With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Centennial Book) - Softcover

Dean, Warren; Schwartz, Stuart B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520208862 ISBN 13: 9780520208865

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants.

Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes it up to the 1990s―through the invasion of Europeans in the sixteenth century; the ensuing devastation wrought by such developments as gold and diamond mining, slash-and-burn farming, coffee planting, and industrialization; and the desperate battles between conservationists and developers in the late twentieth century.

Based on a great range of documentary and scientific resources,With Broadax and Firebrand is an enormously ambitious book. More than a history of a tropical forest, or of the relationship between forest and humans, it is also a history of Brazil told from an environmental perspective. Dean writes passionately and movingly, in the fierce hope that the story of the Atlantic Forest will serve as a warning of the terrible costs of destroying its great neighbor to the west, the Amazon Forest.

About this title

About the Author

Warren Dean (1932-1994) was Professor of History at New York University. His books includeThe Industrialization of Sao Paulo (1969), Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System (1976), and The Struggle for Rubber in Brazil (1987). Stuart B. Schwartz is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

From the Back Cover

"An unprecedented historical account of the destruction of Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a required reading for those committed to its preservation, written with genuine love and knowledge."―José Roberto Borges, Brazil Program Director, Rainforest Action Network

"After reading this volume, no one could fail to realize the uniqueness and importance of these coastal forests, which have played such a fascinating role in the history of Brazil."―Ghillean T. Prance, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

From the Inside Flap

"An unprecedented historical account of the destruction of Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a required reading for those committed to its preservation, written with genuine love and knowledge." José Roberto Borges, Brazil Program Director, Rainforest Action Network

"After reading this volume, no one could fail to realize the uniqueness and importance of these coastal forests, which have played such a fascinating role in the history of Brazil." Ghillean T. Prance, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

By Warren Dean

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Warren Dean
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520208862


1
The Forest Evolves

Forêts vierges aussi anciennes que le monde.

Virgin forests as ancient as the world.

AUGUSTE DE SAINT-HILAIRE

We fly, seven thousand meters high, southward over the Brazilian subcontinent toward the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is early morning. The shadow of our 747 glides over the autumn mist far below. Through the plexiglass we see it encircled by a rainbow, an ethereal bird in a celestial gunsight. The mist dissolves, revealing the worn and ragged Archean shield of Minas Gerais, a confusion of crisscrossing ridges partitioned by the Serra do Espinhaço—the Backbone Range. To the west brown, sluggish creeks meander toward their encounter with the São Francisco River. To the east coursing streams rush toward the River Doce and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a landscape scarred by human striving. On the murky blue horizon the great reservoirs of the hydroelectric dams at Furnas and Três Marias are dimly visible. In the foreground stretch chalky-orange badlands, gashes carved by centuries of improvident mining, farming, and grazing. On flat bottomlands, here and there, cultivation persists. On fields recently plowed, the brick-red blush of fertile, iron-rich soils can be discerned. The highlands are in pasture, still green from the summer rains; soon they will wither, and then they will be fired to rid them of ticks and underbrush. Here and there are hillsides planted in eucalyptus trees, valued for plywood, pulp, and charcoal. Dirt roads careen through this chaotic patchwork, as though laid out by reconnoitering ants. Towns huddle in the valleys, glittering in the bright morning sun like jewels that have come unclasped and have scattered by the wayside.

Nothing about this humanized terrain is remarkable. The lofty traveler may even feel comforted in viewing it. These traces far from the Rhodian shore are manifestations of civilization, as we know it. An urbanized people took possession here five hundred years ago, and its numbers and

its consumption of natural wealth have continuously grown: proofs of success, as we are satisfied to define it. From a height of seven thousand meters there is no sign that anything has gone awry, except for the badlands, hidden from those who travel the roads, which avoid the badlands, as though from shame.

At intervals below, however, the traveler descries verdant tracts of forest, not the orderly rows of planted woodlots but wild and irregular. One in particular is impressively large—two or three kilometers across. The traveler wonders how it escaped the civilizing ax and how long it has been left undisturbed. Woods like these are nearly all regrowths; very few date from before the European invasion, and all have for generations been logged and rummaged through for animals and plants for barter and sale. These patches are the last witnesses of the landscape that preceded civilization and its triumphs. Once, these hills were nearly submerged in a blanket of verdure, only the peaks breaking free in carpets of sedges and grasses. The streams would then have been nearly invisible under the looming trees. Through their boughs, the clear waters would have glittered in the morning sun. From a 747 flying back through time, the traveler would have looked out on an endless green carpet, flecked with the glory of entire trees in full bloom—the purple-pink of sapucaias, the white and red of copaíbas, the yellow of guapiruvus, the violet of jacarandás. Its original inhabitants called it caá-etê —the true forest, the undisturbed forest—a scene very like the Amazon, save for the ridges and bluffs.

What would Matthew Arnold have thought, looking down at this present tattered landscape? The depression that overcame him when he surrendered at last to the uttermost reality of natural selection and felt control slip away, and with it stewardship, hierarchy, righteousness—would it have lifted, if he could have observed from this height how completely the ignorant armies have defeated the sway of evolution, enthroning, in its place, entropy? Or would he, like the other passengers, tranquilized, already have slid shut the visor, settled back in his seat, and contented himself with his little box of disposable plastic into which an ersatz breakfast had been deposited, trying all the while to imagine what adventures awaited in the sweltering, sprawling, desperate megalopolis of Rio de Janeiro?

Is anything to be made of the transformations that have been worked on this great plateau by ten thousand years of human occupation? Why not try to write the history of a forest, of an endangered realm of nature, whose disappearance has occurred for the most part in a historical epoch?

Is a history of the forest possible? Maybe not. History is conventionally

Map 1.
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest in 1500

about human ambitions, human satisfactions and frustrations. How can there be a telling of the "history" of other species when we must suppose that their actions lacked intention, beyond that of spawning and surviving? Other species on this darkling plain, it might be most comfortable to assert, cannot play any role in the drama of human history save that of scenery, even when the play is about the removal of the scenery. Nature, even when human ambition is directed against it, remains an object. The pathos of Sisyphus is entirely his; none pertains to his stone.

A kind of forest history has been written in North America in which the forest appears as raw material for the timber trade, nothing more. The forest is a living stockpile of wood. These accounts are thick with human intentionality, brimming with ambition sated, the stuff of drama and folklore, but in them the forests are unrecognizable in their entelechy, as societies composed of thousands of plant and animal species. These histories of a brief moment in the passage of nations through the "frontier" experience offer not an encounter with the natural world but a representation of a phase in the evolution of their business and technical organizations. In Europe, "forest histories" have been written that are rich in the sense of place as well as in human purpose and are careful in their accounts of the behavior and being of the life that constitutes them. Yet their matter, lamentably, is limited to the management of lopped and pollarded woodlots and macabre hunting preserves: concentration camps for the natural world, in fact, not the natural world itself. It could not be otherwise: On that continent there is "hardly a parcel of land that has not been turned over a thousand and a thousand times."1

Compared with the astonishing productivity, abundance, and variety of the tropical South American forests, neither North America nor Europe ever possessed so marvelous a history to tell. Their summer's leases have all too short a date; indeed, they were so frequently canceled during glacial episodes that their surviving life forms display, as their chiefest quality, superb resistance to cold and storms and a tenacious grasp upon their glacier-scoured soils. Alas, harsh climes discourage evolutionary novelty and experiment. Their forests huddle in timorous uniformity, vast stands of a score of different trees, or a dozen, or just a single species, and on their boughs, in their hollows, and amid their roots only a picket force of animals breed—and many of them with winter's cold flee southward or resign themselves to suspended animation.

The tales to be told of those starveling forests are of the endurance of desperate pioneers, not of the establishment of great cathedrals of life. So resistant and uncomplicated are they that all the devastation visited upon them by humans does not prevent them, unless they are covered over with

asphalt, from reconstituting themselves. This circumstance attenuates the alarm that the sensible observer feels when watching a hundred-year-old forest of fir and spruce fall to the chain saw or go up in flame—by and by, it may return.

The same cannot be expected for the South American tropical forests, which most certainly can be obliterated but may prove impossible to reestablish on the sites from which they were removed. Hence the tragedy. The destruction of these forests is irreversible, within any sort of human time scale. What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable. For although cataloguing of the boreal forest is conceivable—and well advanced, in fact—cataloguing of a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.2

The history of the destruction of the South American forests is nevertheless a story to some degree accessible to our curiosity. History came late to nearly every other encounter of humans with wilderness. When Columbus first scanned the Antillean shore, ten thousand years and more of human occupation had already transformed it in ways unfathomable even to the most earnest efforts of archaeologists. Nevertheless, of all the tropical continents South America was the last to be invaded by humans, and human dominance of its forests was much less intense and of much shorter duration than that exercised in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Hence the Europeans confronted in their New World a nature more pristine than that which they encountered elsewhere in the tropics, and thus much more of the process of degradation has taken place in an era of written records. South America, then, is the forest historian's freshest battleground, where all the fallen still lie sprawled and unburied and where the victors still wander about, looting and burning the train.

Forest history, rightly understood, is everywhere on this planet one of exploitation and destruction. Humans reduce the natural world to "landscape"—domesticated surroundings trimmed and shaped to fit some practical use or conventional aesthetic, or else, more chilling still, to "space"—desert plains steamrollered and built upon to consecrate an extremity of species narcissism. Human interventions never quite realize human expectations. Their fields go plow sick, their pastures become coarse and woody, their cities collapse. The natural world, simplified, not in accordance with human desires but in response to their acts, is turned into a vast cosmopolitan weed patch.

Thus it is nearly impossible to write a forest history that conforms to a

vision of what it is desired that the present become. The anchoring of events to dates and the insistence on chronology presume that penultimate and ultimate events foretoken a proximate, satisfactory resolution of the contradictions inherent in these events. Without this conviction—of the Second Coming, the realization of the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the triumph of bourgeois hegemony, the inevitability of socialist revolution, the establishment of a new economic or political order—historians, even the "scientific" historians who sense a need to disguise their temptation to predict, lose the thread. What is to be made of a history that does not—cannot—make us rejoice in our prospects, that reflects so strikingly our improvidence and parasitism?

For humans, coexistence with tropical forest has always been problematic. Antagonism is not at any given moment a necessary part of the relationship, but forest "clearing" is not merely a dictate of cultural prejudice or pride or of improvident political and social arrangements. The aggrandizement of our species has been based upon the destruction of forests that we are ill equipped to inhabit. The preservation of forests must therefore be based upon something beyond the argument of cultural, environmental, or economic self-interest, perhaps upon a conception of self-interest that only a shrewder self-knowledge and a more profound and philosophical understanding of the natural world may be able to define. Many already view uneasily the proximate extinction of the forests of the world. Perhaps, to clarify such notions and respond to such concerns, a memoir of the destruction of a particular forest, shaming and damning though it be, may be a useful thing to have at hand. That, at least, has been the author's intention.3

On the eastern margin of South America there once stretched an immense forest, or more accurately, a complex of forest types, generally broad-leaved, rain loving, and tropical to subtropical, stretching from about 8° to about 28° south latitude and extending inland from the coast about 100 kilometers in the north, widening to more than 500 kilometers in the south. Altogether the forest covered about a million square kilometers. This complex has been referred to as the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, related to the much larger Amazon Forest but distinct from it. Together, these two great forests formed a life zone distinct from and richer in species than those of the other tropics of our globe, situated in Africa and Southeast Asia. The Atlantic Forest was itself remarkably diverse, considering its relatively modest size. And it contained a remarkable number of endemic species—that is, life forms peculiar to it—even though it shared the same continental landmass with the Amazon Forest and was for long geological periods in partial contact with it.4

Forest occurred along this coast because of relief, wind patterns, and ocean currents. Along its length there rises, only a few kilometers inland, an imposing, almost continuous palisade, in some places nearly a thousand meters high. In the central and southern sectors of the coast there loom behind this first wall, in more or less parallel array, still higher mountainous chains, the result of plate upwelling more than a hundred million years ago. These chains add as much as another thousand meters of height to the coastal profile. Against these barriers a steady eastern trade wind blows during most of the year, laden with moisture from the warm equatorial sea. As the air current is lifted, it is cooled and must drop its moisture as rain, overall about 1,500 millimeters a year. The rains, however, are reduced in the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when the cool Falkland Current presses farther north along the coast. The eastern faces of these chains receive very high precipitation—more than 4,000 millimeters a year at some points along the coast. Inland, cloud moisture drops fairly sharply, and rainfall becomes more seasonal. Along the coast one winter month or another may experience less than 100 millimeters of precipitation, and even less may fall for three or four months in the rain shadow of the coastal ranges, so that the forest may not, in some places, transgress the more landward mountain peaks. Thus a vegetational gradient can be observed as one travels inland.

One still finds first, on bays and estuaries, where there is respite from the scouring of the waves, a shoreline of mangrove, whose stilt roots descend from their branches to the tidal waterside, fabricating soil and harboring colonies of caimans, fish, and mollusks. Behind this picket force, and also occupying lands behind the dunes that at points in the Northeast may soar to 90 meters, lie low thickets of restinga , a formation accustomed to sandy, nutrient-poor soil, bristling with cactus bushes, freestanding bromeliads, and stunted trees. Restinga stretches inland, in some places for 20 or 30 kilometers, on plains where geological upwelling produced, in serried rows, banks of Holocene fossil dunes. Behind this, on the piedmont, stands a majestic formation of rain-loving broad-leaved evergreens, 30 to 35 meters tall, with scattered emergent individuals up to 40 meters, resting on trunks 12 meters or more in circumference. Underneath the dizzying canopy, three or four more stories may be discerned, "forests layered on forests," the lower ones consisting of shorter broad-leaved trees, palms, bamboos, and giant ferns, tolerant of subdued light. Epiphytes and parasites festoon the branches, vines climb their trunks, and lianas curtain the spaces between.5

As the forest climbs the coastal cliff, it becomes noticeably less luxuriant. There the soil is thinner, and the hillsides offer easier access to sunlight and therefore less competition. Thus the trees are smaller, their

trunks finer, and on the steepest hillsides one or two of the understories are absent. Above this somewhat distinct montane formation, along the coastal palisade, at the few points where the upwelling of offshore winds was constant and abrupt, what some have denominated a "cloud forest" was formed. On the sodden, thin, acid soils of these ridges, trees are dwarfen, their gnarled branches burdened with profusions of orchids and bromeliads that draw sustenance from the moist, nutrient-bearing clouds themselves. Mosses, lichens, and liverworts are even more favored—they cover branches and trunks with emerald green. The effect, glittering with droplets of dew and drowned in mist, is altogether unworldly. At the highest elevations, where winds blow mists away, moisture quickly drains from soils, and winter nights are harsh and often freezing, the tree line falters, and a montane flora appears, called campo rupestre , composed of peculiar endemic grasses, sedges, and forbs, most characteristically those of the family Velloziaceae. Some of the latter can still be seen clinging to the flanks of the dramatic granite outcrops that stud the lowlands, of which two—Sugar Loaf and Corcovado—have been photographed by millions of awed tourists.

In the intermontane valleys a highland forest occurred, somewhat lower than that of the coastal plain but structurally and floristically similar and nearly as impressive. Finally, on the landward faces of the massif, broad-leaved deciduous tree species that shed their leaves during the dry season become more and more common. Lianas and epiphytes are rarer along this axis, and tree heights are lower. Finally, the lease of the forest plays out along watercourses, where ribands of gallery forest, more open and studded with palms, snake westward in swaths up to a few hundred meters wide. In the southern highlands the Atlantic Forest acquires another character entirely. The primitive, hardy conifer, Araucaria angustifolia , dominates an open-forest formation in a region where frost is common. Because this species invades grasslands and cannot regenerate in place, some have considered these forests successional, destined over centuries, had humans not interfered, to be replaced by broad-leaved evergreens. Given the great range of latitude along which the Atlantic Forest spread, there was another gradient, one of temperature and insolation. Subtle changes could therefore be observed in the composition of the forest from its northernmost to its southernmost extension. Indeed, these formations interpenetrated. In the south the subtropical forest accompanies the warmer shoreline and penetrates the lowlands of the Paraná River. Conifers reappear along cooler mountain ridges, even as far north as 20° south.

Inland, where rainfall becomes too scarce and too seasonal to support forest, the savanna begins. This formation of widely spaced, low scrub

woodlands and tall grasses is resistant not only to drought but also to fire, which occurs naturally across this landscape. The savanna, called campo cerrado —closed field—or simply cerrado , occupies an immense swath of the interior, almost a quarter of all Brazilian territory. North of the cerrado, penetrating in some places to the cerrado-forest border, is a thornbush scrubland, the caatinga —white forest—so called because its trees defend themselves against the prolonged droughts of the Northeast by seasonal leaf fall. Bleak, parched, and traditionally considered impractical to farm, relegated to an extensive sort of cattle raising, the cerrado and the caatinga form Brazil's sertão —outback—the antithesis of the lush and verdant Atlantic Forest.

Soil was less determinant than rainfall and temperature in the location of the Atlantic Forest. Except for the coastal dune lands, its soils have derived from parent granites, basalts, and gneisses that are ancient, highly weathered, and in consequence low in fertility. Abundant rain and warm weather have formed deep and clayey soils, iron-rich and therefore characteristically reddish. They possess little capacity to hold water or nutrients and yield them up only grudgingly to plants. In some forms they inhibit root penetration, and when exposed to sunlight and rain by cultivators they may become more acid, inhibiting further nutrient exchanges, freeing toxic aluminum, and bonding scarce phosphates to free iron molecules. Under these conditions, soil development depends in good measure on vegetational cover, rather than the reverse. The litter fall from trees is typically twice as heavy as that in temperate forests, and it is rapidly and continuously mineralized by termites, fungi, and bacteria. The deep shade of the forest provides ambient conditions for the formation of a fertile layer of humus. Thus the forest grows and spreads upon an organic, self-generated substrate. Nevertheless, soils are subtly influential in the array of species and the vigor the forest presents in a given location. Basaltic parent rock engenders a very deep, dark red soil that accommodates plants with high nutrient demands, whereas the leached, acidic coastal dune lands and interior mountain crests forbade their development. The soils of the cerrado characteristically contain free aluminum, toxic to plant species that have not invented defenses against it.6

Ecosystems are delineated by nature itself; therefore they are natural subjects—islands, lakes, or deserts, for example. The Atlantic Forest is such a subject. Although its great size, complexity, and variability have left biogeographers and ecologists groping for common designations of its components, its distinctiveness is unquestioned.

In this history little mention will be made of the forest's northernmost extension, above 13° south, or of the southern highland segment domi-

nated by conifers. These are limits excusable only in practical terms; ars longa, vita brevis . Scattered and inaccessible sources, a multiplicity of political jurisdictions, immense distances, and budgetary constraints have lengthened the time needed to gather material for this truncated study far beyond what is normally expected of a sole, unassisted scholar. Perhaps these omissions will encourage other historians to study this vast natural realm more locally and more thoroughly. Meanwhile, the reader will not go far wrong in taking this central region for the whole, containing as it does more than seven-tenths of the area of the Atlantic Forest and having a history of human settlement in most ways typical of the rest.

This history of the Atlantic Forest is not a natural history; that is, it is not an account of the creatures of the forest and the relationships that obtain among them. It is, instead, a study of the relationship between forest and humans. The author's limited insight, training, and experience and the opacity and dispersion of many of the historical sources have at many points no doubt obscured numerous important interactions between humans and their natural environment. Even so, the intent has been to portray the Atlantic Forest as something more than an inviting stockpile of resources or a challenge to human ambition. Perhaps the study's failings will prove as inspirational to other historians as will its possible merits.

The tropical forest is an awesome place for humans. Although once, in our simian past, it was our niche, clearly we have been driven from this paradise. We make our way along its floor, stumbling between the legs of giants, much less dexterously than in open fields. Even in the dry season the morning dew falls in a steady drizzle, soaking the slippery litter and turning the earth to mud. Tangles of roots and vines slow our feet. Lianas, bristling with thorns, scrape our arms. To advance a kilometer is to clamber over fallen trunks a score of times or more. Along the streams, legions of blood-sucking ticks, mosquitoes, sand flies, some of them parasitized by microbes lethal to us hairless mammals—pursue relentlessly. Centipedes, scorpions, and urticating caterpillars dare us to touch them. Amid this chaos, this wreckage, these dangers, we peer upward at the distant light that filters wanly through the foliage. It is an unsatisfactory view, unlike the clear sweep of the horizon we enjoy in the grasslands. The life that teems in the canopy is beyond our ken. To reach that dizzying height, we require ladders, block and tackle, platforms—artifices hard to drag into the forest and harder still to erect.

The forest's gloomy floor offers our species few aesthetic attractions. Its denizens are solitary, ghostlike. Most of its birds are taciturn, their colors subdued. Most of its flowers are tiny, white or green, and unscented. Its

tree trunks, spattered with the ocher, umber, and vermilion of lichens, are twined about with vines. Mosses and cacti droop from branches. Its canopy, fluttering in the wind that blows high above our heads, refracts the distant sun. A hundred shades of green shimmer and deceive our eyes. Although an artist may depict precisely this or that flower on the forest floor, the forest entire defies artistic skill. Neither paint nor photograph, no more than mere works, can capture the forest's enveloping, uncanny presence, its "plastic solidity." In the distance, howler monkeys roar their matutinal defiance at the emerald void. Then there is stillness. We hear only the vague hum of insects in the canopy or the rustle of the leaves—sometimes the fall of a branch "or, it may be, a strange sound that is inexplicable." Moisture forms constantly on our bodies, condensing from the humid ambient air. Eyeglasses fog over, as though in a shower stall. And sweat exudes from every pore on our skin. We must carry as much water in this water-drenched wilderness as we would in a desert.7

We are no longer nocturnal, if ever we were. But the forest comes alive only at night. Then is the forest filled with the screeches and screams and skirls of frogs, birds, and insects, engaged in a million dramas of chase, evasion, and copulation. Amid the clamor of the night forest we are blind without our flashlights, defenseless without mosquito nets and hammocks and campfires. The indigenes spend their nights in thatched cabins, a smoky fire always alight to ward off mosquitoes. Daylight brings joyful restitution of their autonomy.

The forest is no glen of idylls, of sportive dryads, nymphs and elves. These tree creatures are engaged in titanic, slow-motion struggles that we short-lived, frenetic humans cannot even sense. Far above our heads they batter each other for space and sunlight, grasp each others' branches, settle their seeds in the crotches of each others' trunks, scrape and penetrate each others' bark, engulf and strangle each other. In the night forest, above the animal din, one may hear a giant collapse when its burden of parasites overwhelms it, when its branches have been too effectively bored by termites, when its struggle is lost. Then the lianas may hold it up a little while longer, or they may cause the falling tree to drag its neighbors with it to the forest floor. In the rainy season, when thunderheads surge 18,000 meters high and wreak havoc on the canopy trees, humans caught in the forest, as well as its denizens, huddle in the folds of trunks, awaiting the end of the world. Then dozens of the giants may fall all at once, clearing the way for another forest generation to arise.8

We may visit the tropical forest, we may become artful in our extraction of the thousand and one rarities it offers, but we do not live in it, except in desperation. The Brazilian human forest "dweller" lives on its margins,

beside watercourses or fields. There, where two or more ecosystems join, the hunter-gatherers are able to garner varied resources. When they place their dwellings in the forest itself, they open a broad, beaten-earth clearing, wide enough to avoid the peril of tree falls and to form a no-man's-land along which insect pests and reptilian predators can be spied out and destroyed. To live in the midst of the forest, the forest dwellers of necessity cut it down.

Botanists of the heroic age of taxonomy, cast loose into this marvelous and terrifying vegetable world, were struck dumb. Darwin found it "nearly impossible to give an adequate idea" of his emotions. Astonished at its strangeness yet unable to relate it to the nature he had found so amiable in England, his "reason" told him it was beautiful, "but the feelings do not correspond." Although he reported that his mind was elevated to "sublime devotion," it was clear that his god had not been in a contemplative mood when he created this nature. Perhaps it was even some other god. Von Martius, at once "exalted and uneasy" by his passage through the gloomy woods, admitted to "astonishment" at the Almighty, who "conjured in a wild and unknown tongue" a manifestation of power and majesty horrifyingly amoral, profligate, and tremendous. Perhaps this preference of the Europeans for a tamed nature ought not to prejudice us against the kind of nature they encountered. Their fascination, and ours, might be harder to arouse in a harmless milieu: "Pleasure in the sublime is always born of fear." So must it be if we are to appreciate the Atlantic Forest.9

It is hard to say whether it is appropriate to refer to the Atlantic Forest in the present tense. A certain amount of forest cover still exists in the region, and although most of it is identifiably secondary, some small patches of it may never have been cut down or burned by humans. Most of these bits, however, perhaps all of them, have suffered some degree of intervention, through selective logging, extractivism, or air pollution, so that it is impossible to say to what degree they resemble the forest that was there before the first humans arrived. These surviving stands display many of the characteristics of the primitive forest, but the worrisome doubt persists concerning the possibility that local extinctions have already occurred, that this forest is no longer exactly what it once was. Given the impossibility of restoring the original conditions under which the forest must once have grown, much less of managing its recuperation, an even greater doubt persists that it could be restored, even if its present-day human stewards willed it. Thus it may not be possible to represent the Atlantic Forest, except through analogy with that of the Amazon Forest or though imaginative reconstruction, based upon extrapolations of those relict patches that remain.

Even that which remains is in practical terms indescribable. It is immensely complex. A botanist can provide lists of its trees; in the most diverse patches of Atlantic Forest as many as eight hundred species are to be found—an extraordinary number, compared to the few dozens contained in the temperate forests of North America or Europe. Botanists also remark how unlike the floras of the tropical forests of Africa and Southeast Asia are those of the biotic realm of South and Central America. Although their families are mostly the same, and the bean, myrtle, mahogany, and sapodilla families provide many of the more common largest trees of both, most of the genera are different. The tropical forests of the New World lack, furthermore, that dominance characteristic of the Old World, in which a single family or a few families contribute a very great number of individuals or monopolize space in the canopy. In the Atlantic Forest, aside from the southerly conifers, canopy trees were not to be found in pure stands. Instead, the trees of each species were scattered, with no more than a few dozen mature specimens of each in a given hectare and some number of other species represented by no more than a single individual.10

At ground level there are few clues to the identity of canopy trees. Many are straight, smooth-trunked, and grayish. Exceptionally, some trunks display curious buttresses, great tail fin-like folds in their surfaces that give these trees the appearance of rockets about to lift off. Looking up into the canopies, it can be seen that some of the trees bear delicate fronds of compound leaflets, but the great majority possess simple, leathery, dark green leaves, the size of a human hand, elliptical, with smooth margins, often ending in a long, pointed "drip tip." Even forest dwellers have difficulty deciding the identity of a given tree, and they apply names that overlap several species, even several genera. Botanists must have flowers to identify a tree with certainty, but many of the trees flower very infrequently, at mostly unknown intervals of two, three, four, or more years. Thus does the protean forest present its curious human guests with endless riddles and confusions.

Trees of the Atlantic Forest that rose 35 meters or more, in its areas of lushest growth, might be a hundred years old, although some of very great girth could be much older, even a thousand years old. The eastern massif of South America is remarkably free of natural disasters—no earthquakes, vulcanism, or hurricanes disturb these shores—and so the dynamics of forest growth and succession depend upon subtler events like irregularities of rainfall and flooding and, for the rest, on the struggles among its creatures. The fortuitous collapse of trees undone by age, competition, or parasites opens clearings within which the forest is renewed. Indeed, the forest may be seen as a patchwork of clearings and more or less mature stands of trees, all at different stages of recomposition.

How long the process of recomposition might take is not known. Secondary forest, of a type that occurs when a clearing which has been burned for farming is abandoned, may reach a luxuriance approaching that of undisturbed forest in twenty or thirty years, but even at that age its dominant individuals are fast-growing softwoods, quite unlike those of mature forest and fated to disappear from the canopy at a later date. Clearings opened by storms might take a hundred years to reach a late successional state, identical to the neighboring forest. Even then, thick-trunked emergents will not have had time to become giants. Clearings made to accommodate ranching or large-scale farming may prevent regrowth to such a state for a much longer time, perhaps forever.

Diversity is one of the signal characteristics of the forest. The extraordinary diversity of its trees—at one site in South Bahia 270 species were found in a single hectare—is matched by the diversity of other sorts of plants, especially epiphytes, parasites, and saprophytes, and of invertebrate animals. Ideal conditions for growth and reproduction—extended growing seasons, intense solar radiation, high temperatures, and generous and slightly seasonal rainfall—facilitate the abundance of life forms. Under these conditions, metabolic processes are accelerated, and growth is constant and rapid. The life forms themselves stimulate greater diversity by providing additional niches within which specialization proceeds with ever finer precision. A single tree canopy may shelter a thousand species of insects, and the Atlantic Forest as a whole may have sheltered a million of them, only a small percentage of which have been, or ever will be, named by scientists. The determined attacks of fungi and insects, specialized in preying on a single genus or species of plant, were especially deadly to clustered individuals; hence the prevalent scatteredness of tree species. An abundance of species implied that any given one would be at any place in the forest represented by few individuals—all species were, compared to those of temperate forests, rare species.11

The plants and animals of the Atlantic Forest were rare also in the sense that many of them were to be found in no other forest. Of its tree species, more than half were endemic. Another 8 percent were shared with the Amazon Forest. Several locations in the Atlantic Forest have been posited as the centers of endemism of birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects, containing numerous species that had not succeeded in expanding their range beyond its borders or that had found there a refuge when their former range became restricted—certain hummingbirds, tanagers, marsupials, sloths, tamarins, tree frogs, palm vipers, and numerous others are limited to the Atlantic Forest.12

Specialization implies improved efficiency, and the Atlantic Forest was

indeed efficient in its capture of solar energy, in its absorption of nutrients from soil, rainwater, and atmosphere, and in its recycling and exhchange of resources. The result was a plant biomass that in some places may have reached 600 tons per hectare and a capacity to generate perhaps 50 tons of biomass a year. None of the present-day relicts of the Atlantic Forest have been observed to display so great a volume, probably because the most imposing stretches of this forest have been destroyed or selectively logged. By comparison, the forest's animal biomass was impoverished, despite its diversity. A hectare may have contained no more than a hundred kilograms of vertebrate flightless animals of all kinds.13

In the subtropical forest environment, the crude and generalized forms of association common in colder climates are replaced by subtler relationships. Competition tends to be relatively less important and cooperation more important. Evidence of the coevolution of plants and animals is abundant, in pollination and seed dispersal, even in plant defense. Some plants, for example, offer shelter and even nectar to ants that protect them from predation and that clip competing weeds away from their seedlings. The complexity of this forest, then, considered as a single system, is extreme. It cannot be regarded as more resilient than simpler systems, however. Indeed, the opposite may be true: Its complexity may render it more vulnerable to trauma. The integrity of the system may prove extremely difficult to maintain or to reconstitute, in the event of external intervention. For example, a very few species of root fungi, essential in the absorption of nitrogen by many of the canopy trees, may be destroyed in a human-made clearing, so that normal forest succession cannot thereafter take place. Perhaps it is of some relevance, in understanding the course of human settlement in the region of the Atlantic Forest, that neither humans nor their animal domesticates evolved correlatively in this milieu but came to it as strangers.

When and how did the Atlantic Forest come into existence—this luxuriance, this diversity, this arena where millions of life forms surge, contend, and agonize, purposelessly and incessantly? The pedigree of the tropical and subtropical forests is extremely ancient, though its evolution has been spectacularly swift and multifarious.

More than 400 million years ago, photosynthesizing, multicelled vascular plants began to attach themselves to the margins of the continents. Soon these organisms covered the rocky shores, slowed the course of the waters, formed soils, and advanced inland. Nutrient-absorbing rootlets formed, stems flattened into sunlight-capturing leaflets, and seeds replaced spores as agents of dispersal. Some 40 million years ago, some of them

achieved a special kind of branching—no longer bifurcating, one branch became a main stem and then, as vessels developed to transport water upward and nutrients downward, a trunk. Thus they escaped ground-level competition for sunlight and gained a degree of immunity from insect predation. The first forests came into being. Arborescence, however, was also mortality: As these plants transformed themselves into trees, they abandoned, perforce, vegetative reproduction by root spreading. Upright at last, they had become, tragically as well as triumphantly, individuals—in their conception, their life struggles, and their dying.14

Meanwhile, South America, locked together with Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and India, remained far from tropic climes. Circling lazily around the South Pole for 300 million years, parts of this supercontinent suffered glacial deluge at least twice in that immense interval. In the region of the Atlantic Forest, a long, dry period followed, then one of intense igneous activity. Ancient outcroppings of weathered basalt all along the coast are testimony of that era. Then, some 110 million years ago, a fissure opened between the African and South American landmasses, by then sliding northward toward the equator—the beginning of the South Atlantic Ocean and of a distinct biotic zone.

It has been proposed that the first forests, dominated by the ancestors of our humble club mosses, whisk ferns, horsetails, seed ferns, and cycads, were rendered obsolete by an innovation that may have originated along those rift valleys, possibly in the region of the Atlantic Forest. There, certain plants turned to their advantage the evolution, among foliage-eating insects, of wings. Their mobility may have been at first only defensive, but their capacity to gorge upon plants was thereby greatly enhanced. In brilliant riposte, certain of the shrubs of the rift valleys, apparently those adapted to disturbed, arid environments, evolved special organs—flowers—that offered the flying insect a modest reward of pollen for undertaking the task of fertilization while prudently enclosing their seeds in a protective ovary. The innovation was immoderately successful. The flowering plants—angiosperms—were to carry the association to extraordinary lengths.

In the forests, the rise of flowering plants to dominance was gradual. For a long time, they were overshadowed by cycads and conifers. But the angiosperms, genetically plastic, fast growing, rapidly reproducing, and opportunistic, were the inheritors of the forest. They arrived at the canopy about 65 million years ago, at that fateful Cretaceous-Tertiary time boundary that marks the doom of so many life forms and the origin of so many others. As the ferns and their like declined, so did many of the early

families of the angiosperms die off, to be replaced by new ones. The record is one of change, rapid radiation, and diversification. For 50 million years life forms of the Atlantic Forest evolved in place, suffering no further geological upsets.

The South American continent, sliding northward, shook loose from Antarctica. Grown warmer and wetter, its Atlantic coast became covered with a forest. The isolation of the new continent stimulated peculiar life forms. Few in species and relatively free of competition, its early land mammals evolved slowly and eccentrically from just three families—marsupials, ungulates, and xenarthrans, the latter an odd collection that includes sloths, armadillos, and anteaters. This was a history parallel to the Australian continent, where mammals also developed from primitive forms. Only much later do the vivacious rodents and primates appear in the fossil record, arriving perhaps over Atlantic island chains that are now submerged. In this independent realm of plant and animal life, a unique assemblage of endemic species and genera arose. Once again, as very anciently, before the collision of the continents had occurred, the biotic world was growing provincial and diverse.15

Two to four million years ago the South American continent took on its modern form. Along its western margin a tectonic ridge line broke out of the sea and welled up, as the continent collided with the Pacific plate, to form, quite suddenly, the towering Andes. The great shallow inland sea that had divided the landmass north and south was now blocked on one side and tilted toward the east, emptying itself to form the vast river basin of the Amazon. In the northwest, stepping-stone islands arose and offered communication with the northern continent; then they sank, and emerged again, this time creating an isthmus. The southern continent in consequence suffered an invasion by northern carnivores—representatives of the raccoon, dog, bear, and cat families, along with members of the deer, mastodon, horse, peccary, and camel families. These replaced a number of native forms.

During the same period, the globe began to suffer prolonged seasons of cold. At least four ice ages, perhaps as many as seventeen, have struck in this present geological period, called the Quaternary. In the south, in synchrony with those in the north, glacial sheets on the Antarctic continent grew thicker, and ice spread northward along the spine of the young Andes as far as modern Colombia. The ocean grew colder, and the chilly Falkland Current surged closer to the equator, so that the westerly trade winds carried less moisture to land and rainfall patterns were altered. Dry winds from the Andes blew silt over the plain: the beginning of the loess-

thick Pampas, the rich grasslands of modern Argentina. Sea level fell more than 100 meters, extending the margins of the continents far out onto the continental shelf.16

The glacial intervals of the Quaternary lasted longer than did the intervals of warmth. Repeatedly the Atlantic Forest retreated, losing contact with that of the Amazon and possibly fragmenting as it sank into coastal valleys, then gradually reestablishing itself when warmth returned. Each of the advances and retreats of the Atlantic Forest may have transformed its species and their interrelationships. This instability has been put forth as an explanation for the superior diversity of Neotropical forests. Perhaps speciation was encouraged by phases of forest retreat into "refugia," on the ground that isolation is considered prerequisite to speciation. Presentday centers of endemism in the Atlantic Forest, in the region of the city of Rio de Janeiro, in South Bahia–northern Espírito Santo, and in Pernambuco mark, it has been hypothesized, the bounds of the forest refugia during the last, and possibly earlier, glacial epochs.17

Whether this model is correct or whether, more parsimoniously, Neotropical forest diversity may be seen merely as the result of its great extent and topographical variation or of phases of forest expansion, when it invaded new soils, reliefs, and climates, the image of the tropical forests has been transformed. No longer assumed to have reached their complexity through eons of climatic stability, they now appear to constitute some of the world's most disturbed environments. The genetic plasticity of organisms and their capacity to promote and control mutation have come to be cited more often; speciation seems to occur more constantly, species are presumed to be under much greater pressure to adapt, and the duration of species to the point of extinction is presumed to be much shorter. Each of the ice ages is thought to have provoked holocausts of extinctions, hordes of new species taking their places. The forest is thus a palimpsest of superimposed forms and relationships, reflecting evolutionary experience in complex and puzzling geographical patterns.

The last glacial period reached its height 25 to 18 thousand years ago; not until 12 thousand years ago did the South American glaciers retreat to their present sanctuaries atop the highest peaks of the Andes. In this instant of geological time, the Atlantic Forest rushed forward once again, to occupy a vast empire, 3,500 kilometers along the South American coast, and up and over the coastal escarpment as far as rainfall allowed. This most recent and continuing era has been perhaps more favorable for tropical forest growth than any previous interglacial period. Rainfall and temperatures rose higher than ever before during the Quaternary, and, fluctuating mildly, have at times reached levels even higher than at present.

Thus the modern Atlantic Forest evolved and came finally to occupy its historical boundaries, altogether like some remote, antique empire, its origins mythical, its dynasties extending over epochs, its splendor astonishing, its inhabitants luxurious, shrewd, and conservative in their exploitation of its bounteous resources, for millennia unchallenged and unchallengeable in its perfect and total dominion, yet at its foundation utterly brittle and vulnerable.

Meanwhile, on the grassland margins of the forests of Africa arose our hominid ancestors, wielding fire and stone weapons in their pursuit of game, spreading across Asia and Europe, becoming during the most recent glacial crises fully human in shape and intelligence, and setting out at last on a fateful odyssey of discovery, toward the Bering Strait and beyond, where that last hidden empire lay, ripe for conquest.

Continues...

Excerpted from With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forestby Warren Dean Copyright © 1997 by Warren Dean. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520208862
• ISBN 13: 9780520208865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 506