It might be hard for us to see the origins of our own twenty-first-century economics and politics in this early capital-driven violence against landscapes and labor in the tropics. Yet, taking the example of the transatlantic slave trade and monoculture agriculture with which we began this chapter, we can track how a so-called plantation logic still continues to shape global economic markets, the regulation or unregulation of the rights and treatment of workers, international politics, infrastructural developments, structural racism, and environments within and beyond the tropics in the twenty-first century. Dr. Alex Moulton of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his colleagues have elegantly described how much of the Caribbean, for example, has witnessed three consecutive eras of agricultural management for capitalist accumulation. The “plantation era” refers to the imposition of chattel slavery as a “productive force,” which combined desires for biological control of tropical forest landscapes with brutal disciplining of and control over enslaved bodies. The second era pertains to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century emergence of independent states such as Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, which saw governments focus on the productivity of rural populations, deforestation and expansion of usable land, and the modernization of farming. Legacies of colonial infrastructure, however, often meant this involved succumbing to significant foreign debt as well as somewhat patronizing, even if well-meaning, perspectives that the “Global South” was in need of “development.” The third era, from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, saw some governments of tropical nations and the ongoing diffusion of global market capitalism promote internal competition between entrepreneurial farmers seeking to outdo each other and leave behind traditional agricultural approaches. It has also seen European and northern North American leaders politicize “help” and “relief” for Caribbean communities in the face of disasters (made all the more frequent by climate change driven by the emissions from their own countries), praising the “resilience” of local people while completely ignoring the colonial injustices that have left them the most at risk. As Alex describes, “These three phases highlight the ongoing threads of colonialism, racism, and capitalism operating on tropical landscapes and labor that have channeled a ‘plantation logic’ into the present.” While this is just one part of the tropics, we should not kid ourselves that Euro-American histories can in any way be disconnected from the fate of the tropics, its inhabitants, and the inequalities that shape global politics and economics more broadly in the twenty-first century.27
The twentieth century saw many tropical nations previously under the yoke of colonialism gain independence, make broad improvements in living standards, and receive increasing investment in their economies. Nevertheless, the global and national wealth disparities set in place by the processes seen in this chapter and Chapter 10, the growing economic power of multinational corporations, the need for infrastructural development following centuries of brutal extraction, and the continuation of industrial farming systems enforced under imperialism have shaped the current threats faced by tropical forests around the globe that we will look at in the remainder of this book. Between 1980 and 2000, 2,275,320 km2, 2,590,620 km2, and 8,520,310 km2 of tropical forest were lost from Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Amazon-Orinoco Basins, respectively, in the face of logging, land conversion, infrastructural projects, and expanding settlements. The tropics as a whole lost a total of 17,364,780 km2 of forest cover during this period. That is an area nearly double the size of Europe. Rapidly growing economies in Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia increased their rate of fossil fuel burning, which, alongside industrial activities in Europe, Canada, and the United States that had continued apace since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as the feedback resulting from the loss of tropical forest cover, contributed to a rise in CO2 emissions and a 0.6ºC global surface temperature increase over the course of the twentieth century. Habitat loss and climate change meant that the high levels of biodiversity found in the tropics suffered, dramatically affecting global species numbers. Between 1950 and 1987 an estimated 50,000 species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects were lost as a result of tropical extinctions.28
Of course, differences in colonial history, environment, demography, cultures, and political and economic structures and decisions meant that the twentieth century saw each tropical region and nation develop its own unique conservation challenges, priorities, and strengths. Even within each region, different social groups were impacted differently as the growing grip of capitalism on the tropics drove increasingly stark inequality. The widespread appearance of favelas in Brazil as a product of the movement of rural populations to growing, industrialized urban centers during the 1970s is one example. Notably, the majority of the population living in these favelas are descendants of Black Africans, highlighting ongoing wealth disparities and discrimination that reach back to the colonial period and a racialized trade in enslaved labor. Another example is the growing poverty and marginalization of Indigenous populations and the difficult choices they must make between isolation and becoming enmeshed in new forms of settlement, wage labor, and political and social structures. The racial fault lines and traumas set up by the historical processes seen above and in Chapter 10 also began to play out on European and northern North American shores in the twentieth century. The systemic racism, segregation, discrimination, and violence facing Black people in the United States, a lasting legacy of the trade in human lives of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and the racist ideologies surrounding it, resulted in enduring injuries made visible in the rise of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the United Kingdom, from the 1940s, immigrants arriving from tropical colonies in the Caribbean to seek work met with discrimination in the search for housing, and they, as well as ongoing arrivals from the Asian and African nations of the Commonwealth, faced racial profiling, prejudice, and poverty that resulted in their murder by white supremacists, precarious living standards, and retaliatory riots such as those in Broomielaw, Glasgow, in 1919 and Brixton, London, in 1985. Black people living across northwestern and Mediterranean Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century faced similar issues.29 They still do.
The twentieth century also witnessed a growing understanding that the plight of tropical forests was not just a regional problem but a global one. Rampant tropical deforestation and losses of species diversity became symbols of environmental movements around the world, as many ecologists drew attention to the imbalanced amount of planetary biodiversity that would be lost should these habitats disappear. Yet, as we saw right from the beginning of this book when we met the first plants and forests to take root on Earth in Chapters 1 and 2, tropical forests are not just globally significant in the context of their amazing roll calls of plant and animal species. As we discovered then and will explore further in the next chapter, they also play a crucial role in the regulation of precipitation, flow of groundwater, soil formation and stability, and exchange of gases with the atmosphere, on local, continental, and planetary scales. Chapters 13 and 14 will explore whether or not European and northern North American nations and their citizens are willing to accept the fact that modern conservation tensions stem from their colonial and imperial encounters with and attitudes toward the tropics—and whether they are willing to do something about it. Regardless, however, the exploitation of tropical forests that has expanded throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries has impacted not just environments and human livelihoods in the tropics but also, increasingly, the climates and atmospheres of all of us. Determining when and how this process began may offer important lessons as we try to deal with environmental feedbacks of our own making today. To do so, we must reckon with the increasingly urgent concept of the “Anthropocene”—the period when humans began to have a dominating impact on earth systems.30
Chapter 12
A TROPICAL “ANTHROPOCENE”?
Since the begi
nning of this book, the broad, ordered periods of time, or epochs, that we have been using (e.g., Cambrian, Carboniferous, Pleistocene, Holocene) to split up our journey through the tropics have been identified on the basis of physical rock characteristics and the presence or absence of certain fossil plant or animal communities. Distinct boundaries between these periods are often related to major events such as climate shifts, volcanic and tectonic activity, or, as we saw in Chapter 4, an extraterrestrial impact. However, the pace and extent of twenty-first-century human impacts on the Earth’s surface, its rock layers, and climate have led some scientists to argue that we have now entered a completely new era of geological history, the “Anthropocene,” one whose boundary is set by us. Combining the Greek word for “human” with the standard suffix denoting a period in geological time (“-cene”), this term signifies that we are now living in an epoch when human activities are playing an equal, or even dominant, role to natural forces in the operation of so-called earth systems. “Anthropocene” has become an increasingly popular term, not only thanks to artistic and philosophical musings on what the so-called end of nature might mean for all of us but also because the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been increasingly pushing for its official acceptance as a division of geological time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in order to highlight the sheer force our species now wields in the context of the deep time of Earth’s history. Geologically, such a status requires agreement on a clearly visible global “spike,” such as the biological and chemical fallout caused by the asteroid impact that doomed the reptilian dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Attempting to do the same for the Anthropocene, the members of the AWG, headed by Jan Zalasiewicz at the University of Leicester, have narrowed in on plastic particles produced during an expansion of manufacturing of synthetic materials or radionuclides produced by the testing and dropping of the devastating atomic bomb during the twentieth century, which turn up in marine and lake sediments and caves around the world. Yet, while it is undeniable that human impacts on planetary systems since the twentieth century are on a scale never seen before in human history, to truly understand their origins and predict their outcomes, we quite literally need to dig deeper than a single line of plastic or radiation.1
As Professor Nicole Boivin, the director of my own institute in Jena, puts it, “As a process that involves humans, it is essential that geologists include social scientists, specialists in the study of human-environment interactions, to properly come to terms with what the ‘Anthropocene’ is and where its origins lie.” Our species has shaped the Earth for much of its existence, and to limit focus to postindustrial time frames is to miss a long history of human relationships with the natural world. By including archeological, historical, and paleoecological perspectives, we can search for earlier potential roots of the Anthropocene epoch, from the increased burning of fossil fuels following the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the origins of agriculture thousands of years ago. We can also move past a desperate search for a single, formal epoch and place the geological timescale to one side. Using the anthropocene—with a small a—to denote a framework, we are able to explore the long arc of human impacts on environments and the dynamic and often imbalanced human influences on earth systems that have led us to where we are today. Tropical forests provide perhaps the ideal setting in which to do just that. From our exploration of their origins in Chapter 1, we have seen that tropical forests, since their first appearance on our planet over 300 million years ago, have been a crucial part of earth systems. They built on the work of the first plant life to make the atmosphere breathable for life on land. They have regulated the distribution of the Sun’s energy and also shaped where and how much rain fell in a given area. Their roots stabilized the planet’s surface and created soils. They housed some of the first complex ecosystems to inhabit the planet and shaped some of the most marveled-at periods in the evolution of life on Earth. They remain perhaps the most significant biomes at the heart of anthropocene-derived changes seen around the world in the twenty-first century. As even local and regional human alterations to these environments can combine to have global feedbacks, what better place for us to look than tropical forests for the origins of human interactions with earth systems?2
We will now turn to the latest ecological and earth science evidence that shows how tropical forests remain keystone environments for various earth systems today. They are host to the planet’s most varied plant and animal communities and protect them from natural hazards, they are key to regional and global precipitation, they curate the soils of entire river basins, and they interact with the atmosphere. Using the archeological and historical background developed throughout the book to this point, we will then investigate the changing interaction of human societies with tropical forests and the potential scale of its consequences. We will explore how the expansion of water buffalo and rice in the tropics 6,000 to 3,000 years ago may have resulted in visible greenhouse gas emissions, how the spread of farming and associated tropical deforestation in Africa might have influenced regional and continental soil erosion, and how the murder and disease inflicted upon huge Indigenous populations across the Americas at the time of European contact may have resulted in a regrowth of forests so significant that it changed the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We will then move to the colonial and imperial land use that followed and its legacy for perspectives on the “Anthropocene,” and indeed conservation, that can too often fail to acknowledge the wealth and power imbalances that have produced current sustainability tensions in the tropics. This chapter in no way suggests that our current impacts on tropical forests are “precedented” or “OK.” Rather it highlights how our actions depart in both scale and severity, how we have become depressingly detached from the consequences of our choices, and how politicians and scientists must bear this long history of planetary influence and social exclusion in mind if they are to design effective conservation and policy.3
THOSE OF YOU who regularly watch nature documentaries on television or make wildlife encounters a key part of your summer holidays will not be surprised to learn that tropical forests are ecological hotspots. They are home to over half of the world’s plant and animal species. Their lofty trees and bustling undergrowth, as well as their vast array of crawling, walking, swimming, and flying life-forms, make up a staggering third of the Earth’s land-surface biological productivity. To put this into perspective, more species of ant can be found scurrying on a single tree in the Amazon Basin than across the entirety of the British Isles. Similarly, tropical forests can have up to 1,000 species of tree per hectare, as opposed to around a dozen for temperate forests. The huge diversity of tropical and subtropical forests we first met in Chapter 2—ranging from humid lowland evergreen rainforests to semi-deciduous tropical forests with a pronounced dry season, from acidic peat swamp forests to cool montane tropical forests—means that each and every tropical forest ecosystem has its own characteristic roll call of plants, insects, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds that are often strung together in vital, intimate relationships. Certain key species can have massive influences over forest regeneration and health—for example, seed-dispersing primates, bats, and birds the world over play a critical role in tropical forest ecosystem dynamics, which we gained a deep-time perspective on in Chapters 3 and 4. As world-renowned tropical forest ecologist Professor Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford puts it, “In the context of the biosphere, tropical forests, in many ways, have the most to offer. However, they also have the most to lose.” These environments are currently facing some of the worst habitat loss and threats to their wildlife in the twenty-first century. Given the huge proportion of planetary biodiversity tropical forests host, such losses will undoubtedly echo around the planet.4
Lord of the Rings aficionados will be delighted to know that tropical forests are also gaining something of an Ent-like reputation for the way they manage and secure the land o
n which they grow. Belowground, grasping root systems anchor soils in place and shape the flow of water through the ground around them. Aboveground, significant canopies and leaves regulate the flow of rain to the floor, further stabilizing the earth. Together, these attributes enable tropical forests to quell rushing floods and to stem the movement of land. Coastal mangroves and forest plantations were even shown to have protected parts of Sri Lanka against the full force of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; elsewhere, in their absence, the impacts were much worse. Tropical forests additionally host unique microorganisms that rapidly break down dead organic material, processing almost the entirety of falling leaf litter within a year, to keep up an important supply of nutrient-rich soil. These microorganisms, roots, and decaying vegetation even filter the water passing through and over them, removing contaminants for their inhabitants. A team of scientists, led by ecological modeler Dr. Nadja Rüger of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, working on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal, has shown that long-lived pioneer tree species such as mahogany and Amazon nut (Brazil nut) can represent nearly half of the biomass in a given tropical forest. Meanwhile, studies of large-diameter trees in tropical forests more widely show the major control they have on carbon storage and cycling in forests. As a result, “many of these services to the geosphere, and a series of earth systems, can be attributed to the tropical ‘Treebeards’ out there,” as Nadja puts it.5
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