Earth scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have even suggested that the “Great Dying” and the earth systems feedbacks that ensued represent the most significant global marker for the “Anthropocene” as an actual epoch—separating what went before from the beginning of the modern “world-system.” Certainly, from a biosphere standpoint, the first global trade networks that joined the American tropics to Africa, China, and Europe transferred not just microbes on a scale never before seen but also plants and animals. Lewis and Maslin, for example, in a prominent paper published in the journal Nature have suggested that pollen from maize in European lakes and marine sediments and phytoliths from bananas in lake records in Central and South America, from 1600 onward, represent clear stratigraphic markers for the globalization of human foods and cuisines initiated by the so-called Columbian exchange. The same could be said of archival and archeobotanical records of sweet potato in the Philippines, manioc in Africa, wheat in Mexico, potatoes and tomatoes in Europe, and sugarcane in the Caribbean as the tropics sat at the center of a process of changing landscapes and mealtimes across the world. Bones of horses, cows, goats, and pigs, as well as less-intentionally moved rodent stowaways, appearing for the first time in archeological sites in many parts of the tropics offer further potential markers preserved in sediments. These animals could have major impacts on tropical biodiversity, vegetation cover, plant community structure, and the stability of soils as part of a “swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth without geological precedent.”15
This “reorganization” also included new ways of appropriating, using, and perceiving tropical landscapes that arrived with Europeans. We saw in Chapter 10 how, by the second half of the seventeenth century, after just a century of mining in the region, Spain had already received 16 million kilograms of silver from the Neotropics—tripling the amount that had formerly existed in Europe! This could leave deep scars in regions such as the silver mines of Potosí, where labor was forced into an intensive extractive exercise. Here, by 1600, trees were stripped, domesticated and wild animals disappeared, and the soils of entire mountain slopes had turned to loose gravel. Meanwhile, mercury seeped into the soils and air. Likewise, excavation was so intense at the gold deposits in the Brazilian Highlands that scientists visiting the mining zone in the early nineteenth century assumed that the formerly lush, forested area had always been a barren plateau. A similar disregard for sustainability in favor of profit is visible in the form of increasingly widespread plantation agriculture. Europe’s insatiable lust for sugar had already eaten up approximately 5,000 km2 of Brazil’s now threatened Atlantic rainforest by the middle of the seventeenth century—a territory nearly the same size as the entirety of Trinidad and Tobago. We find a comparable pattern on British-, Dutch-, and French-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Dutch spice plantations in Southeast Asia, and French vanilla plantations in Madagascar. Beyond cash crops, globalized economic systems even began to appropriate tropical landscapes for their own everyday food and materials. For example, running out of wood on Mediterranean shores, the Spanish and Portuguese increasingly turned to the lumber resources of the Philippines and Cuba and of South India, respectively, to build their fleets. The exact scale of tropical deforestation initiated by this lust for a “cheap nature,” to be used and profited from, currently remains poorly known. However, given that, as we saw in Chapter 11, concerned observers had already postulated a connection between Neotropical plantation agriculture and aridity as early as the nineteenth century, significant earth systems feedbacks seem highly likely.16
The expanding tendrils of this “Age of Capital” have also been implicated in one of the most prominent anthropocene processes identified in human history, the onset of the Industrial Revolution in northwestern Europe. While this happened away from tropical landscapes, the source of capital for the investors, entrepreneurs, factory owners, and merchants who drove it was in many cases the wealth, productivity, and human lives forcibly taken from, or moved across, the tropics at an increasingly merciless pace between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Privileged, controlled access to energy-rich sugar grown using chattel slavery, rice planted across entire tropical river basins for the main purpose of export, and potatoes and fertilizer to develop local agricultural efficiency meant that the tropics also experienced a rerouting of calories. Opportunities to grow food were taken away from the inhabitants of the tropics to fuel an increasingly nourished society in first Britain and then other nations in western Europe and, later, northern North America. As such, the western European imperial appropriation of tropical plants, land, and labor can be seen as a significant factor in the onset of mass factory-based, capitalist industrial production, expansion of effective transport infrastructure of railways and steamships, and insatiable burning of fossil fuels that left significant, globally recognizable increases of atmospheric CO2 in Arctic ice cores and records of methane, nitrates, ash, and burning in ice and lake records from the nineteenth century onward. Suggested by some as possibly representing the true beginnings of the “Anthropocene” as a formal epoch, industrial- and transport-based emissions remain some of the most significant culprits behind human-induced global warming in the twenty-first century.17
The processes described above are not just important for our search for the gradual intensification of anthropocene phenomena over time. They have also been important for deconstructing the idea of a definitive, unifying, geological, scientific “Anthropocene.” Studying the colonial and imperial processes that swept across the tropics, anthropologists, historians, and historical geographers have suggested that searching for a single spike, in either the Industrial Revolution or later twentieth-century events in Europe and northern North America, obscures the long-term processes of inequality on which twenty-first-century impacts on the natural world are founded. Global history between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries shows that the “Anthropocene” is not a product of humanity as a whole; nor has it impacted all of humanity equally. Instead, as Janae Davis of Clark University and her colleagues have put it, “It is the product of interconnected historical processes driven by a small minority that provided the conditions for global capitalism through colonialism, enslavement, and racism.”18 Expanding the work of anthropologist Donna Haraway, they argued that the “Plantationocene” might be a more appropriate concept than the “Anthropocene.” Rather than seeing the steam and factories of western Europe as the active origins of the present globalized world, we should look at how plantation systems converted foreign investment into homogenized tropical landscapes, how they forced people, plants, and microbes from all corners of the globe together, and how they were caught up in processes of Indigenous mortality and racialized capital-driven systems of enslavement. In such a framework, the forced labor of plants, landscapes, and people provided the “model and motor” for the greedy Western factory system seen by many as the embodiment of the industrial-based “Anthropocene” we contend with today.19
Some anthropologists and historians have also proposed the broader term “Capitalocene,” highlighting how plantation systems were just one part of the origins of a global system that wrapped tropical and extratropical landscapes together. This view highlights how, from the onset of European colonization in the Atlantic and the Americas, tropical lands were mapped, modeled, and valued as open spaces ready to be put to work. Labor, in the form of slavery and indentured servitude, and nature alike became commodities to be accumulated, appropriated, and used. The result was a world in which environments and livelihoods in the tropics—from the silver mines of Bolivia to the coffee plantations of Haiti, from the cattle-modified landscapes of Mexico to the logged hills of the Philippines, and from the tea plantations of highland Sri Lanka to the fields of Indian farmers desperately planting cotton instead of food to earn enough money to pay heavy taxation—were heavily degraded to provide capital and power for populations, factories, and governments in the western half of Europe and northern North A
merica. The result was a world in which even human life across the tropics became reduced to a cheap, often racially based commodity, grist for the mill for national, corporate, and public wealth on the other side of the world. This is not to say that oppressed minorities and populations were always powerless, and Chapters 10 and 11 showed us many examples of their resistance and shaping of globalized cultures, cuisines, and economic systems across the tropics. Overall, however, any analysis of anthropocene processes must clearly recognize that the current global role of the tropics in political, economic, social, and earth systems in the twenty-first century has not emerged from random, uniform human processes, and certainly not everyone has had an equal seat at the table.20
TROPICAL FORESTS ARE, of course, not the only environments in which the “multiple beginnings” of anthropocene processes can be investigated and observed in prehistory and history.21 Some archeologists have focused on the origins and spread of pottery in soil deposits around the world as a “novel” marker of human behavior and waste, a process now extending back to 20,000 to 12,000 years ago in East Asia. Alternatively, domesticated animals emerging from the Near East represent the beginnings of “distinctive organic remains” that herald a new period of human impacts on the biosphere.22 Nonetheless, tropical forests are the land-based environments that are perhaps most caught up in biological, climatic, and atmospheric earth systems and best show how even local and regional modification can have widespread repercussions. With their “keystone” position in planetary function in mind, we can imagine how the disturbance of megafauna through hunting and burning; how the expansion of domesticated animals, emissions-producing crops, and deforestation in the face of expanding and locally developed farming systems; and how the emergence of precolonial cities, states, and empires within tropical forests might all have had preindustrial impacts on earth systems ranging from the local to the global. Working within the anthropocene framework, we can see how these human insertions into earth systems may not represent a clear, global “Anthropocene” spike and may not approach the intensity or scale on which such interactions are happening in the twenty-first century. However, Chapters 6 to 9 have undoubtedly demonstrated how almost all tropical forests have a deep-time history of human manipulation, leaving lasting legacies in terms of species distributions, biodiversity, and ecosystem dynamics. We will see in the next chapter how these long histories of Indigenous management show that there are few “pristine” tropical forests, and we must shape our conservation choices and practices accordingly. In turn, the growing, vibrant archeological, historical, and paleoecological literature in tropical forests forces us to face challenging questions as to what kind of environments we actually want to preserve around the world moving forward: empty and uninhabited, or sustainably managed and used and, therefore, perhaps better protected.23
Tropical forests and their human, plant, and animal inhabitants are also certainly not the only environments and communities to have witnessed the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1541, England, under the rule of Henry VIII, began to extract from Irish forests and relocate Irish labor as part of colonial rule. Meanwhile, a desire for iron, copper, and silver ores had seen significant portions of central Europe laid waste by the early sixteenth century as a consequence of imperial demands. Beyond Europe, the horrific treatment of Indigenous populations and the atrocities of slavery that occurred as part of growing appropriation of nature and flows of capital were repeated in temperate North America, the nontropical portions of Australia, and southern Africa, among other places. Nevertheless, we have seen how the tropics were at the center of the intensifying global spread and flow of imperial power and capital. The mines of the Neotropics quite literally provided the money for European economic and political ventures, tropical plants and landscapes the world over provided the basis for plantation and ranching systems that amassed national and private wealth in Euro-America, and human lives across the tropics were lost, commodified, forcibly relocated, and altered forever by colonial and imperial processes. The scars left behind on our planet, in the form of barren landscapes, political and capitalist economic inequalities, racial conflict, and earth systems consequences, are profoundly apparent through the lens of tropical history. They mean that all of us are caught up in the ongoing balancing act between tropical commoditization and conservation, between necessary sought-after infrastructure and economic expansion and planetary health, and between Western demands for national and global action and the difficulties facing often impoverished tropical nations if they are to act. Only by recognizing this can we begin to develop practicable conservation solutions, involving diverse international, governmental, and local stakeholders, to the crisis now facing some of the most threatened land-based environments on the surface of the Earth.24
Chapter 13
HOUSES ON FIRE
In January 2019 Swedish student Greta Thunberg declared to world leaders at the World Economic Forum, “Our house is on fire.” Her words proved disturbingly prophetic as the year wore on, particularly for the tropics. Between June and August, fires swept across the rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon. Although natural fires are rare in these environments, a weakening in environmental protection regulations by the government, long-term trends of deforestation, fragmentation, and timber cutting, climate change, and linked regional aridity resulted in the highest levels of active fires and forest clearance seen in a decade. Fires in Brazil, as well as Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay, had catastrophic consequences for Amazonian biomes, and by August blankets of smog shot into the high atmosphere, extended across both the Amazon and Paraná River systems, and adorned cities, such as São Paulo, many kilometers away. By January 2020 smoke was arriving in South America from a very different source. Natural wildfires are common in many parts of Australia during the dry season. However, between June 2019 and January 2020, the wildfires of what became known as the “Black Summer,” spurred on by human-induced global climatic warming, were so bad that the resulting smog made it all the way to Chile and Argentina. Not only that, but fires even began within Australia’s rainforests—environments that scientists had thought would rarely burn. As firefighter Renier van Raders put it when I met him on a recent trip to the Atherton Tablelands, “In my twenty years in this job, I have never seen these wet forests burn. This year we had two local events where the rainforest canopy was on fire.” These two sets of infernos vividly illustrated the increasingly precarious state of the tropics, and indeed our entire planet, in the twenty-first century—and worrying trends in fire continued in the Amazon Basin in 2020. They also showcased the diverse social, political, economic, and environmental factors that make developing sustainable conservation and policy solutions so challenging.1
Scientists looking at changes in forest cover using satellite imagery taken from space between 2000 and 2012 have shown that, globally, tropical forests and woodlands are disappearing at a rate of 91,400 km2 every year—an area roughly the size of Portugal. It is therefore not hard to see why tropical forests are frequently considered, in academia, policy, and the media alike, to be key battlegrounds in the fight for human sustainability. The drivers behind their disappearance can be various. In some cases, it is low-income farmers seeking to plant food to survive or cash crops to scrape together a living. In others, it is multinational corporations sponsoring widespread land conversion to maximize productivity and profits. Logging for local, national, and international timber needs represents another threat. Although selective, well-managed logging can be sustainable, poorly regulated, corner-cutting approaches and the building of roads and other forms of infrastructure can lead to forest degradation and fragmentation with impacts that can ultimately be just as bad as wholesale clearance. Beyond deforestation, the diverse plant and animal life of tropical forests faces further challenges. In Africa, nearly 5,000 tons of hunted tropical bushmeat are dragged from their leafy homes every year. Here, as well as in Southeast As
ia and South America, the “catch” often includes large-bodied animals, such as primates, that, as we have seen, can have crucial roles in the overall health of forests. Atmospheric CO2 increases and global warming represent more indirect, though no less significant, human threats for tropical forest life-forms, radically altering their distribution and dynamics. This is only going to get worse as raging fires and deforestation in the same forests release yet more CO2 from the land into the atmosphere, creating an even hotter and less nurturing “greenhouse.” In fact, the average carbon emissions produced by tropical deforestation around the world are currently higher than those produced by the entirety of the European Union.2
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