Text

E-book Political Landscapes : Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico

---

Penilaian

---

In 1937 an offi cial from the Mexican forest service visited the rugged Sierra Tarahumara mountains in southern Chihuahua, which even today remain one of the nation’s most isolated places. Th e landscape that greeted An-tonio H. Sosa was unlike anything he had seen in central Mexico. He ad-mired the “immensity, beauty, and potential” of the untouched Ponderosa and Montezuma pines that soared skyward everywhere he looked.? Th e area was also home to approximately 33,000 indigenous people known to outsiders as the Tarahumara but who called themselves Rarámuri, or “those who run on foot.” Sosa regarded them as the single greatest threat to the region’s ecological integrity. In his estimation, the Rarámuri hated trees with a nearly innate passion. He reported that they indiscriminately cleared the best stands of timber to make way for their cornfi elds or per-haps in the misguided belief that it would help to summon the rains. Since the natives could not be trusted to care for the woods, he recommended opening the region to logging by modern timber companies operating under the watchful eye of forestry experts. “If these woods were subject to a proper management regime,” he wrote, “they would never disappear; on the contrary, they would produce immense benefi ts. However, they cannot endure much longer if they remain abandoned to their present fate, bereft of any oversight and completely at the mercy of the Tarahumara Indians.”?Sosa was hardly an impartial observer. He believed that the central Sierra Tarahumara was ripe for commercial logging and that timber com-panies, which had appeared in northwest Chihuahua four decades earlier, would jump at the opportunity to extend the logging frontier southward. It also seems clear that he misjudged the Rarámuris’ ecological impact. Forests in the arid north did not grow as densely as the ones in central Mexico with which he was more familiar, and native people typically made only small clearings around their dispersed family settlements. In other words, Sosa was observing a healthy ecosystem rather than a threatened one.? His words refl ected a rationalist ideology, typical of his day, in which the primacy of scientifi c knowledge and the desirability of “modern” pro-duction appeared self- evidently superior to the “primitive” forms of local knowledge and behavior they displaced.In time, Sosa came to question some of these beliefs. He returned to the central Sierra Tarahumara in 1965, by which point logging companies had started to extract timber on a commercial scale. He did not like what he saw. To his dismay, the forester witnessed “veritable caravans of trucks heavily laden with timber [that had been] relentlessly extracted from the forests, in a hemorrhage that seemed to have no end.”? Far from the carefully managed logging regime he had once envisioned, the timber com-panies ignored the limits on extraction and indiscriminately cut the best stands of trees. Lumberjacks had also invaded an area designated for an indigenous community through Mexico’s agrarian reform program, where they cut the most valuable timber and left behind erosion- prone rangeland known as agostadero.? Sosa could scarcely conceal his dismay at the local offi cials, who not only turned a blind eye to these events but covered them up by fi ling “ephemeral management plans” with the national forest ser-vice. But he did not lose faith in the basic premise of scientifi c forestry and continued to assert that “a well cared- for forest will never die” as long as conscientious experts could somehow govern the behavior of timber companies and rural populations. Th e Rarámuri had a diff erent understanding of these events. Like most native people in Mexico, they did not value the woods in the same way as timber companies, forestry experts, and other outsiders did. Most Rarámuri regarded the woods as the organic foundation of their individual well- being and collective survival. Forests provided construction material, cooking fuel, game and food, and fodder for goats. Th ey constituted a to-pography of signifi cance by mobilizing collective memories of community, work, and ritual. In other words, forests had particular meanings for most native people, although not necessarily an identical one for each individual. Indeed, native people sometimes disagreed about how their forests should be used and by whom. Th ey struggled among themselves (and with their neighbors) for control of certain stands of trees or entire woodlots. In some instances, they over- harvested their commons or remained indiff erent to forest fi res, invasive species, and other purported threats to the ecosystem. But Rarámuri communities did tend to close ranks when it came to defend-ing their woods from intrusive regulations and unwanted supervision. Th ey ignored or passively resisted the management plans devised by foresters like Sosa and, as one exasperated warden put it, evaded regulations “in an infi nite number of ways.”? But as with Sosa, their attitudes were subject to change over time. In some cases, native people agreed to work with experts to undertake carefully planned logging projects; in such instances, the Rarámuri began to appear a bit like the modern entrepreneurs that Sosa had championed as the solution to the problem of mismanaged forests.

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

970 BOY p

Penerbit

London : Duke University Press., 2015

Deskripsi Fisik

361 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780822375876

Klasifikasi

970

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

History of North America

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar