Communities and People in the Forest Industries

Abstract

it is clear that the frontiersman's approach to the frontier environment is anything but adaptive. We now know from new settlers' practical experiences that the Amazon basin is particularly unsuited for large-scale sedentary (as distinct from shifting or long-fallow) agriculture as well as for ranching. Yet these nonetheless remain the predominant economic orientations of Amazonian colonization efforts. The "cake of custom" is not broken by the frontiering experience. Rather, colonization entails the bull-headed pursuit of land use strategies traditional in the metropolis, no matter how counterproductive they are in the new environment. This is further demonstrated by the Dust Bowl disaster in U.S. history, which originated when the myth that "rain follows the plow" was used to promote sedentary agricultural colonization of arid lands. The colonist remains the recognizable product of the society from which he springs, and the society he creates in a new place will approximate the original as closely as is possible (see Opie in Nichols's American Frontier and Western Issues, as well as Baker and Kopytoff). The volumes examined here obviously do not exhaust the possibilities for testing the Turner thesis, but they clearly suggest that the Turnerian approach is not very useful. Kopytoff remarks that the findings of the studies in his collection, The African Frontier, stand Turner on his head. I would suggest that they do more than that, as do those of Baker, Hemming, Schmink and Wood, Cayton, and Marshall— they suggest that we should drop Turnerian buzzwords and strike out anew. One impression generated by the studies reviewed here is that frontier intrusion can be both humanly and environmentally destructive. The expansion of civilized society into forested frontiers has always entailed the destruction or massive disruption of forest ecosystems. Civilized societies tend to regard nature as a thing to be used; "wild" or unsettled forest is a hostile realm pending its economic development. The Amazonian case aptly illustrates this point, and with a particular poignancy, as the region's "development" is contemporary and continuing, even though the deleterious consequences of development are now understood both within the country and worldwide. This was not the case with earlier frontiers. The Amazonian texts reviewed here do an admirable job of detailing the impact of intrusion on ecosystems, and revealing the sociopolitical context in which intrusion takes place (Schmink and Wood, and Hemming). The destruction of Amazonia does not reflect merely the greed of South American nations claiming a share of the region, but also the international economy that makes such destruction profitable, and even imperative, if the affected nations are to obtain credit in the international market (Hemming). Moreover, to justify their actions, the Amazonian nations may reasonably point to the abysmal record of ecological destruction amassed by every other modern nation. The problem is one of human civilization per se, rather than of local intransigence, or of industrialization (as suggested by Mendes in Hemming, vol. 1). The processes now going on in the Amazon have already gone on elsewhere (see Baker on India). The concept of a frontier is an artifact of civilization. Civilized people define the frontier— as an undeveloped, uninhabited, wild zone — in opposition to the way they define themselves. All the various definitions of both civilization and its opposites are advanced by people calling themselves civilized, who therefore see civilization as fundamentally positive. Yet the history of forested frontiers suggests that such uniformly favorable views of civilization may not always be useful in dealing conceptually and practically with the problems to which civilized life gives rise. Whatever else civilization may be, it is a system by which an elite minority extorts wealth, labor, and talent from a less-privileged majority to support the elite's leisured life-style, the political structures keeping the elite in power, and, if necessary, even to pay the costs of coercing and policing the majority into economic performance and political submission. In other words, civilization is a system of exploitation. Because elites are costly to maintain, and because crude exploitation is inefficient and destructive, a civilization can survive only by expanding, either in crude territorial terms or in the subtle terms of the international economy. In expanding, it deputizes others to exploit new populations and lands. In short, the exploitation of nature by the most apparently efficient and profitable methods, at least for the short term, is inherent in civilized practice and is complementary to the exploitation of human beings. In this system, diminishing returns in one region merely encourage a new destructive intrusion into a farther region. Frontier peoples who cannot be profitably subjugated and exploited, or who refuse to submit, become mere objects to be removed from the path of progress. Hence the tragedy of indigenous peoples on every frontier. But a civilization's own population is similarly victimized. The land scarcity that induces poorer colonists to penetrate a frontier is usually only relative. Land is scarce because the best land has already been engrossed by elites (Marshal, Cayton, Baker, Schmink and Wood, and Hemming). Poor settlers have access only to new land that elites do not care immediately to take for themselves. Once the pioneer has developed the new land, i.e., initiated its ecological degradation, he often loses control through elite financial mechanisms and must then either sink into the group of poorly paid landless laborers or move to a farther frontier (see Marshall, Cayton, Schmink and Wood). Apparently civilized humanity by its very nature must expand demographically and geographically. As civilized economies are generally wasteful, owing to the inefficiency of exploitation, their geographic expansion is also inefficient and destructive. The frontier zone becomes a focal point for this destrUctive inefficiency. On the frontier, inefficiency is made recalcitrant by innate cultural conservatism.