Creatures of the Clearings: Deforestation, Grass-Cutting Ants and Multispecies Landscape Change in Postcolonial Brazil

Abstract

Without denying its striking destructiveness, deforestation can be seen as a socio-ecological process through which humans negotiate their place-making with the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. In this article I combine qualitative and geospatial methods to document and analyse how forest clearing drove the range expansion of Atta ants in southeast Brazil over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, I outline the main deforestation drivers and dynamics, focusing on the connections between clearing practices and Atta habitat formation. Then, using Historical GIS methods, I examine the regional process of ‘savannisation’ and how it fuelled the expansion of two grass-cutting species. Imported African grasses such as Melinis minutiflora played a key role in the historical assemblage that both produced and was produced by the savannised landscapes. I conclude by highlighting the multispecies agential character of the Anthropocene as a product not only of human doings but of what humans enable other living beings to do (or prevent them from doing).