From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Environment and native issues
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 23:14:06 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

>
Pete Shemitz writes:
>
>      However, i thoroughly doubt that the brazilian government has thrown
> people into the amazon to mine gold, to strengthen their economy.  It is far
> more probable that poor people have seen a remote chance to get out of their
> debt-ridden lives and make it economically.  The miners probably have received
> little or no government encouragement.  Quite the opposite-- there are some
> programs (however inadequate) to keep miners _off_ native lands.

I didn't mean that the Brazilian govt was trying to reduce its debt through
gold mining per se. But the Brazilian govt has significant responsibility for
the flood of not only miners but other poor Brazilians into the Amazon -- e.g.
through their support for road construction. They also have done little to
address the root cause of the dislocation of so many poor people, namely the
fact that virtually all of the arable land is owned by a tiny fraction of
the population. This is what I had in mind when I said that they "unleashed"
the miners on the Amazon.  Some large-scale iron mining in the Amazon is
carried out with the approval of the govt, however, and railroads have been
built to transport out the ingots. European and Japanese financing underwrote
the railroad, and Europe and Japan get the iron which is produced. Western
Amazonia gets the pollution.

The programs to keep miners off native lands, like much of the protection of
native lands and rights, are unfortunately much stronger on paper than in
the forest. Moreover, as the population of poor Brazilians seeking to scratch
a livelihood out of the forest in any way they can increases, protection becomes
ever more difficult.

>
> There are no Nation/State governments that will use their tremendouspolice po-
> wers to restrain their citizens from ripping off Indian peoples, and that
> should be one issue that we can focus upon within this board-- the relationship
> between State coercive power and natural resource development in local commun-
> ities.  As mining is perhaps the most localized industrial/extractive activity
> it provides an important issue:  how does mining affect rural communities and
> peoples?  what is the social effect of mining?
>
> I think it is probable that Allen was getting to this point, but i was distract
> ed by his indictment of the individual miners (or mine operators, the distinct-
> ion wasn't clear to me.)
>

Mining is of course only one transformation of the forest ecosystem, through
deforestation for coal to smelt ore, as well as through pollution. There are
many pressures on the Amazon; gold mining was just the first that came to my
mind.  Deforestation also occurs for ranching and raising cash crops, as well
as for logging tropical hardwoods.

Actually my main point was one that should be familiar from US history. You
can give all the paper protection and sovereignty you like to a people, but
if their ecosystem is ruined, so are they: the principle is the same whether
it is the buffalo that are shot and the prairies replaced with farms, or the
rivers that are polluted and the rainforest dessicated through fragmentation
from logging. It doesn't even matter whether it is done out of deliberate
malice or just short-sightedness and stupidity: once you knock out the
underlying ecosystem what is left are dispossessed people, ready to enter the
"mainstream" economy on the bottom economic rung. A few more causalties of
the war on nature.

------------
Alan McGowen


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