Smallholders, The Amazon's New Conservationists

Abstract

Parks, biological reserves, and other protected areas located in the middle of expanding agricultural frontiers are the most important elements in strategies to conserve nature (Brandon et al. 1998; Terborgh & van Schaik 2002). The borders of these frontier protected areas are the battle line between economic activities that are replacing the forest with agriculture and cattle pasture, and the environmental movements that defend public interests in native ecosystems (Nepstad et al. 2006). Yet economic considerations (i.e., low land prices) and risk aversion (Peres & Terborgh 1995) have led to the unusual situation in which most protected areas (with the important exception of indigenous lands) are located far from the most destructive human activities, where their effect on human activities may be minimal for decades to come (Nepstad et al. 2006). Indeed, it appears that the world’s great tropical rainforests are destined for the same fate as the temperate forests felled over the last 4 centuries: they will persist in remote, rocky, hilly landscapes, where the opportunity costs of excluding agricultural expansion and logging are low (Cronon 1983). There are important exceptions to this trend of creating reserves in remote tropical rainforests that provide a crucial lesson for conservation science. In one of the most important conservation achievements of the last decade, 5 million ha of forest reserves were created from November 2004 to March 2005 in the hotly contested landscape of central Para state, in the Brazilian Amazon. With the creation of these reserves, Para and the adjoining state of Mato Grosso to the south now contain the world’s largest mosaic of tropical rainforest protected areas, encompassing 23 million ha (four times the size of Costa Rica) of indigenous lands, extractive reserves, national forests, and biological reserves (Fig. 1).