• DOI:10.2307/3984562
• Corpus ID: 156161425

Agriculture, Forests, and Ecological History: Brazil, 1500–1984

@article{McNeill1986AgricultureFA,
  title={Agriculture, Forests, and Ecological History: Brazil, 1500–1984},
  author={John R. McNeill},
  journal={Environmental Review},
  year={1986},
  volume={10},
  pages={122 - 133}
}

• J. McNeill
• Published 1 June 1986
• Political Science
• Environmental Review

One of the hallmarks of civilization is its capacity and inclination to simplify ecosystems. In order to assure and enlarge their niche, humans have rearranged plant and animal communities to favor those species that provide stored energy for human use. Only a comparatively few such species exist, hence, where human beings flourish they invariably reduce the diversity of the biota, replacing natural flora and fauna with high concentrations of edible (and otherwise useful) plants and animals. In the Old World this process of replacement has been going on for millenia; but in Brazil and most of the Americas, the process is only 500 years old and thus much easier to trace. Although indigenous American species have fought a long undeclared war against invaders, the newly introduced species have often won through the intervention of human beings. Humankind, therefore, has exercised a decisive influence, reminiscent of the gods in Homer's version of the Trojan War, struggling and conniving to see their preferred lower species triumph. Human beings were in South America at least 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. In central Mexico and Peru, Amerindians developed societies that radically rearranged biotic communities, but in Brazil, where human numbers were much smaller, they did not. Shortly before 1500, perhaps one to one and a half million hectares were under cultivation-an area smaller than the state of Connecticut in a country almost as large as the United States.' With every dry season Brazilian food-crop agriculturists cut and burned patches of forest to raise crops. These shifting cultivators