1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996247958303316

Autore

Dean Warren

Titolo

With broadax and firebrand : the destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic forest / / Warren Dean

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 1997, c1995

ISBN

0-585-13048-5

0-520-91908-4

Edizione

[1st pbk. printing.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xx, 482 p. ) : maps ;

Disciplina

304.2/8/098109152

Soggetti

Deforestation - Brazil - Atlantic Coast - History

Rain forests - Brazil - Atlantic Coast - History

Nature - Effect of human beings on - Brazil - Atlantic Coast - History

Forestry

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Deforestation - History - Atlantic Coast - Brazil

Rain forests - History - Brazil - Atlantic Coast

Nature - Effect of human beings on - History - Brazil - Atlantic Coast

Atlantic Coast (Brazil) Environmental conditions History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-440) and index.

Nota di contenuto

; The forest evolves -- Humans invade: the first wave -- Humans invade: the second wave -- Estrangement: depopulation and the regrown forest -- Gold and diamonds, ants and cattle -- Science discovers the forest -- The forest under Brazilian rule -- Coffee dispossesses the forest -- Instruments of devastation -- Speculation and conservation -- Industrial nomadism, predatory industrialism -- The development imperative -- Unsustainable developments -- Getting it off the paper -- The value of bare ground.

Sommario/riassunto

Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms,



some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants.Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes it up to the 1990s-through the invasion of Europeans in the sixteenth century; the ensuing devastation wrought by such developments as gold and diamond mining, slash-and-burn farming, coffee planting, and industrialization; and the desperate battles between conservationists and developers in the late twentieth century.Based on a great range of documentary and scientific resources,With Broadax and Firebrand is an enormously ambitious book. More than a history of a tropical forest, or of the relationship between forest and humans, it is also a history of Brazil told from an environmental perspective. Dean writes passionately and movingly, in the fierce hope that the story of the Atlantic Forest will serve as a warning of the terrible costs of destroying its great neighbor to the west, the Amazon Forest.