Dissertation Research: Landscape Transformation and Power in the Amazon Estuary

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This award supports the dissertation research of a student of social forestry at Yale university. The project is to interview smallholder farmers in the Amazon estuary of Brazil on their interactions with the estuarine floodplain over the past 30 years and explain how these interventions have been involved with resource conflict and property relations. The student will seek to explain how human management of streams has transformed the local landscape, how changing labor and property relations and conflicts over resources shaped and were influenced by changes in the physical landscape, and how local people understand their ability to act autonomously in economic and ecological issues. The methods will include a survey and intensive interviews with about 100 households, the population of the local study area, about productive relations over time and resource conflicts. Aerial photographs will be used as an interview aid. A geographic information system database will be developed to analyze trends over time; the distribution of different crops and economically-exploited forest products will be analyzed and related to local events and conflicts. This research is important because it adds to our expertise about the economic behavior of farmers in this area of the world, and will provide valuable information about local people's feelings and understandings of environmental issues. If the deforestation of the Amazon is to be controlled in the future, policies must be based on understanding of what local people do in environmental interactions, and why they do it, information which will be produced by this sort of study. + - +- ±- f8 Û-ª þ + + _ Ûª▓ ÑOh ª' +'ª▒0 Ý + ] $ H l + ¢ ╗ D h + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ R:\WWUSER\TEMPLATE\NORMAL.DOT 9529972 stuart plattner Harriet R. Eason @ ÀR║/O+ @ -+Y+ª) S u m m a r y I n f o r m a t i o n ( ++++++++++++ ) Û ++++++++++++ ++++++++++++ ++++++++++++ @ +ªWZ++ @ Fª# Microsoft Word 6.0 3 f8 Û-ª þ + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++]ªe =- e ª ; ª ` ` ` ` ` ` ` p p p p p p Á p { 1 e Ó Ó Ó Ó Ó Ó Ó - á á á ª = ª = ) - T ; { ` Ó Ó Ó Ó Ó { Ó ` ` Ó e Ó Ó Ó Ó ` Ó ` Ó - ╝ Ý ` ` ` ` Ó - Ó S Ó