Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ethnohistorical and Geographical Analysis of Livelihood and Institutional Drivers of Landscape Change

在该奖项支持的研究中，加州大学圣克鲁斯分校博士生罗伯特·达文波特在人类学家安德鲁·马修斯博士的指导下，将调查可能在社会变革和生计发展的背景下推动林地利用和管理变化的社会因素。在人类历史的大部分时间里，人类活动对森林生态系统的影响在很长一段时间内缓慢展开。但现在科学家们正在观察森林覆盖率的变化，这种变化发生在短短几十年内，并因大规模农业和道路建设等人类活动而急剧加速。随着对全世界生物多样性丧失的日益关切，关于全球土地使用变化的科学研究强调了人类殖民化和定居对环境的破坏性影响，特别是在热带地区，最近抵达的人类往往缺乏消除商业农业和伐木影响并保持森林的机构和技术。然而，虽然一些科学家将森林砍伐建模为农业扩张的直接结果，但其他人认为，并非所有的耕作都是一样的，小规模农业生态耕作方法实际上可以减少森林砍伐，提高生物多样性，同时仍然有效地利用森林。森林生态系统的一个关键问题是，生计和机构的社会组织如何能够鼓励农业与生物多样性之间出现新的关系。迄今为止，社会生态系统的研究往往侧重于传统的环境管理，较少关注土地使用类型之间的变化，作为市场周边社会组织演变的一个功能。但更好地了解这些动态是至关重要的：美国和国家政策，以减轻气候变化涉及国际激励措施，以减少热带森林砍伐，但缺乏必要的了解社会和生计发展过程的人口居住在森林中。为了进一步理解这些问题，本项目将分析观察到的热带森林覆盖的变化，这与传统观点相反：尽管自1970年以来一直受到殖民化的影响，但它涉及从砍伐森林到重新造林的转变，而不是相反。达文波特将评估生计，制度安排和耕作决策如何在时间和空间上对土地利用变化产生不同的影响。该研究的地点是巴西横贯亚马逊公路上的Medicilandia市，那里的许多小农人口发展了手工劳动密集型和物种多样的农林系统，种植可可树（Theobroma cacao）和阿萨伊棕榈（Euterpe oleracea）。虽然梅第奇兰迪亚其他地区的森林砍伐仍在继续，但距离高速公路较远的10公里范围内的大部分土地在四分之一世纪前被砍伐，今天要么是林场，要么是再生次生林。研究人员将比较具有不同土地利用变化轨迹的农场的社会生态相互作用。三个问题将用于指导分析。首先，农村贫困人口如何随着时间的推移而适应不同的生计战略，涉及哪些劳动力、后勤、生计和商业安排？第二，制度、殖民者的观点和态度如何塑造了有关土地的规则和规范？后者涉及土地保有权、地方社会组织以及地方与国家机构和管理制度，包括巴西国家森林法之间不断演变的关系。第三，农业生态技术和物种栽培决策如何与生计和制度因素有关，以及导致了什么样的土地利用变化？将使用调查、人种学和人种植物学方法构建定量和定性数据集;这些数据集将与对30年卫星图像和航空摄影的遥感分析相结合，以绘制和模拟人类随着时间的推移对环境的影响。

In the research supported by this award, University of California, Santa Cruz, doctoral student, Robert Davenport, with direction from anthropologist Dr. Andrew Mathews, will investigate social factors that may drive variation in forest land use and management in a context of social change and livelihood development. For most of human history, anthropogenic effects on forest ecosystems unfolded slowly over long periods of time. But now scientists are observing changes in forest cover that occur over mere decades, dramatically accelerated by such human activities as large-scale agriculture and road construction. With growing concern over the loss of biodiversity worldwide, scientific research on global land use change has emphasized the environmentally destructive impacts of human colonization and settlement, especially in the tropics where recent human arrivals often lack the institutions and techniques to counter the effects of commercial agriculture and logging and keep forests standing. However, while some scientists have modeled deforestation as the direct result of the expansion of agriculture, others have argued that not all farming is the same and that small-scale agroecological farming methods can actually reduce deforestation and enhance biodiversity while still using the forests productively. A critical question for forest ecosystems is how the social organization of livelihoods and institutions can encourage new relationships to emerge between agriculture and biodiversity. To date, research on socio-ecological systems has tended to focus on traditional environmental management, paying less attention to shifts between types of land use as a function of evolving social organization on market peripheries. But better knowledge of these latter dynamics is critically needed: U.S. and state policies for mitigating climate change involve international incentives to reduce tropical deforestation but lack necessary understanding of social and livelihood development processes for the populations that inhabit the forests. To further these understandings, this project will analyze an observed change in tropical forest cover that counters conventional wisdom: unusually, it involves a transition from deforestation to reforestation, rather than the other way around, despite having been subject to colonization since 1970. Davenport will assess how livelihoods, institutional arrangements, and cultivation decisions have variously impacted land use changes in time and space. The site of the research is the municipality of Medicilândia on the TransAmazon highway in Brazil, which has seen many of its small farmer majority population develop manual labor intensive and species diverse agroforestry systems with cacao trees (Theobroma cacao) and açai palms (Euterpe oleracea). While deforestation has continued apace in other areas of Medicilândia located farther from the highway, most land inside a ten kilometer range, deforested a quarter-century ago, is today either a forest farm or a regrowth secondary forest. The researcher will compare socio-ecological interactions on farms with distinct land use change trajectories. Three questions will be used to guide the analysis. First, how have the rural poor adapted distinct livelihood strategies over time, and involving what labor, logistical, subsistence and commercial arrangements? Second, how have institutions, colonist outlooks and attitudes shaped rules and norms concerning the land? The latter involves land tenure rights, local social organization and the evolving relationship of the locality with state agencies and regulatory systems, including the national Brazilian forest code. Third, how have agroecological techniques and species cultivation decisions varied in relation to livelihood and institutional factors, and what land use change has resulted? Quantitative and qualitative datasets will be constructed using survey, ethnographic and ethnobotanical methods; these will be integrated with remote sensing analysis of 30 years of satellite images and aerial photography to map and model human shaping of the environment over time.