PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY Amazonian exploitation revisited: ecological asymmetry and the policy pendulum

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org T first scientists to enter Amazonia encountered a wonderland of undescribed organisms living in what appeared to be unoccupied and untouched forest. Adjectives they used to describe the forest included “virgin”, “pristine”, and “timeless”, a vision which became incorporated into scientific thinking. Explanations of high Amazonian diversity invoked the stability and the museum-like quality of unchanging environments that accumulated species and minimized extinctions (Stebbins 1974). Coupled with this view was the romantic idyll of hunter–gatherers living in harmony with nature. Such views have been altered by excavations of archaeological sites from the mouth of the Amazon to the High Andes, which reveal a long record of human occupation, ceramics manufacture, and agriculture (eg Roosevelt 1991; Roosevelt et al. 1991). For at least some groups, a trajectory of increasing populations and greater reliance on agriculture is evident for the past several thousand years. As anthropological and paleoecological knowledge of these systems has deepened, the view of Amazonia as untrammeled and changeless has disappeared (Clark 1996). The realization that human populations throughout the Americas declined sharply following European contact altered expectations of the level of human disturbance and modification of systems prior to 1492. Indeed, a series of articles (eg Clark 1996; Erickson 2000; Heckenberger et al. 2003; Erickson 2006) and a recent book (Mann 2005) suggest that the pendulum of scientific opinion has swung from the extreme view of the Amazon as “virgin”, has passed a midpoint of “disturbance localized around main waterways”, and is now headed toward the other extreme of “widespread and pervasive human disturbance”. The title of Heckenberger et al.’s (2003) article, Amazonia 1492: pristine forest or cultural parkland?, was deliberately provocative, but if taken literally depicts a simple dichotomy. We suggest the possibility of a middle path. Here, we provide an alternative interpretation of the existing data, and caution that uncritical acceptance of Amazonia as a manufactured landscape may be misguided and could lead to unsound policy. In Amazonia, there has been a commendable use of science by governments, particularly the Brazilian Government, to set conservation policy. Refuge theory was widely accepted in the mid-1980s and was used at the time, together with maps of diversity, to prioritize areas for conservation (Dinerstein et al. 1995). Although this theory is now largely discredited (Colinvaux et al. 2001), the basic biogeographic patterns of high local endemicity and diversity used to identify “refugia” also formed effecPALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY