A Case Study on Management of National Parks and Biodiversity Conservation in Brazil

Introduction

Latin America - Mexico, Middle and South America - is a conglomerate of independent nations, plus a few Dutch, French, and British islands, a small French territory - the French Guyana, and a large number of surviving pre-Columbian native tribes or nations of distinct ethnic origins. Trinidad-Tobago, Guyana and Suriname became independent from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the 1960’. No visible trace of early Viking sailors survived. Besides, each war in the Old World, forced a wave of migrants to search for asylum in the New World. Italians, Polish, Hungarians, Russians, Germans, Japanese, Syrians, Lebanese, among others formed in some cases tightly closed enclaves, speaking long forgotten dialects that have vanished in their native countries, but more often mingling with the host populations, and retaining but just a few folkloric traces of their original cultures.

The widely used expression Latin America refers to the Iberian conquerors, the Spanish and Portuguese navigators that arrived in the American continent at the end of the 15th century and in the early 16th’s. Ensuing territorial disputes over known and unknown lands of the New World were tentatively settled by Papal bullas and treaties between the kingdoms of Castella and Portugal. From 1581 to 1640 Portugal was under Spanish rule, which was somehow beneficial to Brazilian territorial expansion, beyond the limits established in former treaties. The final treaty that ended wars in the Iberian peninsula was signed in 1668.

All along the 17th and 18th centuries, astronomers, naturalists and soldiers made extensive expeditions to demarcate land and river frontiers and make inventories of natural productions. Attempts by French and Dutch expeditions to establish permanent colonies in Brazil were short lived. Spanish became the official language of the majority of Latin American countries, while Portuguese is spoken in Brazil.

Until the 19th century, the environmental policies in Latin America were those imposed by the European settlers, and obviously directed towards the exploitation of natural resources, vegetal, animal, and mineral. Natives were also considered a natural resource, and duly enslaved, at a time when the Catholic church condoned and justified slavery.

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The earliest regulatory initiatives were aimed at the restriction of trading rights or at the limitation of property and use. Thus, the Portuguese expression madeira de lei was adopted to designate those noble species of trees which belonged legally to the king, to be used in naval construction or in fine wood craftsmanship. It has been recently estimated that from the16th to the 19th century, about 470 thousand logs of Cesalpinia echinata, the Brazil wood, were exported to Portugal for its precious red die. There followed the introduction of species from Europe, and the colonies in Asia and Africa. Botanical gardens were established in the New World to cultivate and spread the costly spices from the Orient and a variety of introduced cultivated plants and domestic animals. New diseases and parasites arrived with men and animals, as it was well documented by the early travelers and chroniclers. From the Americas, plants, animals and materia medica were sent to Europe, causing profound changes in the Old World nutritional habits (Avila-Pires, 2003). Gold, silver and gems would be a later development in the process of territorial occupation of Brazil. On the Pacific side, Spanish conquerors found a number of developed native societies already submitted and ruled by the Inca Empire, with large riches in precious metals ready to be plundered. To the north of the Equator, the Aztec and Mayan civilizations suffered the same fate.

During the 1780’ the governments of Spain and Portugal exploited their American domains in a thorough and systematic fashion. Reports of early naturalists are available nowadays in fac-simile and in commented editions. They help us with the reconstruction of former patters of geographical distribution of pre-Columbian fauna and flora.

Early in the 19th century, with the invasion of Lisbon by the Napoleonic armies, the Portuguese court moved to Brazil. Foreign naturalists were permitted or encouraged to travel and explore the hinterland, except the mining districts and a new era for the Natural History of the New World began.

Involvement of naturalists with the politics of economic development is not a new phenomenon. Cardoso (2003) shows how Domenico Vandelli, trained in medicine and natural history in his native Italy, supported the notion that a better knowledge of natural resources was a fundamental condition for addressing problems of efficiency in their economic allocation. His idea that natural history should be the basis for an economic agenda was a central element in the emergence of political economy as an

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autonomous scientific discourse during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Vandelli was also instrumental in advocating the financing of an expedition in the late 1700’ to study the natural productions of Brazil, with the objective of establishing a program of systematic economic exploration.

Isolated initiatives for specific situations like the restriction of collecting aigrettes date from imperial times.

Environmental policies, in the modern sense were directed to environmental protection and were formally introduced in 1864, when the United States Congress donated an area in the Yosemite Valley to the State of California to be used for public use, recreation, and as a refuge for animals. Eight years later, in 1872, Yellowstone was created as the first National Park, “…hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale under the laws of the United States and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” The rationale behind it was the protection of certain threatened species and scenic landscapes.

Mexico established its first National Park, El Chico, in 1898, while in South America it was Argentina who was pioneer, in 1934, with Nahuel Huapi National Park.

The modern era began in the late 1930’ when several Latin American countries imposed regulations upon the exploitation of natural resources - oil prospecting and mining in particular - not because of the their ecological impacts upon the environment but mostly for political, economic and protectionist considerations. In the Annex: Hallmarks the main international initiatives have been listed.

Thirty years later efforts of naturalists - zoologists, botanists, anthropologists, archeologists - were rewarded with a limited dose of success that gathered momentum with the growing interest and support from public opinion in favor of nature conservation. This movement was to gain force during the two following decades. The concept of conservation substituted the previous protection policies, intended to salvage threatened animals and plants and to establish national parks and preserves, sometimes focusing on certain species, and not on natural communities, which should be the basis for environmental conservation, as shown by Avila-Pires in 1972. Reasons given for the

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need to protect nature went from the sentimental and poetic to utilitarian and pragmatic (Halffter, 1993, Halffter, 2003; Halffter, 2005).

During the 1960’ and 1970’ democratic or dictatorial governments in Latin America either adopted or revised conservation laws. In the case of revolutionary governments it was done through Presidential Law-Decrees or by Congress, with little discussion or argument. But it was not a simple process. Scientists in one side, legislators and jurists in another, and considerable national and international commercial and political interests sometimes intervened and some of the problems that loomed in the near future were the object of discussion during the 8 ^th Reunion of the Central Council of the

International Union of Magistrates, in 1971 (Union Internationale des Magistrats, 1971).

Brazil revised the legislation of the thirties during the period beginning in 1964, under a military dictatorship, which viewed conservation as an integral part of the national security policy, as we shall see.

Argentina approved Law nº 5781 in 1956 to regulate fishing activities and since 1967 a number of Provincial laws on National Parks and Faunal Preserves. A preoccupation with tourism was behind some of the initiatives. One drawback was the permission to introduce exotic animals, as wild boar and European deer in National Parks.

In 1974 Bolivia approved the Law-Decree nº 11686 of August 13, 1974 established the Ley General Forestal de la Nación or General Forest Law of the Nation. It was regulated by the Resolución Suprema or Governmental Resolution nº 183204 of February 2, 1977. Also in the 1970’ Bolivia passed the Law-Decree nº 12301 dealing with Wildlife, National Parks, Hunting and Fishing.

Peruvian history of environmental management dates back to early native cultures that had to cope with the adverse conditions of one of the driest deserts in the world, which extends from Northern Chile to Ecuador. In Peru, a revolutionary government imposed a Forest and Wildlife Law-Decree-nº 21147 in May 13, 1975. Its main objective was to discipline and regulate the exploitation of plant and animal natural resources.

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In Venezuela, Arturo Eichler (1968) was instrumental in the spread of conservationism and introduced the concept of technical conservation, or management of natural resources, with emphasis on agriculture, agrarian reform, erosion, forest fires, and floods.

In spite of the efforts of conservationists and the existing legislation, in several countries mining activities and oil exploration are taking place in natural preserves, as it is the case of Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru (Galindo-Leal, 2000). A number of related important questions were aptly addressed by Ojeda and Mares (1989) and by Halffter (1995).

This is not the place to elaborate on the chronology of new laws in other countries, and the data given above is intended to date the beginnings of the modern conservation legislation in Latin America.

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Highlights of regional technologies of the past

The cold waters of the Humboldt current that surfaces along the coasts of Chile and Peru and turns west at the Gulf of Guayaquil, in Ecuador to, reach the Galápagos Islands, team with fish. Sea birds like terns, penguins, and the large cormorants or guanay in particular, prey upon the fish and nest on the coastal islands, where deep layers of guano accumulates. The dry winds coming from the sea rob the moisture from the coastline before they reach the barrier of the high Andean Cordillera. Pre-Inca cultures established themselves on river-oases along the riverbeds, which originate in the high sierras using a complicated tracery of terraces and building irrigation systems to grow crops and avoid soil erosion. The Mochica and Chimú learned to use the guano as fertilizer. These two desert kingdoms have a continuous archaeological record that began roughly in the third century BC and ends in 1461 with the Inca conquest. Under the unified Inca rule, the birds were protected, and severe penalties were applied to whoever killed a bird or approached their islands during the egg-laying season.

Mexico and Central America also have a history of highly developed civilizations and of careful environmental management. Contrary to the arid conditions of the Atacama-Sechura deserts of South America, the Mayas of the Yucatán peninsula lived in dense tropical forests, where some communities were able to hid from the Spanish invaders and the Christian church, intent upon their conversion. Betty Faust (1998) describes how some of those hidden hamlets survived isolated until recently, maintaining many aspects of Maya practical and environmental knowledge […]. This author describe in detail how the Maya cultural adaptation to local ecological conditions depended upon complex technologies locally developed.

Among the ingenious agricultural technologies there were the rainfall-dependent terracing, quite distinct from the method used in the dry coast of Western South America. It does not depend on the access to rivers, but on rainfall. It not only reduces erosion, but also slows runoff (Faust, 1998; Monasterio, 1994).

A comment by Faust on the Mayan processes of technological change may be extended to past and present problems, and applied to the study of problems related to all kinds of

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environmental impacts everywhere. We tend to forget that local conditions require local solutions. “The technologies of water management and agricultural production utilized by the ancient Maya were diverse and fitted to the specific requirements of different ecological zones. They required different forms of socio-political organization and at times different settlement patterns. They changed in response to changing climate, new ideas brought in from other areas, local inventions, and the challenges imposed by both growing and declining populations.

Mexico had a worst fate. The Aztec settlements, not being protected by the dense tropical forest were horses were of no help, body armor an hindrance, and foot soldiers vulnerable to real dangers and imaginary threats, were swiftly conquered by the invading forces of Cortéz. Crosby (1994) gives a vivid account of the changes introduced by the Europeans and the dreadful consequences of virgin-soil epidemics to men and animals. Another good source of information on the ravages due to imported diseases into Mexico is found in a book published by Karlen (2001) on the history of humanity and diseases.

A good source of information on the activities related to environmental matters is a Directory of Centres dedicated to the teaching and investigation in ecology in Latin America and Caribe, published in 1997 by the Ecological Sciences Program of the Regional Office of Science and Technology for Latin America and Caribe (UNESCO 1997). Many of the courses and research programs listed deal with environmental questions.

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