A short review can do little justice to this superb last book by one of the most penetrating of Brazilianists. As the biographical foreword by Stuart Schwartz demonstrates, this work carried Warren Dean into areas previously uninvestigated; at the same time, it is a logical and fitting capstone to his career. It is the product of a rare combination of erudition, imagination, integrity, and industry—the work of a true scholar.
Engaged, angry, speculative, yet balanced, careful, and judicious, this book will leave its mark on the historiography of Brazil and on the broader historical study of the environment. A handful of limited monographs (including Dean’s own Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, 1987) notwithstanding, this is the first real environmental history of Latin America. In its complexity, scope, and innovation, moreover, it is arguably the finest forest history yet written, managing the balance of natural and human history in a way unattained even by such scholars of temperate-zone forests as Simon Schama, John McNeill, and Thomas Cox. The most important chapter in human forest history, Dean persuades us, is in the American tropics.
This is a history of Brazil’s moral economy, seen through the prism of human interaction with the Atlantic forest. More than a stage for human activities, the forest was, for more than five centuries, a vast historical agent, shaping Brazil’s state and society even as it was itself being modified and eventually destroyed. Dean interprets indigenous and immigrant mentalities, the dyewood trade, plantation cultures, the gold rush, the Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment, land policy, the formation of the peasantry, liberalism, positivism, developmentalism, and militarism, returning always to his central theme of a “contradiction inherent in Brazilian society . . . the chasm between those who owned most of the country’s forests and felt little responsibility for preserving them and the mass of the citizenry, so desperately in need of relief from a social system that had denied them land, education, and welfare” (p. 347). In the end, the shaping resource was destroyed, leaving nothing of equal substance in its place, a process Dean aptly labels “capitalism in reverse.”
Dean assembled his panorama from a spectrum of printed sources, ranging from colonial documents and government reports through theses at the Escola Superior da Guerra, supplemented by manuscripts, notably from the Museu Imperial. His mainstay, however, is a stream of reports, memoirs, travel accounts, and polemics written by missionaries, politicians, planters, business people, and botanists—witnesses to and participants in the destruction of the forest. Most of the voices we hear are those of Brazilians, and the tone of their discourse is unmistakable.
The decline of a great forest both demands and defies objective measurement. Most forest histories either evade this dilemma through subjective descriptions of lost arcadias or turn to multiple tables, graphs, and scattergrams that distract from the text while conveying a false sense of exactitude. Dean resorts to long, narrative arithmetic calculations and deductions from circumstantial evidence of the quantity and quality of forest that must have been destroyed at different stages. Working backward from known quantities of dyewood logs in the holds of ships, numbers and properties of charcoal ovens and brick kilns, slaughterhouse records, and so on, he establishes a series of benchmarks for the destruction of the forest, eventually expressed in the form of 11 maps, the only illustrations in the book. These calculations provide some tedious passages in an otherwise smooth and gripping narrative, but they have the great virtue of accessibility to the nonscientist; and if they leave the uneasy impression that some vital factor might have been overlooked, overall they persuade the reader of an honest effort.
This strategy illustrates Dean’s struggle to avoid the determinism characteristic of much environmental writing, though he flirts with it continuously in his efforts to maintain a coherent central theme and in his informed use of biological and anthropological concepts. He succeeds, but narrowly. While the play of impersonal forces is always visible, the focus is on human motivation and options, and surprisingly often on specific individuals and groups. Dean’s villains are self-interested members of the controlling elites (a general term he avoids almost entirely); his heroes are the rare persons who have perceived the uniqueness and value of the forest and worked for its benefit.
Dean also resists the other consistent temptation of environmental history, romanticism. He spends little energy on questions of Nature in the abstract; the people he discusses are real; and the indigenes and their exploited, mixed-race descendants receive their fair share of criticism as “ecological intruders.” While we might wish for more attention to some topics Dean merely touches on —the bases of environmental thought in popular culture, the military as conservationist, the activities of voluntary associations —this is too much to expect in an already wonderfully inclusive study. Warren Dean has left a conceptual basis, a detailed outline, and a set of intriguing discussion points for a new generation of environmental historians. This book should be required reading for them and for all Latin Americanists.
