Dynamics of occupation and landscapes changes in the Amazon, Brazil

Abstract

The Amazon has a great sociocultural richness due to the historical processes of occupation that led to the coexistence of riverine, indigenous, quilombola, extractive populations and, more recently, farmers, loggers, miners, and large rural entrepreneurs. These populations and their respective techno productive patterns of intervention on nature relate in different ways to the biome, producing differentiated and diversified landscapes 1,2 .Recent studies in the Amazon show how human presence helped form the rainforest. The hyperdominance of managed species such as açaí, cocoa, and Brazilian nuts suggest that the Amazon rainforest was occupied and transformed over 8,000 years ago 3 . Long before Europeans, human settlements were the main sites of production and storage of knowledge about biodiversity, involving ancestral agroextractive or agroforestry practices that can still be found in the region as a portfolio of techniques and knowledge about the biome. These practices have diversity characteristics that resemble ecological components and that underlie the maintenance of the Amazonian biome as an integrated and living system. Subsequently, agroextractive practices and activities were developed and improved by local communities as a result of the colonization, one of the main assets of the historical process of formation of human societies in the Amazon, including caboclo societies 4 .Until the mid-20th century, historical transformations had not caused major changes in the landscape and sociocultural and ecological diversity of the Amazon. During the 1960s, however, the policies of occupation of the military governments lead to profound changes in the biome. The new spatial pattern of expansion of the agricultural frontier -based on monoculture techniques -following the expansion of highways construction and the implementation of large settling projects 5 , triggered transformations in the biome with important socio-environmental alterations leading to possible threats to the ecological balance of this system. Other than promoting migratory waves that brought a large and diverse population to the Amazon, this new occupation greatly contributed to the disorganization and fragmentation of the territory by introducing many techniques and technologies of forest, mineral, and agricultural exploitation.This new occupation model of the territory and the expansion of homogenizing economic activities, disregarding the conservation of the forest and its populations, had as a consequence the loss of extensive forest areas, thus reaching its highest rate of deforestation in 1995 (29,059km 2 ) 6 . Stimulated by an economy based on the search for the expansion of the degree of commoditization of exports, in the 2000s, grain production advanced from the Cerrado to the Amazon. Due to the increasing forest