In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 223

trees were damaged in the felling process. Recently, while investigating the effects of
modern selective logging in Amazonia (research carried out as part of the Large-Scale
Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia [LBA], a NASA international research
initiative), researchers reviewed several “subcanopy” impacts of this kind of extrac-
tion. 87 The selective cutting of valuable species may leave the forest canopy more or
less intact but strongly affects forest functions through changes in carbon uptake, seed
stocks, regeneration, ecological community structure, and resilience. Perhaps the most
important finding is that that between ten and thirty adjacent trees are taken down for
each “targeted” tree. LBA scientists concentrated on “harvest” rates of about one tree
per hectare, roughly equivalent to modern Castilla densities, although these low mod-
ern Castilla distributions seem somewhat at odds with the descriptions of manchals of
nineteenth-century observers like Rocha, quoted earlier. Harvesting in the more intens-
ive caucho zones produced a “stealth” deforestation rate of between 36 and 180 milli-
on trees. 88 The “take all” approach resulted in local extinctions—and these helped drive
Peruvian caucheiros into the lands of Brazilian tappers. 89
Ifwetakemoderndataasthenorm,eventhoughthismayleadustounderestimatethe
impact, the selective clearing of Castilla during the height of the rubber economy may
have been “invisible” at the time but produced such deforestation that today the satellite
signature of the upper Amazon is successional forests rather than the primal selva these
placesareimaginedtobe. Caucho hasbecomeaspeciesoffloodplainsratherthanofthe
uplands, its former haunt. 90 Da Cunha was correct in describing the caucho system as
“killing trees and men.”
Where Rubber Reigned: Peonage and the Northeastern Diaspora
Attempts to intensify Hevea rubber production in Amazonia have consistently met with
failure because of the vulnerability of Hevea trees in the Amazon to Macrosystis ulei ,
a fungus that decimates the young leaves. Traditional and native peoples have con-
centrated useful plants wherever possible, a phenomenon documented throughout the
Amazon basin. Even today tappers in Acre and in the eastern Amazon along the Tapajos
improve the density of Hevea trees by planting seedlings within the forests. 91 There had
been many larger-scale attempts at making denser Hevea stands, largely unsuccessful,
especially in the later part of the nineteenth century. 92 Attempts to adapt the tree to in-
dustrial production through plantations in Amazonia—the most efficient way tree crops
can be organized to serve dynamic capitalist markets—were always thwarted in Amazo-
nia by ecological constraints, even when, as in Fordlândia, Henry Ford's enclave for in-
dustrial modernization of rubber production, capital was no object. 93 While slavery was
the general mode in caucho systems, debt peonage has characterized much labor mo-
bilization in the Brazilian rubber economy in upper Amazon tributaries. The ending of