Agricultural Settlement and Land Use in Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 582

Because steel and cement are rare in mountain settlements, especially in developing
countries, wood—large timber in particular—is the most important building material for
homes, tent/yurt frames, barns, bridges, and farm implements. Expert sawyers carve
mature trees into beams by axe or in small local sawmills (Fig. 11.23). The finished
timber is expensive by any local standard. While some homes are all wood, a timber
frame filled in with rock, silt, and thatch is more typical (Figs. 11.24, 11.25). New
roads that bring alternative building materials into mountain communities for the first
time reduce the local demand for timber. This same infrastructure enables highlanders
to export wood products to the timber-starved lowlands, where it commands a high
price. Although this new source of nonfarm income provides for fertilizer, household
items, school tuition, and mechanization, the unsustainable harvest rate can liquidate
the forest resource. For example, in the early 1990s, Mexican farmers and outside en-
trepreneurs began supplying the United States with old-growth pine and oak from the
Sierra Madre. While the proceeds and employment benefit Mexico's struggling eco-
nomy, the allied secondary (mostly furniture production) and tertiary (marketing and
shipping) salaries depend on a shrinking resource. In another example from Indone-
sian Borneo, sustainable forest management, economic, environmental, and social de-
mands are in open conflict, as government-approved logging and other unregulated
land uses threaten the loss of the tropical rainforest (Kuusipalo et al. 1997). Some log-
ging operations are displacing traditional slash-and-burn farmers, while roads to facil-
itate timber removal open up new terrain for thousands of land-hungry transmigrants
from the crowded islands of Java, Sumatra, and Madura. Logged areas then transition
into degraded slash-and-burn farmland, and cash crop or timber plantations. More of-
ten, they convert into secondary succession grass and shrubland, where any viable tim-
ber is quickly removed for fuelwood and home construction.