Ecology and the Poor: A Neglected Dimension of Latin American History

Author(s): Joan Martinez-Alier

Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Oct., 1991), pp. 621-639
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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COMMENTARY

Ecology and the Poor: A Neglected

Dimension of Latin American History

JOAN MARTINEZ-ALIER

Introduction
This Commentary addresses the issue of ecological perception and
ecological politics among poor populations, rural and urban. Some social
struggles by poor people (and some national struggles by poor countries)
can be understood also as ecological struggles. This approach reveals the
ecological content, both hidden and explicit, of social movements from
the past or present, which have been geared to defend access to natural
resources against the advance of the generalised market system, and that
have contributed to the conservation of resources to the extent that the
market undervalues externalities. Examples are taken mainly from the
history of highland and coastal Peru, but this approach is relevant also for
the Amazonian region. Some comparisons are made with other countries
in Latin America and also with India.
The Brundtland Report (1987) pointed out that poverty is a cause of
environmental degradation, and therefore it saw in economic growth a
remedy both to poverty and to environmental degradation. But this is a
transparent attempt at depriving the ecological critique of economics of its
distributional implications. This Commentary takes for granted that
poverty is a cause of environmental degradation. Of course, wealth, more
so than poverty, is also a cause of environmental degradation since the
large exosomatic consumption of energy and materials by rich people
implies a greater ecological burden on the environment, both as extraction
of resources and insertion of pollutants. Nevertheless, it is true that
poverty is a cause of environmental degradation. The extreme example
would be poor peasants forced to eat the seed of next year's crop, thereby
turning a renewable resource into an exhaustible one. In urban settings,
poverty means lack of sufficient amounts of water, and therefore

Joan Martinez-Alier is Professor of Economics and Economic History at the Uni-

versitat Autbnoma de Barcelona.

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 23, 621-639 Printed in Great Britain 62I

6zz Joan Martineg-Alier

difficulties in disposing of human excrement, with a risk to health. If

poverty is a cause of environmental degradation, and if poverty is rooted
in unequal class relations based on institutions of power and ownership,
then social movements opposed to political domination and to existing
patterns of distribution of assets will sometimes also be ecological
movements.
The complaints and actions of such eco-social movements (tribal,
peasant, or urban) increase the costs that firms or governments have to
pay for natural resources: they contribute to the internalisation of
externalities. However, negative externalities, defined as uncertain social
costs transferred to other social groups, or to future generations, must be
perceived before they become a motive for social protests, and often there
has been no popular reaction against ecological damages because
ecological awareness is socially moulded. At other times, ecological
damages are perceived but they are easily accepted because they will only
be felt in an uncertain future: the export of guano and fishmeal from Peru,
and also the rates of discount implicit in peasant communal investments
in land conservation, will be discussed in this context.

The Ecologyof the Poor

Many people think that environmentalism is a movement of the middle

class in some North Atlantic countries, born in the late I96os and early
1970s, and now electorally implanted in Europe. Thus there seems to be
more worry about the destruction of tropical forests in Washington D.C.
or in Berlin than in the tropics. However, many social movements emerge
from the struggles of the poor for their own survival, both historically and
presently. These struggles are therefore ecological movements (regardless
of the language in which they are expressed) in that their objectives consist
in obtaining the ecological necessities for existence: energy (including
food calories), water, and other materials. They are ecological movements
which normally try to remove natural resources from the economic
sphere, i.e. from the generalised market. To the extent that the generalised
market (or State control1) has implied a logic of externalisation of
environmental costs, the poor, by demanding access to natural resources
against capitalism (or the State), simultaneously have contributed to their
conservation. We shall study the ecological motivation across socio-
economic struggles which over the centuries have used and still use local
indigenous languages instead of widespread political languages. Following
1Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, 'State Forestry and Social Conflict in British
India', Past and Present (May i989). Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods. Ecological
Changeand Peasant Resistancein the Himalayas (Delhi, i989).
 Ecologyand the Poor 623

Guha, there have been many Chipkos (the Indian forest movement) in the
history of humankind! For instance, Chico Mendes, a leader of the rubber
tappers in Acre, Brazil, assassinated in December 1988, not only belonged
to a left political party, he also belonged to a Christian group, and he could
also appeal to local tradition, mobilising a local idiom of resistance against
the privatisation and exploitation of Amazonian resources. The thesis of
this Commentary is that the struggle for survival brings the poor to
defend access to resources and, sometimes, their conservation; therefore
the ecology of the poor has been very present both historically and now,
although there is little research on this. In other cases we need to explain
the absence of ecological struggles and lack of ecological perception,
despite the existence of ecological problems. Therefore, we shall see how
the history of nature is at the same time social history.
In the South, the 'social question' and the 'ecological question' get
meshed together, as also happened in today's industrialised countries
when workers fought for healthier conditions of urban life, and for safety
at work in industry and in the mines. Furthermore, the ecological
perspective again opens the discussion about the relations of international
dependency: the North-South conflict can now be seen also as an
ecological conflict. For instance, in the history of Peru there were social
movements explicitly directed against ecological damage, there were other
movements with a hidden ecological content, and there were also episodes
of external ecological exploitation, perhaps not yet perceived as such, and
which did not cause any nationalist reaction. Thus there was a social
movement against the pollution produced by the smelter of the Cerro de
Pasco Copper Corporation, an acid deposition from sulphur dioxide
known by the innocent name of the 'smokes of La Oroya'. More recently,
there was a struggle against the same type of pollution, this time caused
by the Southern Peru Copper Corporation.2
In other social movements, although the ecological motive is not so
visible, it also exists. This is the case in the urban struggle for water, and
for garbage disposal. The ecological motive can also be found in
numerous rural struggles. For example, communities in the Andes
attempted to recuperate pastures from the haciendas because of the
ecological complementarity between the resources of the highlands and
those of lower levels, even though the communities used legal rather than
ecological arguments.
Ecological perception is nowadays often expressed in the language of
energy and material flows, of exhaustible resources and pollution. This is
the language of scientists, as well as the language of many political
2
Julio Diaz Palacios, El Peruiy su medio ambiente: SouthernPeru Copper Corporation,una
complejaagresionambientalen el sur del pais (Lima, 1988).
624 Joan Martinet-Alier
' greens', but it is not the language of other historical or present ecological
movements, often not yet discovered. For example, in India, the Kerala
fisherman who used catamarans powered by sails did struggle against
boats with petrol engines. This was in fact an ecological struggle which
proposed the exploitation of fish with no use of exhaustible fossil fuels and
at a rate compatible with its reproduction. It is also a struggle which
appeals to the image of the sea as something sacred. Was there a similar
struggle in the coast of Peru in the I96os and i970S, when the fish were
being destroyed? In which socio-political language was it expressed?

The pressure of production on resources

The balance between resources and population is the obvious starting

point for the study of human ecology, and Peru provides a good example
because it is one of the countries in America with an unfavourable ratio
between cropland and population. Although Peru's area is large, more
than twice that of Spain or France, Peru actually has, because of its
difficult geography, one of the lowest ratios of cropland per head in
America following Haiti and El Salvador. It is difficult to accept any exact
figure of cropland per person in Peru, because of statistical uncertainties
compounded by the practice of agroforestry in the 'Amazon, and by
shifting borders of irrigation areas in the Coast and in the Sierra. With
only o.19 hectares of cropland per person, which is a figure commonly
accepted, demographic pressure relative to cultivated area is in any case
lower in Peru than in Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany or
England, to name examples of relatively prosperous countries.
Now that the quincentenary of 1492 is approaching, it is worth
remembering that if the population existing in America in 1492 had
increased in the 500 consecutive years at a rate similar to the growth of
European population in the same lapse of time, today the Americas would
have an Amerindian population similar to their present total population.
Given the history of ecological and demographic imperialism of Europe,3
it is not appropriate for Europeans to insist on the excessive pressure of
population on resources in the Third World. Nevertheless, a socio-
ecological history should start with human demography. Ecologists know
the causes and patterns of migration of birds, but ecologists cannot
explain the actual geographic distribution of people; political scientists are
needed. In effect, how is it possible to maintain such enormous
international discrepancies in the exosomatic consumption of energy and
materials? These can only be maintained through the existence of States
3 Alfred Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9oo-r1oo
(Cambridge, i986).
 Ecologyand the Poor 625

with borders and border police which, by impeding the free movement of
people, maintain the difference in the use of resources per person between
societies. Although it is fashionable to attribute poverty to excessive
demographic growth, thus biologising social inequality, state borders
actually are socio-historical institutions unrelated to biology. However,
even if we assume a more rational geographic distribution of the
population, including the right to free migration, the indefinite growth of
population even at low rates cannot but end in a Malthusian situation. On
the other hand, the reality is that America generally has a low population
density, due partly to the demographic collapse following the European
conquest, a question still of contemporary relevance for recently contacted
peoples in Amazonia.
Current discussions on the notion of carrying capacity in Amazonia
focus on a crucial case because, even though population density is very
low, this does not necessarily mean that the carrying capacity has not been
reached, if we exclude substantial inputs from outside. Thus, Fearnside
has attempted to get around the theoretical discussion on carrying
capacity by providing an operational, statistical definition.4 He studied
colonisation settlements in Amazonia and computed an empirical
relationship, which is U-shaped, between population density and
probability of colonist failure. When population density is too low, there
is a high risk of failure; when it is too high, the probability of failure
exceeds a maximum acceptable level, and this can be considered a
population density which exceeds carrying capacity.
But of course, carrying capacity would also depend on average
consumption, on input use, and on the terms of trade obtained by
colonists in their exchanges with the outside regions. A discussion on
carrying capacity requires therefore a specification of the territory in
question, and of migratory policies. It also requires specification of the
level of exosomatic consumption of energy and materials in that territory,
since carrying capacity will be increased by low average level of
consumption. Finally, the use of the concept of carrying capacity for a
given territory requires also specification of the input level. Certainly,
when inputs come from exhaustible resources, as is the case not only for
industry but also for agriculture in high-income countries, one could
argue that such territories have exceeded carrying capacity, since resources
spent now will not be available in future. But mainstream economists
could retort that the present 'excessive' physical resource load responds,
after all, to a decision on allocation between present and future uses,
4
Philip M. Fearnside, 'A stochastic model for estimating human carrying capacity in
Brazil's Transamazon Highway Colonization Area', Human Ecology, vol. I3, no. 3
(I985), pp. 331-69.
626 Joan Martinet-Alier
which mainstream economics is assumed to be well equipped to confront,
by giving present values to future events. Thus the discussion on carrying
capacity leaves the realm of ecology and becomes an economic discussion
on the present valuation of future, uncertain events. In this new terrain,
critical ecological economists would then argue against mainstream
economists that intergenerational allocations cannot be explained as
arising only from transactions between individuals. At this point, the
argument on carrying capacity shifts from the natural sciences to the social
sciences, and then, within economics, from an individualist to an
institutionalist perspective.
The conclusion to this section is that it is not easy to explain existing
poverty and increasing environmental degradation in terms which will
find universal agreement. Excessive demographic pressure or external
exploitation? Perhaps agreement could be found by using the distinction
between population pressure on the resources and the pressure of
production on the resources.5

Ecological degradation and unequal exchange

Stephen Bunker, in his analysis of the political ecology of the Brazilian

Amazon,6 goes beyond the characterisation of an 'enclave economy' as an
economy with insufficient backward and forward linkages. In his view,
the social destructuring in extractive zones (and, one could add, in zones
which are dumping grounds for dangerous industrial waste), leaves a
socio-political void which is occupied by foreign interests or, as in the
Brazilian Amazon, also by the central State, which in turn accelerates the
ecological exploitation and degradation.
An Andean example which could be compared to the Amazonian case
studied by Bunker and other authors is Bolivian mining.7 In an extractive
economy, the flows of materials and energy are not incorporated in
infrastructure which facilitates continuous development. An extractive
economy also destroys the local civil society. The Bolivian miners' unions
seemed to be an exception to this situation, but they have been destroyed
in the past few years. The mines are nearly exhausted and the number of
full-time miners has decreased from 25,000 to 5,ooo since I985. The lack
of profitability and collapse of tin mining in Bolivia has various causes.
Comibol, the nationalised industry, had low efficiency and did not
5 P. Blaikie and H. Brookfield (eds.), Land Degradationand Society (London, I987).
6
Stephen Bunker, Underdevelopingthe Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the
Failure of the ModernState (Urbana and Chicago, I985).
7 Susan Hecht, 'Environment, Development and Politics', World Development,vol. 13
(I985), pp. 663-684. Elmar Altvater, SachswangWeltmarkt. Verschuldungskrise,blockierte
Industrialisierung,okologischeGefahrdung- der Fall Brasilien (Hamburg, 987).
 Ecologyandthe Poor 627
undertake the necessary investment. The mines had too many employees,
and furthermore, an overvalued exchange rate reduced the company's
local income from exports. The crisis in Bolivian tin mining had already
emerged before the collapse of world prices in October I985 (caused by
the accumulation of stocks and the low demand of the world market,
caused also by the replacement of tin by aluminium for the manufacturing
of cans, and by Brazil's new tin production). Another main cause of
collapse was the increasingly scarce supply of tin in Bolivian mines, to the
point that it became better to exploit the old slag heaps than to do regular
mining operations. Tin content started to decrease before the national-
isation of 195 2.8 The once-strong Bolivian miners' unions, born from this
extractive industry, were several times at the point of instigating a
revolution, but now they are disappearing. To what extent did they
develop an ecological awareness ? A well-known study of Bolivian miners
has the telling title We Eat the Mines, and the Mines Eat Us9: Bolivian
miners realised that the mines were not inexhaustible, and that they were
being exploited to the benefit of foreigners. However, a socio-ecological
history of Bolivian mining from Potosi to Catavi and Siglo XX has not
yet been written. It would show that the extractive economy produces a
lack of local political power, and at the same time local poverty, and
therefore incapacity to stop the extraction or to raise prices of extracted
resources. Similarly this happens if a region is converted to a place where
hazardous industries or residues are inserted. Nevertheless, there are
developed regions in Latin America starting from extractive enterprises,
like Sao Paulo. Here, in spite of the displacement of coffee to a new
frontier because of soil erosion, from the Paraiba Valley to Parana, coffee
production could be sustained and it created many local economic
connections because coffee growers and coffee exporters established
permanent local roots. This contrasts with mining in the Bolivian
altiplano, or with present mining in the Brazilian Amazon. Similarly,
Warren Dean's history of rubber in Brazil makes the point that the large-
scale extraction of the resource for world exports stopped, because of a
disease, before such wealth had created a solid social structure, i.e. the
pressure of rapid extraction on the local resources was combined with lack
of local political power, which leads to more extraction until the final
collapse of the extractive industry.
As Stephen Bunker has suggested, an ecological approach must
question the 'staple theory of growth', which explains the economic
growth of ex-colonial countries such as Canada, Argentina, Australia or
8
John Crabtree,TheGreatTin Crash:Boliviaandthe WorldTin Market(London, 1987),
p. 58.
9 June Nash, We Eat theMines,andthe MinesEat Us (New York, i979).
628 Joan Martinet-Alier
New Zealand, by the export of raw materials and food. In contrast, the
ecological approach gives new force to the theory of underdevelopment
as caused by dependency. Thus, the failures of export-led growth in the
last hundred years of Peruvian history have been carefully studied by
Thorp and Bertram,10 who were not unaware of ecological factors, and
the slow growth of the ideology of export-led growth in the post-
independence period of the nineteenth century has also been studied,11 but
the ecological political economy of underdevelopment is an unexplored
field in Peruvian historiography, and also in other countries of Latin
America. Economic dependency is expressed not only in the under-
valuation of the labour force of the poor of the world, nor merely in the
secular deterioration of the terms of trade, but also in an unequal exchange
between extracted non-renewable or slowly renewable 'products'
including soil nutrients (which have no (or only long-term) replacement),
and products which are rapidly produced.

The cases of guano and fishmeal in Peru

The rapid exploitation of exhaustible or slowly renewable natural

resources for export is a common trait of the history of Latin America.
Thus, there are well-known episodes of this kind in many countries,
which lend themselves to an ecological analysis, perhaps particularly in
Peru.12 This section briefly considers only two of them.
Peruvian historians of the guano era (between 1840 and i88o)13 have
insisted that the prosperity of guano did not create a national bourgeoisie,
and this fits into Bunker's thesis: the pressure of export production on
resources resulted in a lack of local political power, which in turn led to
rapid extraction until the final collapse of the extractive activity, due to
exhaustion. Studies have been done of the history of the finances of guano,
the failure of a national bourgeoisie to develop the country beyond this
temporary bonanza, and the exploitation of the Chinese coolies who
worked in the guano islands. But the contribution made by guano to
agricultural yields in Europe and the United States should also be studied.
Guano of high quality contained io % nitrogen, and Peru exported up to
half a million tons annually. To avoid an exploitative agriculture in the
rich countries, to replace the nutrients to the soil, other lands were
exploited. Liebig himself, who counterposed regenerative agriculture to
10
Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru I89o-i977. Growth and Policy in an Open
Economy(New York, 1978).
1l Paul Gootenberg, BetweenSilver and Guano (Princeton, 1989).
12 Antonio Brack Egg, 'Ecologia, Tecnologia y Desarrollo', in M. Vega-Centeno et al.,
Tecnologiay Desarrollo en el Peri (Lima, i988).
13 H. Bonilla, Guanoy burguesiaen el Pert (Lima, I974).
 Ecologyand the Poor 629

exploitative agriculture, and became the spokesman for the new

agrochemistry after I840, noted that guano was one infallible means to
increase the production of cereals and meat. Boussingault wrote that,
according to Humboldt's calculations, 300 years of excrements of guano
birds formed a layer one centimetre thick. Recently there had been layers
of twenty or thirty metres, but they were disappearing since guano had
become an object for commercial gain.14
The rate of extraction of guano exceeded the rate of its replacement.
The production of guano depends on the quantity of birds which deposit
their excrement in the islands off the coast of Peru, where it barely rains,
and therefore the guano remains intact. At the same time, the quantity of
birds depends on the abundance of fish. Periodically, the warm current of
El Niflo, which comes from Ecuador, draws away the coastal Humboldt
current and simultaneously destroys the fish banks, causing many birds to
die of hunger. This process was not the main enemy of guano formation
in the late nineteenth century,15 and was not the only cause one hundred
years later of the disappearance of the anchovy fish used for making
fishmeal for North Atlantic pigs and poultry. During the guano era, a
debate could have taken place on the adequate export price for this
resource to secure an optimal intergenerational allocation, but in I 840-80
(and again around 1970) there was no political ecology movement in Peru
concerned with the over-exploitation of this renewable resource. There
was some discussion, but not a political movement.
In the same way that the forests of Central America have been degraded
when converted to pastures for producing export beef, the extraordinary
richness of the Peruvian coast served for producing fishmeal. Borgstrom
warned in 1968 that:

The fantastic amount of fish in the Peruvian current has been heavily exploited
in recent years, mainly by nonlocal companies and by means of massive 'aid'
programs of fishing equipment and know-how. However, the limits of the ocean
and the dangers of the ecological patterns have become apparent. Overfishing has
contributed to the starvation of great numbers of sea birds who normally live on
the fish; this has cut down the production of guano which is an important natural
fertilizer resource for the area. In addition, the Peruvian-Chilean export of
fishmeal in the period i966-68 was enough to provide 413 million people a
minimum (7.5 kilograms per year) protein for a year, yet this vast amount of
protein went to distant places in the well-fed world outside South America. The
continent was thereby deprived of 50 percent more animal protein than its total
meat production ... If the degree of profit-making is to determine what we do and
if short-range losses and gains are never weighed against long-range costs and
14
J. B. Boussingault, RuralEconomyin its RelationwithChemistry,
Physics,andMeteorology
(London, 1845), p. 38 .
15
See J. A. de Lavalley Garcia,El Guanoyla AgriculturaNacional(Lima, I913 (?)) (a set
of press articles),p. 97.
630 Joan Martine.-Alier

benefits, both in terms of ecological balancesand the needs and interests of the
countries directly involved, the world is bound to become enmeshed in
increasinglydangerousenvironmentalpredicaments.16
Around i970, Peru exported more than 5oo kg of fishmeal per person per
year. In spite of warnings from a few Peruvian and foreign experts, there
was no political movement against ecological exploitation and unequal
exchange. In the guano era, proposals were made to save and invest the
income from guano. However, to convert the income ?coming from the
export of resources into capital goods which utilise non-renewable
resources (or which use renewable resources at more rapid rates than the
replacement rates) does not guarantee ecologically sustainable economic
growth.
Andean agronomic pride

Historically Peru lacked, it seems, an ecological-political awareness and a

socio-political structure strong enough to defend guano or fish. Today, in
contrast, a retrospective pride burgeons in Peru about the successes of
pre-Hispanic agriculture, and there is therefore a popular ecological vision
linked to what Burga, Flores Galindo and other historians have called the
'Andean utopia'.7 By 'Andean utopia', Flores Galindo meant, in a strict
historical sense, the social movements, sometimes religious, sometimes
political, which from the sixteenth century to the final rebellion of Tupac
Amaru in 1780 fought, without any chance of success, in order to re-
establish the Inca empire. 'Andean utopia' also meant, in Flores Galindo's
conception, a contemporary search for popular identity, in a race-divided
country like Peru, looking for roots in the ancient Andean culture, and
including the belief that the Incas' rule had been stern but benevolent in
the sense that it provided food security for everybody. This then is not a
utopia of the future but a retrospective utopia, in which the common
struggle to save local cultures and local eco-systems, as two aspects of the
same fight, is reinforced by this ecological vision of Andean history,
which emphasised the fact that agriculture was born in the Andes in an
autonomous manner, and gave to the global human patrimony a
considerable number of domesticated vegetable species whose benefits
could hardly be evaluated in monetary terms.
The development reached by this agriculture is admirable when
considering the complex geography of Peru. Which forms of social
16 -
Georg Borgstrom, 'Ecological Aspects of Protein Feeding The Case of Peru', in M.
Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton (eds.), The Careless Ecologyand International
Technology:
Development(Garden City, N.Y., i972), pp. 753-74.
17 Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscandoun Inca. Identidady Utopia en los Andes (Lima, 3rd ed.,
1988). Manuel Burga and Alberto Flores Galindo, 'La utopia andina', Allpanchis, vol.
20 (I982).
 Ecologyand the Poor 63 I

organisation have been capable of taking advantage of this adverse

environment? Researches in the I970S on the control of diverse ecological
zones by Murra, Brooke Thomas and others, constitute important
landmarks of economic-ecological anthropology and of socio-ecological
history.l8 John Murra developed the notion of a 'vertical economy'
starting from the fact that in the Inca empire there was no monetary
exchange in a generalised market system, nor were there even peripheral
markets, while knowing, on the other hand, that mountain communities
cannot live only from their own resources without acquiring those which
come from other heights. How was it then and is it now possible to reach
an ecological complementarity through non-market social mechanisms?
On the coast, where natural dryness necessitates irrigation, a hydraulic
civilisation arose, unlike those of Egypt or Mesopotamia because it was
not organised around the control of one or two rivers, but fifty rivers,
creating systems like the Lambayeque complex which covers five valleys.
Another example of original coastal agricultural technology is hillside
agriculture, capable of securing agricultural production using environ-
mental moisture. In the Sierra, the struggle to expand the agricultural
frontier was also a difficult challenge.'9 Notable accomplishments included
the large Andean systems of terracing and irrigation, the complex sectoral
fallow systems controlled by communities, and the agricultural raised
fields in the altiplano. Even more remarkable than the construction of
these works was the development of a sophisticated body of knowledge
about the management of Andean crops, capable of utilising hundreds of
varieties of potatoes adequate for diverse ecologies, as well as many
varieties of other root crops and cereals.
Increasing agricultural productivity is difficult in the Andean region,
except for the few irrigated valleys of the littoral and in the inter-Andean
valleys, such as Cajamarca and Mantaro, because of the impediments to
mechanisation and due also to the climate.20 Therefore, these Sierra zones
are refractory to capital investment, with one important exception: the
extensive raising of sheep in the immense punas where, since the early part
of this century, capitalist enterprises tried to dislodge the livestock of the
local indigenous population in order to develop well-managed sheep

18
John Murra, Formacioneseconomicasypoltiicas del mundoandino(Lima, 1975). R. Brooke
Thomas, 'Energy Flow at High Altitude', in Paul T. Baker and Michael A. Little
(eds.), Man in the Andes: a MultidisciplinaryStudy of High-altitudeQuechua(Stroudsburg,
Penn., 1976). Shozo Masuda, Izuma Shimada and Craig Morris (eds), Andean Ecology
and Civilization: an InterdisciplinaryPerspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity
(Tokyo, I985).
19 M. de la Torre and M.
Burga (eds.), Andenesy camellonesen el Peru andino(Lima, i987).
20
J. M. Caballero, Economzaagraria de la Sierra peruana antes de la reformaagraria de 1969
(Lima, 1981).
632 Joan Martinet-Alier

ranges. They could not totally overcome peasant resistance.21 Moreover,

profits could not be guaranteed in zones where the risk of investment was
high - not only because of the geographical and climatic difficulties, with
dry agriculture dependent on the absence of freezing spells, but also
because of social and ethnic conflicts, fought sometimes with everyday
forms of Indian peasant passive resistance, sometimes through legal
procedures, sometimes by unionisation, land invasions and widespread
rebellions.
Pre-Hispanic agriculture had maintained the working population and
provided small surpluses. In spite of dramatic demographic and ecological
changes, including the abandonment of Andean irrigation systems, there
were also surpluses after the conquest, but under another social
organisation: production of export crops, incorporation of African slaves
in coastal production, and the emergence of the latifundia and of colonial
feudalism.22 The European conquest profoundly redefined Andean
agriculture by incorporating it in the world market by introducing new
products (wheat, sugar cane, beef cattle and sheep), and by converting
some native crops (corn, potatoes and manioc) into important components
in the diets of other continents. The history of agriculture reveals that
there are export crops which change function over time. For example,
sugar cane, the archetypal export crop produced in coastal latifundia in
huge plantations owned by the great families of the Peruvian oligarchy,
is at present changing its role as it is being turned into a cheap source of
calories in the diet of a poorly nourished, growing population. The
pressure of production on resources slowly becomes pressure of
population on resources; export crops become subsistence crops.
Another interesting crop is coca, of contemporary importance in parts
of the jungle area. Coca was always a significant element in the 'vertical
economy' of the Andes, and has played a key role in the development of
the internal market since the colonial era, fulfilling even today the function
of universal equivalence in the transactions of many of the peasant
communities less integrated into monetary circuits. Besides, its con-
sumption is associated in the Andean world with a religious cosmovision.
The traffic in cocaine, a further case showing the pressure of exports on
natural resources, has, because of its illegality, a corrupting effect on the
social fabric. For coca producers there is no other crop with similar
profitability: an alternative legal use of the same crop (which in Peru
comprises over 200,000 hectares) would be for exports, not of the raw
21
Joan Martinez-Alier,Haciendas,Plantations Farms(CubaandPeru)(London,
andCollective
'977).
22 Pablo Macera,'Feudalismo colonial americano:el caso de las haciendas
peruanas',in
Trabajosde Historia, vol. 3 (Lima, 1977).
 Ecologyand the Poor 633
material for cocaine, but in the form of coca leaves for tea. In any case,
however, precarious coca cultivation on weed-free steep slopes, lacking a
protective cover of trees, creates erosion.23
Today in Peru, in contrast to the pre-Hispanic era, there is no food
security. Thus, some Peruvian agronomists have developed an Andean
agricultural pride and an ecological consciousness.24 This line of thought
could be described as pro-peasant socialism, or as a Marxian narodnismin
the tradition of Mariategui, but with a new ecological perspective. It is
based on pride in the antiquity of Andean agriculture - possibly older
than the Euroasiatic - in its wealth of species diversity, and in its
adaptation of technology to the environment. It points out that modern
agricultural technology is not really conducive to higher productivity
since the secret of the increase in yields per worker and per hectare is the
use of great quantities of energy from fossil fuels for tractors and trucks,
fertilisers and pesticides. In other words, the economic results of modern
agriculture would be different if petroleum were evaluated with a longer-
term time horizon, taking into account the future necessities of humanity
and the present necessities of the poor. The idea here is an agriculture
based on traditional technology and communal peasant institutions,
without state interference. This vision derives its social force from the
retrospective Inca utopia. This school of thought in Latin America -
which would rely on peasant agriculture in order to achieve food
security - also derives support from the energy analysis of agriculture,
reflected in recent studies by Pimentel and other authors.25 For example,
the greater energy efficiency of peasant agriculture (in terms of use of
fossil fuels) was explicitly mentioned by Schejtman in his work on food
security.26 This argument is also topical in Mexico, a country which
exports at a low price large quantities of non-renewable fossil energy. This
energy is spent in part in the agriculture of the United States, which then
exports cheap cereals which undermine Mexican peasant agriculture,
although the latter is more efficient than United States agriculture from
the point of view of energy flow. A longer time horizon, and a lower
implicit rate of discount, allied to a nationalist view opposing cheap oil
and gas exports, would lead Mexico towards a more ecological and pro-

23 Marc
Dourojeanni, Gran Geografia del Peru, vol. IV, Recursos naturales, desarrolloy
conservacidnen el Peru (Barcelona and Lima, I986), p. 115.
24 Eduardo
Grillo, 'Peri: agricultura, utopia popular y proyecto nacional', Revista
Andina, vol. 3, no. i (I985), pp. 7-56.
25 David and Marcia
Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society (London, I979).
26 A. Schejtman, 'Analisis
integral del problema alimentario y nutricional en America
Latina', Estudios Rurales Latinamericanos, vol. 6, nos. 2-3 (I983), pp. I4I-80.
A. Schejtman, 'Campesinado y seguridad alimentaria', Estudios Rurales Latinamericanos,
vol. Io, no. 3 (I987), pp. 275-3II.
634 Joan Martine--Alier

peasant position. But are there political forces in Mexico capable of

adopting this point of view, and of implementing it in practice?
However, the argument for ecological neo-narodnism based on the
greater energy efficiency of traditional agriculture has been contested in
the case of slash-and-burn agriculture.27 Certainly if the energy
contribution of the natural vegetation cleared and burnt in preparing the
field for cultivation is included, then of course shifting cultivation would
appear as extremely inefficient in energy terms. However, the main point
of the energy analysis of agriculture, i.e. the high ratio of output to fossil
fuel input of traditional forms, remains. The comparison could also be
expressed in terms of 'production time',28 giving results even more
favourable to traditional forms of agriculture. Nevertheless, taking into
account McGrath's criticisms of shifting cultivation, and taking also into
account that there is no guarantee of permanent conditions for fertility in
the conditions of Amazonia ever when the rotation period under shifting
cultivation is long, perhaps the main argument for ecological neo-
narodnismin Amazonia and in the Tropics in general is that emphasised by
Mexican authors such as Toledo29 and Leff,30 namely the preservation of
biodiversity.
Perhaps peasants have a longer-term vision of investments like terracing
and irrigation works than the state administration or international banks
for development aid, whose cost-benefit analyses use high discount rates
which undervalue future benefits. After all, in the Andes, many peasants
still have communal institutions which permit coordination of individual
efforts necessary for making such improvements. There certainly is some
Andean evidence of popular ecological thinking as regards the abandoned
pre-Hispanic terraces and irrigation systems. The anthropologist John
Earls recorded in Sarhua (Ayacucho) the testimony of a farmer: 'The
sarhuinofriend grabbed a handful of soil, indicated its sandy state and
uselessness for agricultural production. He said that more and more soils
of Sarhua were turning this way because modern governments do not
rebuild the terraces, and each rainy season washes more soil and takes it
down to the Pampas and Apurimac rivers and finally to the jungles', i.e.
towards the Amazon basin.31
All the same, there are many examples in Peru of abandoned practices
27
David G. McGrath, 'The Role of Biomass in Shifting Cultivation', Human Ecology,vol.
i5, no. 2 (1987), pp. 221-42.
28 Albert Punti,
'Energy Accounting: Some New Proposals', Human Ecology,vol. i6, no.
i (I988), pp. 79-86.
29
V. M. Toledo et al., Ecologiay autosuficienciaalimentaria (Mexico, I985). V. M. Toledo,
'La sociedad rural, los campesinos y la cuesti6n ecol6gica', in J. Zepeda (ed.), La
SociedadRural Hoy (Michoacan, Mexico, 1988).
30 Enrique Leff, Ecologiaj Capital (Mexico, I986).
31 M.
Lajo, R. Ames and C. Samaniego, Agriculturay alimentacidn:basesde un nuevoenfoque
(Lima, I982).
 Ecology and the Poor 635

of soil conservation which the peasants no longer carry out. In an

interesting thesis on Aymara peasants, Jane Collins explained that poor
peasants today cannot afford the luxury of being only agriculturalists.32
There is a scarcity of workers even in areas of heavy demographic pressure
on resources, in contrast to the idea that economic growth could help
support itself with an 'unlimited supply of labour'. This community on
the banks of Lake Titicaca seasonally dispatches part of its members down
to the edge of the rainforest to cultivate coffee. While in the highlands they
continue to grow subsistence crops using traditional technology, in
contrast, coffee is cultivated as a speculative activity, and no concern is
given to soil erosion. There is lack of time for adequate care, since the
family members work in diverse occupations, trying to obtain the basic
necessities to live, frequently travelling to cities to obtain additional
resources. Little by little they lose their peasant technical insights, and
environmental degradation of their land becomes common.

Ecologicalhistoryand the longue duree

The Andes, with their heights, slopes and climates, are certainly a
permanent fact in the longue duree of the history of Peru, but socio-
ecological history is not the same as an interpretation in terms of
geographical determinism, nor does it merely consist of situating human
history in a long-term ecological backdrop, as proposed by the French
'possibilist' school. It could be that human ecological relations are
modified more slowly than purely human social relations, but the opposite
can also occur. The history of human ecosystems shows sharp
discontinuities, which have sometimes been perceived at the time, but
sometimes not. For example, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and possibly
the increase in the 'greenhouse effect', are already being felt in the short
term, at a time when the majority of humankind is still living with an
energy consumption not much greater than before the Industrial
Revolution. Of course, the greenhouse effect caused by the increase in
carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was understood one hundred years ago,33
but for a long time it was interpreted in an optimistic way since an increase
in temperature was to be welcomed in high latitudes.34 Thus, human
ecology is not always placed in a Braudelian longueduree.35The examples
of the exploitation of guano and fish in Peru are as clear as today's rapid
32
Jane Collins, 'Labor scarcity and ecological change', in Peter D. Little and Michael D.
Horowitz (eds.), Lands at Risk in the Third World (Boulder, CO, I987), pp. 19-37.
33 Svante Arrhenius, Lehrbuchder kosmischenPhysik
(Leipzig, I903).
34 M. I. Budyko, Human Ecology (Moscow, 1980).
35 J. P.
Deleage and D. Hemery, 'From Ecological History to World Ecology', in C.
Pfister and P. Brimblecombe (eds.), The Silent Countdown(Berlin and Heidelberg, I990).
Donald Worster (ed.), The Ends of the Earth (Cambridge, I989).
636 Joan Martine.-Alier

disappearance of the rainforest, within one generation, in some countries.

Also, we know from ethnobotany (a scientific discipline closely linked to
political ecology) that the commercialisation of agriculture leads
sometimes to the disappearance of a multitude of varieties in a rapid
process of 'genetic erosion', a type of ecological change which has
occurred in many parts of the world in the crops of corn, wheat, and rice,
and still not in the crop of potatoes in highland Peru.36 Similarly, the
change in food consumption norms can be very rapid, as it has occurred
in Peru and in many other tropical countries, with the introduction of
products derived from wheat flour, or in Southern Europe with an
enormous growth of meat consumption since the I96os. In the past, there
were abrupt ecological changes in America, the most notable in the
sixteenth century with the European conquest and the consequent
demographic collapse.37 At present, contact between the remaining
Amazonian populations and the larger Brazilian population still causes
sudden demographic collapses. In conclusion, then, changes in the human
ecology are not always slower than changes in other levels of social reality.
Human relations with the environment have a history, and the
perception of such relations is also historical. Ecological awareness is now
increasing everywhere; however, ecological historiography is still in its
infancy, not just in Peru but also in Europe and the United States.
Ecology should not always be seen as a slowly moving geographical back-
cloth to economic changes and political events. Ecological history deals
with many subjects, some of them slow-moving and majestic, some quick
and irregular. We need a history of the human economy as human
ecology, and at the same time a history of social conflicts, forms of social
resistance, and active social movements that are geared towards access and
conservation of natural resources. We lack ecological histories not only of
such remote corners of the Eurocentric world as Peru or the Amazonian
region, we also lack an ecological history of Europe. Why was history not
studied with ecological spectacles?
Geography has also studied some questions of human ecology, but it
has not focused on the study of other issues such as the flow of energy and
materials in human ecosystems (which ecological anthropologists have
studied since the i96os). The so-called geography of energy was merely a
description of the location of energy sources and the transport of some
forms of energy; it was not an analysis of the energy systems of humanity.
Geography could have become much more ecological at least since the
36 Stephen Brush, 'Genetic diversity and conservation in traditional farming systems',
Journal of Ethnobiology,vol. 6, no. i (I986).
37 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-900o
(Cambridge, I986). N. D. Cook, DemographicCollapse. Indian Peru (Cambridge, 1982).
 Ecologyandthe Poor 637
turn of the century, if the lead of Bernard and Jean Brunhes had been
followed. It will be recalled that one of the chapters of Jean Brunhes' La
GeographieHumainedeveloped the notion of Raubwirtschaftintroduced by
the German geographer Ernst Friedrich (b. I867, professor at K6nigs-
berg): 'it seems particularly strange that characteristic devastation with all
its grave consequences should especially accompany civilisation, while
primitive folk know only milder forms of it'.38 An ecological geography,
focusing on the forms of environmental degradation associated with
wealth and poverty, could have been born in French universities out of
these reflections by such a prominent geographer as Jean Brunhes.
A well-known American geographer of German origins, Carl Sauer,
who, to my knowledge, did not explicitly use the concept of Raubwirtschaft
was nevertheless influenced by George Perkins Marsh, and this led him to
ask: 'Must we not admit that much of what we call production is
extraction?,39an observation which pointed to the heart of the matter.
When, today, in Brazilian Amazonia, the popular ecological movement
defends the use of resources in 'extractive reserves', we see a perversion
of the language: truly sustainable production is called 'extraction', while
practices which damage the environment and are not sustainable in the
long run, such as mining or cattle ranching, are called 'production'.
Geographers had nothing to lose and much to gain professionally by
becoming human ecologists and environmental managers, but a notion
like Raubwirtschaftwas not politically popular in colonialist Europe,
particularly not in colonialist France. After giving examples of Raubwirt-
schaft,40 Jean Brunhes mentioned the book by his brother Bernard
Brunhes, La degradationde Fenergie.Bernard Brunhes was the director of
the meteorological observatory at Puy de Dome, in central France, and
he died young. He studied the flow of energy and also land erosion. He
blamed deforestation on the privatisation of common lands: he quoted
Proudhon's views on private property. The idea of Raubwirtschaftcould
therefore have been linked by geographers to a notion of 'tragedy of the
enclosures' rather than 'tragedy of the commons' because, although
private owners carry the full short-term costs of land degradation
(compared to users of communal lands), as far as long-term costs are
concerned (and this is a relevant consideration for deforestation and land
erosion), their time horizons might well be shorter, and their implicit
discount rates higher, than those of communal managers. Such
38
Jean Brunhes, Human Geography(I920, repr. Chicago/New York, 1978), p. 331.
39 CarlSauer,'The Agency of Man on Earth', in WilliamL. Thomas Jr. (ed.), Man'sRole
theFaceof the Earth(Chicago, 1956) (proceedingsof a conferencein 1952,
in Changing
co-organised by Lewis Mumford).
40 J. Raumolin, 'L'homme et la destructiondes ressourcesnaturelles:la Raubwirtschaft
au tournantdu siecle, Annales,E.S.C., vol. 39, no. 4 (I984).
638 Joan Martineg-Alier
'enclosures' (as we see today in Amazonia) are not only a social tragedy
in the form of loss of access to common lands and proletarianisation, they
also become an ecological tragedy. The notion of Raubwirtschaftcould be
linked therefore to the study of social conflicts on the access to resources,
and also to the study of international ecologically unequal exchange.

Ecological neo-narodnism: an alternative modernity?

An awareness of ecological issues has been lacking in the social sciences,
and this includes Marxist historiography. Also, widespread political
ideologies in poor countries, or among the poor in different parts of the
world (such as anarchism, the diverse marxisms, Russian and East
European populism, even Gandhian political philosophy) have not been
explicitly ecological, and sometimes they have been totally oblivious of
ecological issues. In contrast, popular ecological perceptions and political
ecology in the so-called Third World, as studied recently by diverse
authors, seem to be more widespread than suspected. In Mexico there is
the work of Toledo,41 in West Africa that of Paul Richards,42 and there
are also works compiled by geographers who analyse ecological
perception and the use of natural resources in a variety of poor
countries.43 In India ecological activism is growing rapidly, and there are
many competent groups, whose works and results are summarised in the
reports entitled The State of India's Environment.44 The Chipko movement
in the forests of Uttar Pradesh or the struggle against dams in the
Narmada valley are well known. In Mexico, there are also indigenous
movements for forestry conservation against the paper mills, and in
Brazil, in a different context, there are struggles against the destruction of
land and cultures due to the development of hydroelectricity, mining and
cattle. Such struggles contribute to 'the internalisation of externalities' by
increasing the costs that firms and governments must pay for the
destruction they cause (on so-called Third World ecological movements
see Alan B. Durning).45
Another Peruvian example of rural egalitarian ecology refers to the
conflict between agricultural production and social reforestation, a type of
41 V. M. Toledo et al., Ecologiay autosuficiencia
alimentaria (Mexico, 1985). V. M. Toledo,
'La sociedad rural, los campesinos y la cuesti6n ecol6gica', in J. Zepeda (ed.), La
Sociedad Rural Hoy (Michoacan, Mexico, 1988). V. M. Toledo, 'The Ecological
Rationality of Peasant Production', in M. Altieri and S. Hecht (eds.), Agroecologyand
Small-Farm Development(Boca Raton, FL, i989).
42 Paul Richards, IndigenousAgricultural Revolutions(London, I984).
43 P. Blaikie, P. and H. Brookfield
(eds.), Land Degradationand Society (London, I987).
44 Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (eds.), The State of India's Environment1984-8g (New
Delhi, I985).
45 Alan B. Durning, Action at the Grassroots(Washington D.C., I989).
 Ecologyand the Poor 639
conflict much more present in Africa and India than in Latin America.46
Cesar Fonseca and Enrique Mayer explain that, on one occasion:

in the community of Tapuc...women vehemently said in Quechua that the

transplanted eucalyptus in the parcels of manay must be immediately removed.
Manay is an agricultural zone dedicated to the cultivation of root crops, in turns
dictated by the system of sectoral fallow, with years of rest in between. The
community and individuals of the community exercise control together over the
manay.Thus, the women, speaking for the community, insisted that these parcels
had been inherited from their grandparents to supply root crops, they were not
going to feed their children with the eucalyptus leaves. Moreover, where the
eucalyptus grow, the soil is impoverished and it does not even grow onions.47
There is no need to deny the role of eucalyptus (a nineteenth-century
innovation) for wood availability in the Andes and against land erosion in
order to accept the relevance of these women's views. Often, the attempts
to change peasant practices in the name of a superior rationality, which has
been presented as science but which was actually bad science, has
coincided with attempts to include in the economic sphere forms of
production and natural resources which were still outside it.
Thus the ecological movements of the poor are not necessarily anti-
scientific. They defend both a moral economy and an ecological economy
against the incorporation of natural resources, whose use is regulated by
communal institutions, into the sphere of monetary value, since the
generalised market system discriminates against the poor (and against
future generations). We are beginning to see socio-economic history from
this ecological point of view.
46 Bina
Agarwal, Cold Hearths and Barren Slopes (London, 1986).
47 Enrique Mayer and Cesar Fonseca, Comunidady Produccionen el Peru (Lima, 1988), p.
87.