Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This is a story about the complex relationship between biomass and human beings, told through their shared becoming into plantations or locations of extractivisms in the tropical Andes.Barks, trunks, resins, flowers, fruits, seabird droppings, feathers, or mammalian meat and skins are some of the actors of this narrative.Submitted through greater or lesser violence, with axes, saws, or other technologies for extraction or domestication, medicines, textile fibers, food, gums, dyes, fertilizers, stimulants, as well as museum and decorative objects were obtained from these and other non-human actors.To do so, human beings had to deal with uncertainty in the form of climate changes, pests, fluctuating markets, among other difficulties.They also built relationships of subjugation towards each other, marked by the construction of otherness and dispossession, on different scales: local, national, regional, global.And there were those who questioned servile relationships and the destruction of nature, determined to transform them through policies.This chapter concentrates on the land use change processes in the four countries that occupy most of the tropical Andes: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.The chosen countries contain the "Tropical Andes" and "Choco/Darién" hotspots, lowlands on the coast and the Amazon, parts of the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, as well as islands (Zador et al. 2015).Andean tropicality has received numerous descriptions, usually associated with such words as variety or megadiversity, for its cultural, biological, geological, geographical, and climatic characteristics.Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are listed among the seventeen countries on the planet considered megadiverse (Mittermeier, Goettsch Mittermeier, and Robles Gil 1997;Josse et al. 2009), due to the combination of tropicality, mountainous topography, marine currents, and the presence of both continentality and insularity.Andean empires and chiefdoms, Amazonian and coastal, coexisted for millennia with this explosive variety.Until the twentyfirst century, dense and growing Indigenous populations survive on all altitudinal
Authors: Nicolas Cuvi, Delfín Viera
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4401005782