The 280 000 km² Xingu indigenous lands and protected areas (ILPAs) corridor, inhabited by 24 indigenous peoples and about 215 riverine (ribeirinho) families, lies across active agriculture frontiers in some of the historically highest-deforestation regions of the Amazon. Much of the Xingu is anthropogenic landscape, densely inhabited and managed by indigenous populations over the past millennium. Indigenous and riverine peoples' historical management and use of these landscapes have enabled their long-term occupation and ultimately their protection. The corridor vividly demonstrates how ILPAs halt deforestation and why they may account for a large part of the 70 per cent reduction in Amazon deforestation below the 1996–2005 average since 2005. However, ongoing and planned dams, road paving, logging and mining, together with increasing demand for agricultural commodities, continued degradation of upper headwaters outside ILPA borders and climate change impacts may render these gains ephemeral. Local peoples will need new, bottom-up, forms of governance to gain recognition for the high social and biological diversity of these territories in development policy and planning, and finance commensurate with the value of their ecosystem services. Indigenous groups' reports of changing fire and rainfall regimes may themselves evidence climate change impacts, a new and serious threat.

No abstract

No abstract

1.Introduction A sixty-four-year-old resident remembers when a timber company began clandestinely logging in Boa Nova community territory in 1986 (Figure 1). He and his neighbours blocked Igarapé Araticum, the river along which logs were being extracted, by weaving a barrier from vines: "We got them to stop and made the loggers leave …We did not want [them], did not want [them], and look, thank God, we managed to [make them] stop", he said proudly. Forty years later, Boa Nova and other communities find logging companies operating in their traditionally occupied territories once again. But now, logging comes labelled with the social and environmental certification stamp of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-justified by hegemonic discourses in the language of 'development', 'job generation', 'sustainability', 'social responsibility', 'income generation' and 'compensation.' Locals say they are now "caught between resistance and negotiation." This is because companies today offer compensation for losses of territory and resources in the form of 'development' projects, providing basic social rights to which communities are constitutionally entitled anyway, ranging from the installation of electric power grids to paying for funerals, the provisioning of medical care, transport and fuel. The changing forms of governance and power that communities have faced since the 1960s shape conditions for and forms that resistance takes. Forest peoples' ancestral territories were enveloped by a conservation unit, the 441,282.63ha Saracá-Taquera National Forest (FLONA)created in 1989 (Figure 2), which permits 'sustainable use' of mineral and forest resources. The FLONA is managed by government environmental agencies the Chico Mendes Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), timber and mining companies, and NGOs. The FLONA is seen by these actors in terms of its 'natural vocation' for mining and timber concessions (Figure 2; Zhouri 2006). At the centre of the FLONA lie extensive bauxite reserves exploited by Mineração Rio Norte (MRN), the largest bauxite mining company in Brazil and the third largest in the world. The MRN has been involved in socioenvironmental conflicts with the peoples of the FLONA since the late 1960syet represents itself as 'green' (MRN 2002). We understand these shifts from 1960 to present day as a proliferation of forms of power exerted by industrial resource extraction: Fletcher's (2010:177/178) schema is useful here: governmentality (a generic 'conduct of conduct') is manifest in a interplay between distinct modalities of power coexisting in different mixtures at any given locale: sovereign (i.e. the power of life and death immanent in law and violence), disciplinary (i.e. internalization of norms and self-surveillance), biopower (nurturing and orchestrating (social-)life and populations), neoliberalism (manipulation of external incentive structures) and truth (particular conceptions of nature and reality). Our theore...

No abstract