Mythbusting Tropical Nature:
Week 2
 Adopt a new sense of true nature rather than what was given to us
 Natural Law vs Law of Nature
o Nothing natural about nature.
o See nature through historical nature
 Tropes that are manifested in society
o Tropics are more than just beaches and vacations
Lecture Aug 31
 Defining the Tropics
o Between cancer and Capricorn
o Warmer and wetter
o Dense vegetation growth
o Global South(third world) or Torrid zone called by European
o Torrid Zone for European
 Hot and Dangerous area of the world
 Savaged and uncivilized people
 But full of opportunity(ex. Coffee, sugar, metals)
 Stopped humans from living there because of the dense vegetation
 English brought in the word “Jungle”
 Lack of civilization
 Poor view of the Tropics and would never want to travel there.
 Brings in human racial difference
 Dark skins at bottom Light skins at top
 Green Hell
 Jungle comes and eats whomever comes in
 Jungle described as a woman which a man could tame

Defining our approach to the subject
o Three “Big Myths”
 Primeval wilderness
 Overpopulation
 Irrational/something

Brief context for this week’s reading
o Bill Cronon
 Most sighted scholar sighted from USA
o Ramachandra Guha
 Most sighted scholar sighted outside of USA (from UK and India)
Homework
o Check ingrediency in food for sugar cane or palm oil.

Week #3
 Myth of Wild Africa
o Crops only grew in Cape Colony
o Wildlife brought hunters in the 19th century
o Portuguese explore believed there was an oasis in the middle of Africa with gold
 Angles guarding paradise
 Creating term “Wild Eden” from wilderness and Edan
o African language helped create myths for the Europeans
o Ancient Roman view of Africa was a woman holding a cornucopia and a scorpion.
o Pg10 Henry Smeathman “ I compliment the years I passed in that terrestrial
Elysium, as the happiest of my life”
o Stanley colonized along the Congo and was looked at as a hero.(pg 22)
 Colonization of Congo was one of the most ruthless in the world, led by
Stanley.
o David Livingstone traveled around Africa and brought back information to
England.
 England then changed up his tales and findings to show a wild and scary
place.
 Gorillas in their Midst
o Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas in Africa, became a symbol for conservation in
Africa
 Took the stand against poachers
 Believed that when she died, the gorillas would die with her
 Did extreme things to stop poachers
 Affected local people
 Conservation Refugees
o Does a conservation have to take away “humans” for it to still be considered a
conservation?
o Kicked out of home lands
o Many different ethnic groups
 Hard boarders and cannot leave
o Tourism brought in revenue to locals
 Africans would give tours and “explore” the land just to live in their new
location
o Dian Fossey told a rumor that the Batwa people ate gorillas and that help bring
in more tourist to the conservation, evicting the local people for Fossey to claim
the land.
 Lecture Sep 9
o ‘Wild’ Africa
 Representation on maps reflex’s and reproduce with people who create
maps
 Invention of malaria drug and machine gun helped the European colonize
Africa in late 19th century
 90% of Africa was claimed by European countries early 1900s

Millions of farmers in Africa were evicted to convert into
plantations/mines to ship back to Europe
 Workers working on claimed land would become slaves
 Caused people to run toward rainforests and jungles

Week #4
 Quaternary International
o Burning of forests?
o Is climate change the cause of the downfall of the rainforest?
 Rise of population
o Southeast Asian islands are organically diverse place in the world with massive
populations
 Locals have been farming on the Southeast Asian islands for 4000 years
 Borneo forests have been manipulated by humans for more than 50,000
years.
 Chainsaw and the Gun
o Indonesian military involvement in deforestation of local forests
 Direct involvement in forest industries
 Direct investor in logging operation
 Applying contracts for logging and pushing out communities
 Provided security for forest-related businesses
 Participating in the illegal timber economy
 “new order” under President Suharto
 Lecture week 4
o Dutch involvement in east and central Asia.
Week 5
 Lecture week 5
o First Americans
 After humans showed up, many animals went extinct.
 Animals native to Americas did not evolve to the introduction to human
 Human hunters were too good at hunting, whipping out large hunt
 Late Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions
 Nature vs Humans
 Humans win
 When humans are introduced, other populations decrease

o Other Agricultural Revolution
 Did not domesticate animals for livestock.
 Mainly dogs, turkeys and camels.
 Instead, they domesticated the landscapes for the game animals
 Stringently kept the animals homes well but kept them where
they were


What separates forests from farms?
 Agroforestry: managing forests for the production of food,
materials, and other necessities.
 Can be seen today how the natives would control forests as farms.
 Europeans saw these forests as untouched lands and a free taking
from whomever.
o Great Erasure
 Humans start to migrate back to where they came from and onward into
the Americas.
 After the ice age, many bugs were gone and diseases were destroyed as
well.
 October 1492
 Native Americans lost immune systems to new diseases
o A lot of people died.
 Recreating Pangea
 Without the death of 90% of Americans, the world today would
not be the same.
o Were venerable because of 1000s of years being isolated
 Smallpox among the Aztecs was the most brutal deaths in human
history.
 Spain could not have been able to penetrate Americas with native
troupes against them
 With less humans, that caused the “Little Ice Age”
 Death of many humans brings down the temperature dramatically
if the lands are able to grow naturally.
 Once the trees die, they feed the area and brings more cO2 into
the atmosphere, warming up the world again
 Nature will naturally fix itself.
 The great dying
 The greatest mass extinction on Earth
 Indicated the effects on human history and global climates.
Amazonia
o Thomas Belt description of the tropical rainforest: a gigantic, teeming expanse,
wildly diverse biologically but otherwise undifferentiated.
 Today, amazon is used as one being rather than multiple living beaning’s.
 Amazon Basin : drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries.
 Amazonia: refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes to the west,
the Guiana Shield to the north, and the Brazilian Shield to the south.
 Doesn’t rain the same in all part of the Amazon rainforest.
 Third of the Forest is savanna
 “Wet Dessert” – much of the soil’s nutrients is all washed away.
 If the forest floor is exposed too long it will wither up and die
 Plants get the nutrients from the fallen debris of other plants.

Slash-and-burn tactics of farming for the soil to not have permanent
damage “swidden”
 Mega-Nino events: major weather events that would hurt the growth of
resources
 European style farming would permanently destroy the land
 How did Maggie prevent her findings to become safeguarded?
 She did not want people to come and destroy it so people could
actually come and inhabit it because she found it is reuse full.
o Anna Roosevelt vs. Betty Meggers
 Megger
 Form of evidence from looking at layers of swidden
 Idea of the limits of food that could be produced from the
rainforest limited her to only looking for one way that it could be
done
o Doesn’t see all the ideas out there
 Claims that the Amazon should not be inhabited
o Because she wants to protect the amazon rather than
actually giving scientific conclusions
 Roosevelt
 Uses newer technology to see the landscape and soil through
different scanners
 Idea of finding as many different ways that farming could be
found in the rainforest
o Doesn’t have definite evidence
o Raindrop Physics
 When forest is cleared, raindrops hit the soil harder disrupting everything
 Rather than planting crops, the ancient civilizations planted domesticated
trees
 An 8th of the forest were made by humans
 Some say the whole forest is built by humans :built environment
Due next Thursday 30th
Write a paragraph on what subject for the final project
Week 6
 Review on wilderness myth
o Emerged through colonial conquests
 Distinct forms in each region
 Africa- hunting reserves for rich colonizers, the vast unknown for
mass portion of Africa
 Asia- archipelago in east southeast Asia. Lumber and government
power of deforestation. Dense human population within tropical
forests due to the dense nutrient within the forest.(16-17th
century through the 20th century)




The Americas- the concept of deforestation within the Amazon.
Mass depopulation due to disease. Caused repopulation because
of the lack of humans on the land. (90% depopulation of natives)
Brought in the myth that the land was empty and not used.
Colonizers saw as free real estate. Broad sense that Europeans
were obligated to take control of the primitive natives enforcing
religion onto them.
o Personal recap from this part of class.
 The idea of useful land throughout the world is
vastly different. The use of the land also has
different meanings for many people. From
considering them to be useless to thriving on what
grows around the land. The concept of
conservation for this land varies due to the history
of the land. When is conservation pushing too far
with their idea of protecting the land?
 How the wilderness myth functions as
erasing the violence that came with
colonization. The violence happened, then
the violence is erased.
Functioned to erase both
 Colonial violence
 History of the colonized
 Justified continued European control over land and resources in the
postcolonial period
Lecture week 6
o Thomas Malthus: Idea that Will Not Die
 Malthus in His Own Context
 English priest
o Wealth in land. No private property in land. Just rights to
work land.
o Enclosure- physical fencing of stone walls & giving the
rights of the land to noble mans.
 Peasants that worked the lands for generations lost
them to noble men.
 Peasants moved to cities to find work or started
begging.
 Believed that peasants practiced drinking, gambling, fornication.
o Peasant assistance would only increase population
o More animal like
 Used “Laws of Nature” on human history & society
o Ignoring history by comparing humans to primitive animals


Malthusianism in the 19th Century
 Potatoes started cash crops around the world.
 India hit by El Nino
o Brittan still required exportation of goods
 Leaving Indians with less to eat
 William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn believed Great Depression & WWII
were caused by over population.
 Late 1960’s-early 1970’s
 Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich
o Population shown in his life time that forests he played in
as a child became plots of land for houses and other
buildings
o Triage necessary to control and reduce total human
population
An Essay on Principle of Population
o Chapter 2
 Food and sex are necessary for man to exist.
 Food- increases with arithmetical ratio
 Sex- increases with geometrical ratio
 Reproduction is more important than food ??
 Must be kept equal
 Misery
 Sickness, premature death, waste of seed
 Vice
 Stray away from all evil
o Drank, gambled, children out of wedlock.
 checks" (hindrances) to marrying early and having a large family.
o Chapter 5
 positive check" on population growth: an increase in the death rate, brought about


by "want [i.e., poverty] and sickness."
Poor to die young
 Charities could not help them
 Government support causes more population
 Poor Law should have never existed
o Instead have laws benefiting agricultural growth
Population Bomb
o Paul R. Ehrlich “ Population control is the only answer”
 Chapter 1 The Problem
 UDC- underdeveloped countries “aka starving”
o Not industrialized
o Inefficient agriculture
o Small gross national product
o High illiterate rate


o Population doubles in 20-35 years
DC -developed countries
"triage"- categorizing tragedies in ranks
o First: needs help, but would not help survive
 Ex. India
o Second: Will survive without help
 DC
o Third: Will only survive if they are helped
 Ex. West Afghanistan
What would happen if they simply moved

Week 7
 Week 7 Lecture
o Fables of Collapse
 The Ancient Maya as Modern-day Troubles
 19th century: wild speculations, exotic tales of supernatural
beings.
o 1900-1920 US questioned if it was possible to live in the
tropics (Pacific and Caribbean’s)
 Deforestation and erosion -> desertification
 Findings of massive cities -> unlikely to sustain
people
o 1920s(during the Spanish Flu) waves of epidemic disease->
collapse
o 1960s: Marxist allegories of inequality as class warfare
o 1970s-1980s: environmentalists sound the alarm over
deforestation in tropical rainforests & overpopulation
o 1990s-today: anthropogenic climate change
 Confliction Perspectives on the “Maya Collapse”
 Re-reading Diamond on the Maya
 Virtually all up to date archaeological scholarship
 primary sources from Spanish colonial period
 any up to date scholarship on Maya agriculture
 Milpa Cycle
 Slash and burn (keep temp perfect to not destroy microbes in soil


Dimond’s main point about the Maya destroying themselves. Lying in his writing to
bringing more readers in. Making it more entertaining. Trying to influence readers to
strive to have a successful civilization through population control in lower level class in
different countries. Not trustworthy. RACIEST

The Maya Collapses, Jared Dimond (studies civilizations who strive or succeed)
o The collapse of the Mayas brought tourist
 Incredible art for a “primitive” group of people
o Ancient climate and environmental changes that cause the downfall of the
Mayas
o the bishop Diego de Landa
 Burned all manuscripts he could find to eliminate the "paganism,"
o Mayas damaged the environment
 Deforestation and erosion
o Maya is not a tropical rainforest
 Seasonal Tropical Rainforest
 Not located between the 17 to 22 degree N
Week 8
 Week 8 Lecture
o When did having more farmers become a bad thing?
Week 9
 Tucker “The Last Drop”
o Because of European and North American demands of coffee and sugar, the land
in Brazil is being destroyed
o Planting and tilling started eroding the hills
o Richard Burton stated that the rivers flowed with manure straight into the ocean
and replacing the soil with brick like substance
o International coffee agreement: maintain the price of coffee
 Question
 Why did Brazil have European workers and not local?

 Mark Dowie “Exclusion”
o Terborgh believed that most natural forests will be cut down by 2045
 Wanted to protect African lands
 Worried indigenous people would still have a bad effect on the land they
lived
 Money cannot buy back something that is lost forever
 The products of the world is not equally spread
o Redford and Sanderson believed indigenous people had the right to the land.
o John Muir thought that all wilderness should not have humans
 Questions
 What can we do to prevent loss of nature?
 Why can’t humans coexist with nature?
 Terbrogh stated that he was trying to find an untouched part of
nature, but his idea of finding it contradicts his goal.
 Both
o Act of displacement.
 Look at this not that

 Keeping the wealthy not at fault
Biocentric model is historic
o The idea that animal behaviors can be mimicked in human behavior
o