Introduction

“Amazonia” conjures up visions of mystery, richness, and grandness, but today these visions are intermingled with thoughts of rampant deforestation, armed land disputes, and forests aflame. There are few places on the planet where the human affront to biodiversity is more direct and damaging than in Amazonia.

Most of the deforestation in Amazonia has been concentrated in an arc extending from the State of Para in the east through the states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia in the south. Large-scale forest clearing began in this region in the 1960s. The development process has been disorderly. A parade of actors, including farmers, ranchers, miners, and loggers, have worked to wrestle riches from the landscape. Ecological and economic evaluations of the development process conducted in the 1970s held out little hope for sustainable development (Goodland & Irwin, 1975; Hecht, 1983). But the Amazon settlement experiment is in constant evolution. Hence, previous pronouncements concerning development prospects need to be continually updated in light of new findings.

One area undergoing particularly intensive deforestation is the municipality of Paragominas, located in eastern Pará along the Belém-Brasília Highway (Fig. 15.1). In this chapter we review the history of natural resource use at Paragominas and evaluate the prospects for sustainable development in this region. The municipality of Paragominas (22,000 km2) is an ideal location for research aimed at understanding landscape change and assessing the sustainability of Amazon development because in many ways it presents a microcosm of Amazonia, containing within its boundaries significant areas devoted to ranching, logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, and mining.