What I found particularly fascinating about this book was that it was a labor history, environmental history, and a political history all mixed into one. An in-depth understanding about the history of commerce, client-patron relations, and competing visions of the Amazon were necessary for a deeper context related to the implementation of rubber procurement programs. Labor conditions were contingent upon policies enacted by multiple agencies that represented two federal governments. The local labor pool was altered not only by neighboring areas affected by drought, but racial inequality in urban areas as far away from the Amazon such as the state of Sao Paulo. Even though the notable distinctiveness of each chapter made me lose sight of the central argument, the book demonstrates the environmental, political, intellectual and cultural impact of World War II on a place that is considered peripheral to the success of the Allies.
From Kyle: I agree, the central argument got muddled within the distinct chapters. No matter how much useful and insightful information I received from the book, it stood to be more cohesive so as not to obscure the overall points.
While a great amalgamation of labor, environmental, and foreign policy history that draws out the significance of production to the US during and after WWII I could not help but feel bad for Garfield in that all the optimism of his book has been largely erased by new scientific data concerning climate change and the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro. That the livelihood of so many indigenous peoples and rubber pickers will/ must become obsolete and what effects that will have on the region and its workers, makes issues concerning the environment all the more convoluted and in y humble opinion once again lend further weight to the need for a move towards international socialism. Otherwise, the people of the Amazon will be just as left behind and forgotten as the millions of latin American workers/farmers that were decimated by trade deals such as NAFTA and financial responsibilities enforced by the World Bank (which should be abolished). While some benefits came to the region through worker struggles and other more grassroots organizations of people the reality is that the ultimate concessions that were made were made in the interest of capital and that does not bode well for the future. especially with a President who has promised to open the Amazon to logging company's and has openly threatened the livelihood and security of indigenous people living in the region.
I can always count on you to see the glass nearly empty with no sign of another drop of anything in sight. :) When I was reading this book, I was thinking about the move to save the rainforests in the late 80s and early 90s--there was "rainforest crunch" flavored EVERYTHING--lots of greenwashed, feel-good ways to save the jungle that the world relies upon for clean air. And now that we are worrying about climate change, I'm always struck that there isn't more conversation about saving the Amazon. Your comment and Garfield's book make me wonder how much of that is related to Brazil being in the news more for non-Amazonian rainforest purposes and whether that (and images from Rio at the Olympics, for example, with all the negative reporting that shone bright lights on the clearing of whole neighborhoods, etc) makes people unable to separate the rainforest from the politics.
I agree with your comment about the unfortunate situation indigenous communities are in under the Bolsonaro government, especially considering that one of his first moves in office was to combine the ministries of agriculture and environment. I don't think anybody would bet that he wasn't aware that both of those ministries were adversarial in their purpose and end goals.
I feel strongly for your statements about the ecologically disastrous predicament we are in and the tension between the work of otherwise marginalized and disadvantage people which comes into tension with generally well intended environmental protection. This is a problem I studied looked into for some undergraduate papers many years back and to play the contrarian, as seems to be my destiny in all my classes this semester, I would note that socialism by no means guarantees any solutions or even concern for our environmental conundrum. The tension will remain between the needs of the people and the needs of the planet. Perhaps we may produce less, but we are at still at a point where must people feel that they need more: more food, clothes, medicine, all the necessities of life and all the things that we in wealthy countries enjoy and those in other nations would like access to as well. Even if socialism can provide a solution it is not the only possible one. My own research showed that programs to assign a monetary value to forested land have succeeded in at least a few instances, where the policy was well enforced and the land monitored, to bring what had classically been externalized elements of production into the market system. Bolsonaro is here acting as an example of the problem of the state being the primary bad actor. The state could set laws to internalize the value of the environment, or it could actively work to promote environmental destruction.
I liked the way Garfield expanded the idea of an environmental history by including the “role of labor, social conflict, and representation in the making of nature” (p. 5) that he says many other environmental histories ignore. Certainly, the environment here is shaped by humans, economics, and social forces, but Garfield goes further, showing that the United States, in its refusal to consider rubber needs beyond Malaysia (and despite documentation that it realized it needed to), wrested control of the Amazon away from its people by leveraging political influence and the economics of that. World War II, in most history books, is confined to Europe and the Pacific, but Garfield challenges that idea by showing how the United States exploited Brazil to meet their raw material needs of the war effort. I had no idea there were so many uses for rubber in World War II—the 40,000 that Garfield cites exceeds my ideas by 39,999 because I generally think of tires when I think of rubber. That American imperialism leveraged this war time need to resculpt the Brazilian labor economy is probably not a surprise, but the inability to understand how to recruit labor in Latin America reflects the continued story of how the United States struggles to conceptualize that others have different priorities and values that the capitalist, consumerist state does.
I completely agree with your reflection that Garfield brings the transnational war effort into light with this book. As he demonstrated with the example of the rubber drive in the early 40's, political will and organization do not win wars if the natural resources are not there to back them up. It would have been simple for Garfield to stop there, but the book also covers how the United States and Brazil had differing priorities in their war involvement, and a shared enemy did not necessarily mean organizational harmony between American project managers and representatives, and Brazilian laborers. Even upon finishing the book, I had so many questions about what this history means in terms of how environmental degradation is tied to economic growth and how the randomness of natural heritage can be used to create narratives of national uplift.
I too certainly learned a lot about rubber production — and it was really interesting to hear about how it stayed an extractor/gathering endeavor in the Amazon although it became a cultivated product in the Malaysian pennisula. (If we have time before class today remind me to show you some photos I took last year on our stop at a rubber tree grove on our way to a national park in Thailand last year.) It seems that there is a larger lesson there about governments’ inability to plan effectively for the future even when they know that there is a crisis coming. It seems to me, however, that simply a narrative of one-way exploitation is too simplistic a description of Garfield’s analysis. I thought the strength of Garfield’s book was looking at how different actors from individual migrant workers through governments all acted with autonomy and out of self-interest in negotiating the rubber resurgence in Brazil during WWII.
Seth Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon was a surprising thrilling read about the Amazon and the various ways it changed Brazil. The section I found most interesting was titled “Drawing Boundaries: Geographers and the Delimitation of Amazonia”. The way in which borders were being decided by bureaucrats and how those borders pushed for a less “nationalistic” movement surprised me. After having read numerous books on nationalism in which “one people one state” was the primary focus of nationalism and the ramifications it would have on a nation’s society. Later in the chapter it is discussed how politicians used regionalism as a way to maintain power and wealth. That’s a viewpoint I had never come across before. This narrative of regionalism is also prevalent in the epilogue where Brazil stands its ground at an international conference. Brazil points to other nations with ecological issues and smuggly tells the United States why don't they stick their nose their instead of Brazil. After reading that epilogue in addition the segments mentioning the Good Neighbor policy and how Brazil was able to take advantage of World War II for economic gains made me think of the power dynamics between the United States and Latin American nations. we have seen the United States invade try to colonize (both economically and ideological) in our readings. We however have seen Latin American nations resist and stand their own against the United States. It may be American arrogance why we view the Western Hemisphere as split between North and South America. is the idea of Latin America an American conception for viewing those nations as lesser? Or is Latin America a region distinguished from the United States in order to confront against US imperialism? This is a question I want to keep in the back of my mind for the second half of the semester.
I also found the section from Chapter 1 that you referenced interesting. To me, this section focused on the attempts to plan and control nature as a means of "civilizing" different regions. Regions were given designated borders that would ensure each area was used as efficiently as possible to extract as much as possible from the environment. By controlling the landscape, you could also control the people in that region. I think this doesn't necessarily mean a lack of nationalism, though, rather there was a push to change the cultural perception of the Amazon region and to put that region to better "use" for all of Brazil.
I appreciate Garfield's attention to how larger global forces shape personal decisions. This book maps out how national and natural forces directly impact the choices made by actual people rather than surveying events from afar. For example, he details the backstory behind why the Amazon was targeted as a rubber sources, which was due in part to Japan's empire-building as well as U.S. Standard Oil Company's lack of development of synthetic rubber because of illicit ties to Germany. Government forces choreographed a propaganda campaign that promoted the nationalist identity of the Amazon and subsidized the journey there (along with medical care) for sorely-needed workers. Natural forces such as drought along with government incentives pushed Brazilian men to go to the Amazon, and Garfield outlines the personal struggles they must have gone through as a result of these larger forces acting alongside them. Some men used this as an opportunity to make money to send home while other used the Amazon as an excuse to skip town on their wives and children. The Brazilian government motivated workers to come to the Amazon knowing full well they did not have the infrastructure to support them, which Garfield argues was done knowing that they could invite U.S. development to close that gap. I tend to agree with Garfield's assessment here: it seems that the larger actors made decisions that impacted working class people without factoring those people in as anything but resources for producing more rubber.
I agree, I think that Garfield brings in a logical and interesting perspective as to how even small life decisions based from economic need are created by larger forces in the political system.
I appreciated that Garfield considered and weighed both the autonomy of various Brazilians and the influence of the US and other foreign governments and populations in discussing developments in the Amazon before, during, and after WWII. It seems that some of the other authors we’ve read have tended to take more of an either/or approach to the question of Latin American autonomy versus the role of the US in particular as the force that is the primary autonomous actor (cf. the Nicaragua book, which was so focused on the role of the US versus the Sabato book, which acknowledged virtually no US role, neither of which seems particularly accurate to me).
In particular I appreciated Garfield’s attention to the agency and autonomy of migrants to the Amazon, and that he didn’t just paint them as mindless dupes of government decisions, and I also appreciated his discussion of how ecology and society interact such that droughts and other similar natural disasters are as much as result of human decision making as of pure “environmental” factors (for those of us in Cooper’s class, cf. with the book about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, and in my Immigration History class we’ve explored a similar analysis of the Irish potato famine as socially produced).
Overall this was a good and thought-provoking read.
I also appreciated the perspective of workers not being portrayed as dupes and easily manipulated. I also appreciated the fairly blatant contradictions of capitalism that this book exposes in an almost perfunctory way, which goes further than ranting about how exploitative the system is.
From Kyle: There are several strong aspects of Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon; it’s weaving together of environmental, labor, diplomatic, and military history is quite impressive. I found this combination of approaches most useful at examining power and nature, especially in this case. One of more interesting parts is the recognition that U.S. interest in Brazilian rubber is just another stop on the train of white supremacist colonialism. Our foray into the Amazonian jungles represents a continuation of the frontier myth in American history, justified by national security.
I find this week's reading enlightening, the way in which Garfield details the ideas of economic and industrial development in Brazil. The ways in which the profiting from the Amazon began are particularly interesting because we often think about the country holding these natural resources as initiating the development of the land. In Brazil's case there were outside actors, the United States primarily, influenced by WW2 pushing for the birth of industry there. I think that the role of the government in creating this new economy and influencing workers to migrate to the Amazon to work was done in part to build that new industry while also expecting and inviting outside investment into the area. It directly shows the ways in which nature and its resources influence our ideas of industry, politics, and sovereignty.
Reading the first chapter of the book reveals an argument that in order to win a world war, you have to do whatever it takes to create and maintain a state's military prowess. The rubber that came from the trees in the Amazon were used by the United States to fight a two-front war. The author wrote that the only way that the United States turned to Brazil was because the United States was shut out of Southeast Asia by Japanese imperial conquest prior and after the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941. In this book, it can also be argued that the United States turned to Brazil not for imperial goals, but because of survival and or revenge against Japan.
I'm inclined to agree with you based on the circumstances that the US found themselves within as you and book both describe. I do think that the US was probably being much less evil or at least greedy when turning to Brazil as the book says after losing something like 92% of its rubber imports. However, based on the campaigns to focus more on synthetics and things like the America First campaign also make me inclined to think that they were not really looking out for the best for Brazil either. However, to be fair, I'm sure Brazil was likely lower on the list of important US allies to keep afloat and support, especially in comparison to Britain or later the U.S.S.R.
Hello Zack, I thought Brazil was able to take to advantage of situation and get deal with the United States. The United States didnt really have an interest in Brazilian Rubber before. It was more about survival like you said. Needing it to combat Japan and support its allies in combating Germany.
While the idea of "the making of nature" is useful and well argued I find I have something of a philosophical disagreement with the idea. It seems too often scholarship is engaging in a human-centric approach that I find my rankles my philosophic tendency towards realism. When the epistemological question about the tree falling in the woods is posed to me I firmly assert that it does make a sound. In regards to this book the importance of the Amazon as a natural environment exists regardless of whether or not we recognize that importance. It isn't us putting value on biodiversity, carbon sinks, or the feedback loops that generate the conditions of a rainforest that make it matter. Those things matter in and of themselves and for themselves, not for us.
In regards to the geopolitics, particularly during WWII, I find this book presents a good reminder that the effects of the war went well beyond the active belligerents and their direct colonial territories to include the world system of trade and the dependency of much of our technological world on global networks of exchange in order to maintain their function.
In the social sphere and political situation mostly internal to Brazil this book really drove home the idea of a nation operating as a colonial system with a core a periphery within its own borders. I tend not to think of the US this way because I am well aware of the fact that westward expansion was a series of invasions and subjugation but It is now clear to me that there is a lot in common with that system and the exploitation of the Amazon.
I think Garfield did a fairly good job of clearly setting up the origin and then explaining the story of the rubber and its full relationships to the Amazon and Brazil as a whole. He made it very easy to tell when a point was either just supporting information or something to note that he would bring back later as a part of a broader argument. I particularly liked reading about the comparisons that he sets up between the US and Brazil as a way of looking at the relationship to two form and develop throughout the second world war. For me it was really interesting to read about the same sort of romanticizing plot that exists within Brazil in regards to the Amazon and the US in regards to manifest destiny and moving west. This idea of moving west across the continent to conquer and exploit the land and resources I had some what assumed to be uniquely American and did not expect to see in Brazil. However, going forward I do think it is interesting to wonder about what internal contradictions this might have caused as the real exploitation was coming from the US of Brazil and the Amazon. Was there a realization that because the end result for the rubber was to go towards US and not Brazil's production lines or automobiles that they were actually not the ones moving west and seizing the Amazon but were actually a tool withing the US's exploitation of the area?
What I found particularly fascinating about this book was that it was a labor history, environmental history, and a political history all mixed into one. An in-depth understanding about the history of commerce, client-patron relations, and competing visions of the Amazon were necessary for a deeper context related to the implementation of rubber procurement programs. Labor conditions were contingent upon policies enacted by multiple agencies that represented two federal governments. The local labor pool was altered not only by neighboring areas affected by drought, but racial inequality in urban areas as far away from the Amazon such as the state of Sao Paulo. Even though the notable distinctiveness of each chapter made me lose sight of the central argument, the book demonstrates the environmental, political, intellectual and cultural impact of World War II on a place that is considered peripheral to the success of the Allies.
ReplyDeleteFrom Kyle: I agree, the central argument got muddled within the distinct chapters. No matter how much useful and insightful information I received from the book, it stood to be more cohesive so as not to obscure the overall points.
DeleteWhile a great amalgamation of labor, environmental, and foreign policy history that draws out the significance of production to the US during and after WWII I could not help but feel bad for Garfield in that all the optimism of his book has been largely erased by new scientific data concerning climate change and the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro. That the livelihood of so many indigenous peoples and rubber pickers will/ must become obsolete and what effects that will have on the region and its workers, makes issues concerning the environment all the more convoluted and in y humble opinion once again lend further weight to the need for a move towards international socialism. Otherwise, the people of the Amazon will be just as left behind and forgotten as the millions of latin American workers/farmers that were decimated by trade deals such as NAFTA and financial responsibilities enforced by the World Bank (which should be abolished). While some benefits came to the region through worker struggles and other more grassroots organizations of people the reality is that the ultimate concessions that were made were made in the interest of capital and that does not bode well for the future. especially with a President who has promised to open the Amazon to logging company's and has openly threatened the livelihood and security of indigenous people living in the region.
ReplyDeleteI can always count on you to see the glass nearly empty with no sign of another drop of anything in sight. :) When I was reading this book, I was thinking about the move to save the rainforests in the late 80s and early 90s--there was "rainforest crunch" flavored EVERYTHING--lots of greenwashed, feel-good ways to save the jungle that the world relies upon for clean air. And now that we are worrying about climate change, I'm always struck that there isn't more conversation about saving the Amazon. Your comment and Garfield's book make me wonder how much of that is related to Brazil being in the news more for non-Amazonian rainforest purposes and whether that (and images from Rio at the Olympics, for example, with all the negative reporting that shone bright lights on the clearing of whole neighborhoods, etc) makes people unable to separate the rainforest from the politics.
DeleteHi Jason,
DeleteI agree with your comment about the unfortunate situation indigenous communities are in under the Bolsonaro government, especially considering that one of his first moves in office was to combine the ministries of agriculture and environment. I don't think anybody would bet that he wasn't aware that both of those ministries were adversarial in their purpose and end goals.
I feel strongly for your statements about the ecologically disastrous predicament we are in and the tension between the work of otherwise marginalized and disadvantage people which comes into tension with generally well intended environmental protection. This is a problem I studied looked into for some undergraduate papers many years back and to play the contrarian, as seems to be my destiny in all my classes this semester, I would note that socialism by no means guarantees any solutions or even concern for our environmental conundrum. The tension will remain between the needs of the people and the needs of the planet. Perhaps we may produce less, but we are at still at a point where must people feel that they need more: more food, clothes, medicine, all the necessities of life and all the things that we in wealthy countries enjoy and those in other nations would like access to as well. Even if socialism can provide a solution it is not the only possible one. My own research showed that programs to assign a monetary value to forested land have succeeded in at least a few instances, where the policy was well enforced and the land monitored, to bring what had classically been externalized elements of production into the market system. Bolsonaro is here acting as an example of the problem of the state being the primary bad actor. The state could set laws to internalize the value of the environment, or it could actively work to promote environmental destruction.
DeleteSeth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon
ReplyDeleteI liked the way Garfield expanded the idea of an environmental history by including the “role of labor, social conflict, and representation in the making of nature” (p. 5) that he says many other environmental histories ignore. Certainly, the environment here is shaped by humans, economics, and social forces, but Garfield goes further, showing that the United States, in its refusal to consider rubber needs beyond Malaysia (and despite documentation that it realized it needed to), wrested control of the Amazon away from its people by leveraging political influence and the economics of that. World War II, in most history books, is confined to Europe and the Pacific, but Garfield challenges that idea by showing how the United States exploited Brazil to meet their raw material needs of the war effort. I had no idea there were so many uses for rubber in World War II—the 40,000 that Garfield cites exceeds my ideas by 39,999 because I generally think of tires when I think of rubber. That American imperialism leveraged this war time need to resculpt the Brazilian labor economy is probably not a surprise, but the inability to understand how to recruit labor in Latin America reflects the continued story of how the United States struggles to conceptualize that others have different priorities and values that the capitalist, consumerist state does.
Hi Jen,
DeleteI completely agree with your reflection that Garfield brings the transnational war effort into light with this book. As he demonstrated with the example of the rubber drive in the early 40's, political will and organization do not win wars if the natural resources are not there to back them up. It would have been simple for Garfield to stop there, but the book also covers how the United States and Brazil had differing priorities in their war involvement, and a shared enemy did not necessarily mean organizational harmony between American project managers and representatives, and Brazilian laborers. Even upon finishing the book, I had so many questions about what this history means in terms of how environmental degradation is tied to economic growth and how the randomness of natural heritage can be used to create narratives of national uplift.
I too certainly learned a lot about rubber production — and it was really interesting to hear about how it stayed an extractor/gathering endeavor in the Amazon although it became a cultivated product in the Malaysian pennisula. (If we have time before class today remind me to show you some photos I took last year on our stop at a rubber tree grove on our way to a national park in Thailand last year.) It seems that there is a larger lesson there about governments’ inability to plan effectively for the future even when they know that there is a crisis coming. It seems to me, however, that simply a narrative of one-way exploitation is too simplistic a description of Garfield’s analysis. I thought the strength of Garfield’s book was looking at how different actors from individual migrant workers through governments all acted with autonomy and out of self-interest in negotiating the rubber resurgence in Brazil during WWII.
DeleteSeth Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon was a surprising thrilling read about the Amazon and the various ways it changed Brazil. The section I found most interesting was titled “Drawing Boundaries: Geographers and the Delimitation of Amazonia”. The way in which borders were being decided by bureaucrats and how those borders pushed for a less “nationalistic” movement surprised me. After having read numerous books on nationalism in which “one people one state” was the primary focus of nationalism and the ramifications it would have on a nation’s society. Later in the chapter it is discussed how politicians used regionalism as a way to maintain power and wealth. That’s a viewpoint I had never come across before. This narrative of regionalism is also prevalent in the epilogue where Brazil stands its ground at an international conference. Brazil points to other nations with ecological issues and smuggly tells the United States why don't they stick their nose their instead of Brazil.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading that epilogue in addition the segments mentioning the Good Neighbor policy and how Brazil was able to take advantage of World War II for economic gains made me think of the power dynamics between the United States and Latin American nations. we have seen the United States invade try to colonize (both economically and ideological) in our readings. We however have seen Latin American nations resist and stand their own against the United States. It may be American arrogance why we view the Western Hemisphere as split between North and South America. is the idea of Latin America an American conception for viewing those nations as lesser? Or is Latin America a region distinguished from the United States in order to confront against US imperialism? This is a question I want to keep in the back of my mind for the second half of the semester.
I also found the section from Chapter 1 that you referenced interesting. To me, this section focused on the attempts to plan and control nature as a means of "civilizing" different regions. Regions were given designated borders that would ensure each area was used as efficiently as possible to extract as much as possible from the environment. By controlling the landscape, you could also control the people in that region. I think this doesn't necessarily mean a lack of nationalism, though, rather there was a push to change the cultural perception of the Amazon region and to put that region to better "use" for all of Brazil.
DeleteI appreciate Garfield's attention to how larger global forces shape personal decisions. This book maps out how national and natural forces directly impact the choices made by actual people rather than surveying events from afar. For example, he details the backstory behind why the Amazon was targeted as a rubber sources, which was due in part to Japan's empire-building as well as U.S. Standard Oil Company's lack of development of synthetic rubber because of illicit ties to Germany. Government forces choreographed a propaganda campaign that promoted the nationalist identity of the Amazon and subsidized the journey there (along with medical care) for sorely-needed workers. Natural forces such as drought along with government incentives pushed Brazilian men to go to the Amazon, and Garfield outlines the personal struggles they must have gone through as a result of these larger forces acting alongside them. Some men used this as an opportunity to make money to send home while other used the Amazon as an excuse to skip town on their wives and children. The Brazilian government motivated workers to come to the Amazon knowing full well they did not have the infrastructure to support them, which Garfield argues was done knowing that they could invite U.S. development to close that gap. I tend to agree with Garfield's assessment here: it seems that the larger actors made decisions that impacted working class people without factoring those people in as anything but resources for producing more rubber.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think that Garfield brings in a logical and interesting perspective as to how even small life decisions based from economic need are created by larger forces in the political system.
DeleteKatie, all decisions have consequences that will play long after everybody forgot about it.
DeleteI appreciated that Garfield considered and weighed both the autonomy of various Brazilians and the influence of the US and other foreign governments and populations in discussing developments in the Amazon before, during, and after WWII. It seems that some of the other authors we’ve read have tended to take more of an either/or approach to the question of Latin American autonomy versus the role of the US in particular as the force that is the primary autonomous actor (cf. the Nicaragua book, which was so focused on the role of the US versus the Sabato book, which acknowledged virtually no US role, neither of which seems particularly accurate to me).
ReplyDeleteIn particular I appreciated Garfield’s attention to the agency and autonomy of migrants to the Amazon, and that he didn’t just paint them as mindless dupes of government decisions, and I also appreciated his discussion of how ecology and society interact such that droughts and other similar natural disasters are as much as result of human decision making as of pure “environmental” factors (for those of us in Cooper’s class, cf. with the book about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, and in my Immigration History class we’ve explored a similar analysis of the Irish potato famine as socially produced).
Overall this was a good and thought-provoking read.
I also appreciated the perspective of workers not being portrayed as dupes and easily manipulated. I also appreciated the fairly blatant contradictions of capitalism that this book exposes in an almost perfunctory way, which goes further than ranting about how exploitative the system is.
DeleteFrom Kyle: There are several strong aspects of Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon; it’s weaving together of environmental, labor, diplomatic, and military history is quite impressive. I found this combination of approaches most useful at examining power and nature, especially in this case. One of more interesting parts is the recognition that U.S. interest in Brazilian rubber is just another stop on the train of white supremacist colonialism. Our foray into the Amazonian jungles represents a continuation of the frontier myth in American history, justified by national security.
ReplyDeleteI find this week's reading enlightening, the way in which Garfield details the ideas of economic and industrial development in Brazil. The ways in which the profiting from the Amazon began are particularly interesting because we often think about the country holding these natural resources as initiating the development of the land. In Brazil's case there were outside actors, the United States primarily, influenced by WW2 pushing for the birth of industry there. I think that the role of the government in creating this new economy and influencing workers to migrate to the Amazon to work was done in part to build that new industry while also expecting and inviting outside investment into the area. It directly shows the ways in which nature and its resources influence our ideas of industry, politics, and sovereignty.
ReplyDelete-Alexandra
DeleteReading the first chapter of the book reveals an argument that in order to win a world war, you have to do whatever it takes to create and maintain a state's military prowess. The rubber that came from the trees in the Amazon were used by the United States to fight a two-front war. The author wrote that the only way that the United States turned to Brazil was because the United States was shut out of Southeast Asia by Japanese imperial conquest prior and after the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941. In this book, it can also be argued that the United States turned to Brazil not for imperial goals, but because of survival and or revenge against Japan.
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree with you based on the circumstances that the US found themselves within as you and book both describe. I do think that the US was probably being much less evil or at least greedy when turning to Brazil as the book says after losing something like 92% of its rubber imports. However, based on the campaigns to focus more on synthetics and things like the America First campaign also make me inclined to think that they were not really looking out for the best for Brazil either. However, to be fair, I'm sure Brazil was likely lower on the list of important US allies to keep afloat and support, especially in comparison to Britain or later the U.S.S.R.
DeleteHello Zack,
DeleteI thought Brazil was able to take to advantage of situation and get deal with the United States. The United States didnt really have an interest in Brazilian Rubber before. It was more about survival like you said. Needing it to combat Japan and support its allies in combating Germany.
While the idea of "the making of nature" is useful and well argued I find I have something of a philosophical disagreement with the idea. It seems too often scholarship is engaging in a human-centric approach that I find my rankles my philosophic tendency towards realism. When the epistemological question about the tree falling in the woods is posed to me I firmly assert that it does make a sound. In regards to this book the importance of the Amazon as a natural environment exists regardless of whether or not we recognize that importance. It isn't us putting value on biodiversity, carbon sinks, or the feedback loops that generate the conditions of a rainforest that make it matter. Those things matter in and of themselves and for themselves, not for us.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the geopolitics, particularly during WWII, I find this book presents a good reminder that the effects of the war went well beyond the active belligerents and their direct colonial territories to include the world system of trade and the dependency of much of our technological world on global networks of exchange in order to maintain their function.
In the social sphere and political situation mostly internal to Brazil this book really drove home the idea of a nation operating as a colonial system with a core a periphery within its own borders. I tend not to think of the US this way because I am well aware of the fact that westward expansion was a series of invasions and subjugation but It is now clear to me that there is a lot in common with that system and the exploitation of the Amazon.
I think Garfield did a fairly good job of clearly setting up the origin and then explaining the story of the rubber and its full relationships to the Amazon and Brazil as a whole. He made it very easy to tell when a point was either just supporting information or something to note that he would bring back later as a part of a broader argument. I particularly liked reading about the comparisons that he sets up between the US and Brazil as a way of looking at the relationship to two form and develop throughout the second world war. For me it was really interesting to read about the same sort of romanticizing plot that exists within Brazil in regards to the Amazon and the US in regards to manifest destiny and moving west. This idea of moving west across the continent to conquer and exploit the land and resources I had some what assumed to be uniquely American and did not expect to see in Brazil. However, going forward I do think it is interesting to wonder about what internal contradictions this might have caused as the real exploitation was coming from the US of Brazil and the Amazon. Was there a realization that because the end result for the rubber was to go towards US and not Brazil's production lines or automobiles that they were actually not the ones moving west and seizing the Amazon but were actually a tool withing the US's exploitation of the area?
ReplyDelete