Land Use in the Andes from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1950

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 (leaving aside the other tropical Andean territories of Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela).