The Frontier Forest as a Specific Type of Social-Ecological System: A Comparative Study of Brazil and the US

Abstract

"Deforestation appears to be ubiquitous in the history of human settlement and development. If so, then we might expect deforestation to have common causes across human societies, i.e., to represent an identifiable type of social-ecological system that poses common problems for collective action. As such, the concept of the 'frontier' becomes useful for distinguishing between states or stages of development. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest a general theory of 'forest transition,' according to which deforestation is a common feature of early development, which eventually slows and reverses, so long as appropriate institutions are created. This paper contributes to that literature by comparing the social-ecological circumstances of twentieth-century deforestation in Brazil’s 'forest frontiers' and deforestation in US 'forest frontiers' from the colonial era into the second half of the nineteenth century. After comparing and contrasting the two cases, we posit as a hypothesis (to be subject to further testing) that 'frontier' conditions represent a distinctive type of social-ecological system, which can be described using a combined IAD-SES analysis comprised of a set of fairly consistent variables that typically are not found in forests after frontiers have closed."