The Rainforest And Brazil Essay Research Paper — страница 2

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populated region. During the first two centuries of Brazilian colonization little attention was paid to the nearly inaccessible and seemingly unproductive highlands, although parties of explorers, known as bandeirantes, did traverse them from time to time, capturing Indians for slaves and searching for precious metals and stones. Taking with them a few head of cattle, which eventually expanded into the herds that came to dominate the economy from the caatinga to the Pantanal, some of the bandeirantes settled down in the interior and continued their search for gold and diamonds. The first gold strike came in what is now Minas Gerais in 1695, where diamonds were also found in 1729, attracting many plantation owners from the northeast who brought their slaves. They spent money

lavishly on building fine towns, such as Ouro Pr to and Diamantina, and also invested in small industries to supply the mines as well as the farms that, before long, were producing a surplus for export. With the development of roads over the Serra do Mar to the coast, and the transfer of the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, Brazil’s economic and political centre shifted from the northeastern to the southeastern part of the country. Subsequently, during the 19th century, this was consolidated by the wealth generated by the great coffee plantations developed in the Para ba do Sul valley. Developing the plateau Rio de Janeiro’s population had passed 500,000 by the time the slaves were fully emancipated in 1888, while the city of S o Paulo, entrep t for

all of Brazil south and west of Minas Gerais, was but a modest town of 65,000. That situation changed as a flood of European immigrants flocked to Brazil; some worked as tenants on the coffee plantations that were expanding across the terra roxa soils of S o Paulo and northern Paran , while others established themselves on small freeholds along the southern coast and in the forests. Whereas the latter group remained physically and culturally isolated until after World War II, the newcomers in S o Paulo played a key role in building the railroads and establishing the industries that were later to give both the city and the state their preeminence in the Brazilian economy. Settling the outback While the more southerly parts of Brazil were expanding economically, the northeast was

stagnating and beginning to feel the effects of overpopulation and an archaic landholding system under which all the best coastal lands were in the hands of a few powerful landowners. This had driven the earlier population of mixed Indian and European ancestry, the mestizos, ever deeper into what was then the sert o, or outback. They first settled the agreste and then the caatinga, wherever water or a small patch of moist ground was available. Severe droughts in the 1870s and 1880s forced many of these people to abandon their land, and they were recruited to tap rubber trees in the Amazon to supply the growing demand for this product. Half a century was to elapse before there were new opportunities for massive migrations from the drought-prone, impoverished northeastern region.

One of these opportunities was to provide the large amount of labour that was required during the post-World War II period to build the constantly expanding urban centres of the southeastern region, culminating in the construction of Bras lia. At the same time, northeasterners began occupying the sparsely populated forest lands along the remote northern perimeter of the Brazilian Highlands, including Rond nia and Acre. There they have been joined by emigrants from southern Brazil, who were displaced by agricultural mechanization. The Amazon region in the north remains the most underpopulated part of Brazil, with an environment resistive to commercialization and settlement despite government development plans intended to lure more migrants. There has been a damaging trend to the

ecology, nevertheless. Forestry and cattle raising, for instance, pose threats to the future of the rainforest and the Amazonian habitat. The entire Amazon region had a population of only about 40,000 in the middle of the 19th century, but by the end of World War I this had risen, largely owing to an earlier rubber boom and the influx of northeasterners, to some 1,400,000; Bel m and Manaus had grown from somnolent villages into modest-sized cities. In the late 1950s there was a minor boom along the Lower Amazon where Japanese settlers began raising jute and black pepper. The manganese deposits in Amap were also being rapidly developed, and a new pioneer zone appeared along a highway between Bel m and Bras lia. Urbanization With its rural settlement patterns essentially defined,