ABSTRACT

At a 2010 conference on climate change I attended in Brasília a senior Brazilian scientist stated that the combined effects of deforestation and global warming could disrupt rain regimes and transform parts of the Amazon rainforest into a savanna-like ecosystem. He added that, as a result of these macro-ecological changes, agricultural and ranching operations in the basin would suffer, and Amazonian populations would find themselves living in environments radically different from those to which they were accustomed. Following his presentation, I asked one of the conference organizers (an environmentalist who has worked in Amazonia for decades) how it was for him to work on the premise that unprecedented socioecological futures are coming. He responded by explaining that the basin had a long history of rapid and profound socioenvironmental changes. Some populations living in Amazonia’s agricultural regions, he added, had already lived through rapid ecological and economic shifts that were analogous to transformations associated with climate change; for them such futures would not be unprecedented. “This is not science fiction,” he claimed.