The Tropical ‘Anthropocene’ A Modern Battleground or a Long-Term Framework?

Although referencing temperate, rather than tropical, rainforest destruction in the United States of America the above passage highlights the shift in landscape valuation driven by modern demographic and economic pressures. Firstly, as a greater proportion of the world’s population shifts to the tropics over the course of the twenty-first century, more and more local smallholders will rely on tropical forests as a source of freshwater, agricultural land, and urban land, as well as timber, medicine, and food (Ghazoul and Sheil, 2010; The State of the Tropics Project, 2016). Furthermore, rather than solely being contexts for local subsistence and use, tropical forests are now also national and international ‘mines’ that provision high value wood, minerals, fuels, and land for multi-national businesses and markets. Notions that tropical forests should be removed, rather than managed or maintained, in order to increase local productivity and land value, have led to them becoming the most threatened terrestrial environments on the face of the Earth after the polar ice-caps. Certainly, the increasingly dramatic impacts these pressures are having upon them form part of broader discussions of a new, human-driven era of earth systems domination known as the ‘Anthropocene’ (Malhi et al., 2014). Disproportionate biodiversity, the regulatory role these habitats play in local and regional soil structure and chemistry, and their position within local, regional, and even global climate systems mean that human alterations to tropical forests, that have been argued to have changed in nature and scale since the European industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1960s, have massive implications for the planet as a whole (Malhi et al., 2014; Malhi, 2017). As a result, tropical forests are a focal political, economic, and cultural battlefield between local populations reliant upon living within them, and business and governmental interests seeking to extract from them. This chapter explores the tensions that exist in the human occupation and use of global tropical forest regions today, including the advance of urbanism and industrialization, exploitation of mineral, floral, and faunal resources by local groups and multi-national corporations, and their key position in discussions of anthropogenically induced climate change.