Forest Extraction to Theme Parks: The Modern History of Land Change
Modern-day deforestation in the southern Yucatán peninsular region began in earnest in the late 1960s. The composition of the region’s forest and options for land uses, however, were partly shaped by eighty years of activity leading up to the 1960s, just as it was by the ancient Maya over a millennium ago (Ch. 2). Most of the modern impacts began in the twentieth century and are traced here through three major episodes of use and occupation of the region: forest extraction, 1880–1983; big projects and forest clearing, 1975–82; and land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism, 1983 to the present. Each episode corresponds to different visions of how the region should be used and to different human–environment conditions shaping the kind, location, and magnitude of land change. Understanding these changing conditions underpins all other assessments of the SYPR project. The episode of forest extraction spans the bulk of the modern history of the region. It began in the late nineteenth century and ended with the demise of parastatal logging companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, due primarily to the depletion of reserves of mahogany and Spanish cedar throughout the region. Before this episode fully expired, a new one, that of big projects and forest clearing began, marked by large-scale rice and cattle schemes undertaken in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. This episode accelerated the road construction that began in the latter part of the 1960s, and it witnessed expanded settlement linked to colonization programs. The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 brought this episode to an abrupt halt, triggering the search for a new alternative to developing the frontier. This search, made in the context of neoliberal economic reforms, led to the establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1989 and other, more recent initiatives, defining the most recent episode of land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism. From the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization to the twentieth century, the occupation of the region was sparse (Turner 1990), the forest serving as a refuge during the colonial period for those Maya fleeing Spanish domination along the coasts and in the north, especially during the Caste War of the middle nineteenth century, when the northern Maya revolted against Mexico (Jones 1989).