Memória social e ecologia histórica: a agricultura de coivara das populações quilombolas do vale do Ribeira e sua relação com a formação da mata atlântica local / Social memory and historical ecology:slash and burn agriculture in the formation of an Atlantic rainforest area inhabited by quilombola communities, Ribeira Valley, Brazil

Lucia Chamlian Munari

The Atlantic Rainforest is one of the worlds most diverse and threatened biomes. The majority of its remnants are located at the Ribeira Valley (SP) where several of the States quilombola populations remain. The Valleys quilombos originated from a population of freed, abandoned or refugee slaves brought to the region in the beginning of the European colonization during the 16th century. The main subsistence strategy these populations have developed is the slash-and-burn agriculture (coivara), a system capable of proffering great heterogeneity to the forest landscape. However, the coivara system has been undergoing a transformation process in the last decades due to demographic increase, advance of the local economy and the implementation of environmental and political developmental legislation. The aim of this study is to understand how the coivara system has contributed to the forest landscape formation of the São Pedro quilombo community at the Ribeira Valley. A historic narrative of the processes that contributed to the systems transformation helps understand the changes in the local subsistence patterns and the way these changes reflect in the landscape. In order to do so, the local social memory was sought through ethnographic and oral history methods. Furthermore, monitored trails were carried out to study the environmental perception of landscape units and the spatial configuration of swidden and fallow plots. These methods allowed us to realize that, in the past, gap openings for crop cultures depended on a series of factors, such as: availability of social capital for labor, family demand on crop production, and economic ties with the regional market. Simultaneously, the landscape occupation was a product between the knowledge of the local ecological dynamics and the established social norms. The domestic unit, composed of the casa de fora and the capuova, was the most constant expression of human presence in the landscape. The coivara transformation processes began in the 1950s with road constructions decreasing the regions isolation. From then on, the intensification of palm-heart extraction and cattle ranching brought along with land grabbers in the 1970s, redirected the communities economic activities. As a consequence, both the number of cultivated areas and the area of each agricultural unit decreased. During the 70s, with the construction of a school in the region, the houses were displayed in a village form, which stimulated the concentration of cultivated units around it. Moreover, the intensification of environmental inspection in the region during the 80s restricted their local subsistence activities. As a result, two tendencies may be observed nowadays: segmentation and homogenization of the landscape into areas destined to management on one hand, and the establishment of a mature forest formation, unable to be cut down, on the other. This might result in a decrease of the structural complexity and ecological dynamics of the local forest. We conclude that, despite the new spatial configuration of the swidden plots and the tendency to segmentation, cattle grazing sites and palm-heart extraction seem to be most harmful, causing most of the forest landscape fragmentation. Due to these changes, the São Pedro community faces, nowadays, the challenge of combining their need to produce items with market value with the environmental restrictions brought upon them. Moreover, they must reorganize their collective labor activities and reformulate the local landscape conception and use to ensure, in the future, their permanence in that territory.

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