Abstract
Extractive reserves, usually associated with the survival of rubber tappers in the Brazilian tropics, have close parallels elsewhere, including temperate zones. This research isolates the distinctive features of recent Amazonian reserves, illustrates parallel features in a fifty year-old management experiment in the United States, and explores the advantages extractive reserves offer land reformers interested not only in social equity and efficiency but in biological conservation. Extractive reserves stand apart from traditional land reforms in their innovative use of common property, a tenure mode well adapted to sustainable management of marginal lands.
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Additional information
Charles Geisler is an associate professor of rural sociology at Cornell University. He works on issues of land ownership, use, and reform in the United States and Latin America, on the integration of human livelihoods into parks and protected areas, and on the social impact assessment of resource development on rural peoples.
Louise Silberling is a doctoral candidate in development sociology at Cornell University. Research interests include extractive reserves, common property regimes, the role of social movements in resource management and land use planning. Her recent work has been in the Alto Jurua, Acre, with the National Council of Rubber Tappers and the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest.
Research support for this paper is gratefully acknowledged from Hatch Project No. 550, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University for field work in New York and from the Conservation and Research Foundation of New London, CT for Silberling's 1989 research in Brazil.
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Geisler, C., Silberling, L. Extractive reserves as alternative land reform: Amazonia and appalachia compared. Agric Hum Values 9, 58–70 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217921
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217921