Analysis Of Colonial Mangroves And Brazil's Landless Poor

There is power in marginalization. Although systemic societal structures limit agency, especially to the already marginalized, humans still have some free-will and power. Human agency is exhibited throughout Tucker’s 2007 investigation, with the various resistance movements, and in Miller’s 2003 analysis of the “Colonial Mangrove’s and Brazil’s Landless Poor,” in which the people help to determine the conservation of the mangrove. Although Tucker’s comparative and more top-down analysis differs from Miller’s subaltern approach, both do consider the role of human agents on the conservation and destruction of the environment. Miller, however, centralizes the marginalized perspective, unlike Tucker who maintains the socially marginalized peoples
The fact that there were so many allowed for the elites to want to provide conservation, as it was meant for the common good in their moral economy . The elites also maintained the subsistence of the peasant poor as the peasant poor were effective property buffers and a sizable army. If the mangroves were not conserved, the peasant poor would no longer have the right to subsistence, and either they would die or fight back due to this. Either way, the elites would lose an important resource . Also, there was no direct extractive profitability in the mangroves, like pearls. The elites, therefore, needed to conserve the mangroves, as the peasant poor’s established livelihoods were dependent on these resources. As one can see, Miller’s investigation demonstrates the importance of understanding the local perspectives, as the human agency of the peasant poor led to the conservation of the
imperialism and have been altering the environmental landscape since their migration into the tropics. He also notes that people, whether elite or poor, can be complicit in the U.S. imperial system, just as they can resist . This is very much aligning with the argument of Cronon, as in his analysis, he finds that the romantization of ‘wilderness’ and nature often disallows the understanding that the sublime landscapes that existed prior and after U.S. intervention were empty and uninhabited. Tucker, just as Cronon, very much go against this idea of the “virgin”