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Article Excerpt
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A prominent theme in environmental, or landscape, histories of Latin America is the impact of land tenure on land use. Research on both colonial and postcolonial periods explores the environmental and social implications of latifundios and minifundios, even though this dichotomy oversimplifies the diversity of land-tenure types and is concerned primarily with agriculture (Thiesenhusen 1989; Dorner 1992). Rangelands tend to receive less attention.
Research on land reform in rangelands usually focuses either on the privatization of communal grazing lands or the displacement of smallholders--often indigenous and largely subsistence producers engaged in agriculture--by largeholders who clear the land and produce for the market (Hecht 1985; Gerritson and Foster 2001). An underappreciated phenomenon is when landowners subdivide large grazing properties that are already devoted to market production. Our case study from southernmost Chile considers this kind of rangeland subdivision and exposes the impact on the complex interaction of the region's social and biophysical systems.
Through the subdivision of estancias in its southernmost region, Tierra del Fuego, the Chilean government sought to achieve two familiar land-reform objectives: to provide opportunities for campesinos to earn a living from the land and to settle its southern frontier with smallholder ranches. Implicit in these goals was to change the region from one dominated by a handful of large, extensively managed estancias to one occupied by hundreds of intensively managed ranches, effectively modifying the cultural landscape. In this article we use the term "cultural landscape" in its broad sense, incorporating cultural change as well as the impact of that change on the material landscape.
Today, more than eighty years after it began, subdivision has transformed the material landscape in a manner that reflects the vision of a region dominated by smallholders: Fences and roads fragment the rangeland, and small houses pepper it. Chilean Tierra del Fuego now contains some 500 ranches, giving the impression that the land-reform plan achieved its goals.(1) But our study of land users finds otherwise: Land reform failed to achieve its socioeconomic goals--social justice, increasing land productivity, and evenly settling the landscape with smallholder ranchers and their families.(2)
The contemporary cultural landscape reflects an alternative reality to that envisioned by the government. Instead of vibrant rural communities consisting of families who live and work on the land, the landowners are largely absentee elites, and the livestock sector has been in decline for decades. Today's absentee owners value the land as much for cultural reasons as for its economic potential. Many of them are, in effect, "hobby ranchers." In contrast to those of active, professional ranchers, land-use decisions made by passive, hobby land managers are not entirely profit driven (Coppock and Birkenfeld 1999; Sayre 2004).
We position the land-reform history of Chilean Tierra del Fuego within a broader literature on the impact of land subdivision and the rise of hobby farming (although in Tierra del Fuego, ranching is the primary land use). In contexts worldwide, studies link hobby farming to amenity migration--the movement of people from urban to rural areas due to smog, land prices, or other push factors and to the pull of particular amenities, such as spectacular vistas, recreational opportunities, and land investment (McGranahan 1999; Evans, Morris, and Winter 2002; Stewart 2002; Holmes 2005; Lage 2005; Buxton and others 2006; Moss 2006b; Argent, Smailes, and Griffin 2007; Loeffler and Steinicke 2007; Wilson 2007). The amenity-migration literature often describes a transition from productivist to postproductivist or multifunctional landscapes. In other words, landscapes that supported rural livelihoods through "productive" use--farming, logging, ranching, and so forth--are giving way to new land uses introduced by landowners who value the land's amenity characteristics rather than solely its economic potential.
Reflecting familiar foci in amenity-migration research (Maestas, Knight, and Gilgert 2001; Wacker and Kelly 2004; Hansen and others 2005; Moss 2006a, 19), our case study in Tierra del Fuego explores rural cultural and biophysical landscape change, the way in which smaller land units constrain productive farming or grazing, the rise of absentee landholders, and the dominance of hobby ranching. Indeed, the transition from a landscape controlled by "professional" land managers to one dominated by hobby ranchers is one of the earliest examples worldwide. In addition, our two main goals are to expose how change dynamics in Tierra del Fuego differ from those identified in the amenity-migration literature and to demonstrate how the the incorporation of cultural change in the form of hobby ranching informs regional debates on land degradation, declining stocking rates,(3) and the role of land reform in land-system change.
The details of the historical processes that define Tierra del Fuego's landscape enrich American environmental history in an understudied part of the world. The case exposes the interplay between land reform and biophysical factors in shaping nature-society relationships. The legacies of this interplay include a built infrastructure dominated by smallholders, the entrenchment of hobby ranching, a decline in the region's overall number of sheep, and the introduction of nonnative invasive weeds. This legacy landscape continues to inform land-use decision making.
RANGELAND DEVELOPMENT AND LAND REFORM
With managed grazing land covering more than 25 percent of the global land surface (Asner and others 2004), rangelands are an important subcategory of land-system change (GLP 2005). They attract the attention of land-change and sustainability scientists largely because of concern over dryland degradation (commonly referred to as "desertification") (Puigdefabregas 1998; Gisladottir and Stocking 2005). Within the literature on rangeland environments is an equal need to understand biophysical change processes and the social conditions and decision-making rationales that underpin rangeland use and management (Sayre 2004).
Although social justice considerations factor into land-reform processes in Chile's southern rangelands, as they do in much of Latin America, Tierra del Fuego's land-reform history differs from that in other parts of the region. Relative to the literature on land reform in rangelands, the Tierra del Fuego case represents an amalgamation of two twentieth-century scenarios. The first reflects many state-directed initiatives in which largeholdings, many of which are communal, are subdivided in the hope that livestock production will become more efficient. In Kenya, for example, the state privatized ranches communally held by the Maasai. The impacts are mixed: When private owners form grazing associations, effectively maintaining economies of scale, production is sustained or improved; but when they do not, the land's carrying capacity for livestock has declined by 25 percent on small properties (Boone and others 2005, 528).
In an example that resonates with the Chilean case, Australia has experienced rangeland fragmentation due, in part, to government policies that encourage population growth. The goal is to break up land monopolies and promote rural development. But the result is often an increased emphasis on pasture improvement via sewn grasses and chemical inputs, land degradation, and property sizes that are too small to be economically viable (Stokes, McAllister, and Ash 2006).
The second land-reform scenario has links to market forces rather than government programs. Land subdivision associated with amenity migration is often found in areas in relatively close proximity to important urban centers or in those that have particularly high amenity value. As land values rise and the livestock sector declines, whether because of falling commodity prices, higher input costs, or climatic influences, largeholders subdivide their land. In perhaps the majority of cases the subdivision leads to small properties in which the owners use land for some purpose other than grazing stock. But many of the new landholders continue to put stock on the land, though from a perspective far different from that of their predecessors. We use the term "hobby ranchers" to refer to these new owners who buy or retain ownership of rural lands largely because of their cultural value. Hobby ranchers normally have significant off-farm income and hire laborers to maintain the ranch.
Although...
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