Search

Objective/Context: This article explains how the Sierra de La Macarena Biological Reserve, which marked the beginning of the new state responsibility of caring for nature in Colombia, was conceived and then created by law in 1948. Additionally, this paper reconstructs the first decade of its existence. Methodology: This research is based on archival documents, historic publications and secondary sources, which allow us to understand the ideas about nature that guided such history and the concrete processes that characterized it. Originality: This article studies the process of State formation from a territorial and environmental perspective, bringing together political and environmental history, and pointing at new avenues of inquiry in both fields. Conclusions: The beginnings of a new state responsibility of caring for nature depended on previous developments of the state itself, particularly on the efforts to deal with tropical diseases. Therefore, an area of state activity devoted to insure the well-being of the population served as the basis for the inceptive development of another. This issue was, however, not entirely national. Global scientific networks, including medical doctors, entomologists and geologists, together with an innovative technology, aviation, also played a crucial role. The research station that was conceived along with the reserve to support long-term research was partly impaired by La Violencia of the 1950s. Instead, scientists carried out several expeditions that contributed to turn La Macarena into national patrimony, at least in the minds of some Colombians. Given that aspirations well exceeded the achievements, the definitive emergence of this area of state performance had to wait a few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how different groups valued the natural resources in the region of the San Jorge River over the course of the twentieth century. Some people saw them as pantry of natural resources for the taking while other warned of their over-exploitation. In the case of fishing, resource conflicts date back to at least the eighteenth century. The role of the state in this work is seen as a historic, characterized by its desire to foment economic development without taking the past into account and, even less, without trying to establish what might happen in the future. This has led to the current crisis of alarming proportions in the region's fisheries as well as a decline in the living conditions of local residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]