Forest and poverty: A historical evidence of the relationship between social inequality and environmental harm

Abstract

This is a case study that analyzes the relationship between forest management and sustainability of forests in the long term. Our research is based on analysis of the of management decisions adopted by the Council of Tenerife in the administration of the public mountains of the island between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and describes the impoverishment of rural communities in the eighteenth century as a result of the crisis in the wine exports, and the severe deforestation caused by forest overexploitation. This study confirms the need to investigate the relationship between natural resource management and sustainability from a "micro" approach to specify how the interests of the institutions that manage public resources affect their evolution. Attributing the deforestation of the mountains of Tenerife to the rural poor, as it has been doing, is not only unfair, it is also wrong.