Unpacking El Salvador's ecological predicament: Theoretical templates and “long-view” ecologies

El Salvador is both the most densely populated and the most severely deforested country in the continental Americas. The convergence of these two facts leads inevitably to questions of Malthusian resource scarcity, Boserupian agricultural intensification, and the population-environment debate. Despite compelling evidence for demographic causes of land degradation and biological simplification, much of the recent work on the environmental problems in El Salvador has focused on the role of unequal access to resources in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lost in this discourse is any serious consideration of rural land use trajectories through time, including changing food production strategies and fuelwood resource availability. Paleoecological data, together with early historical accounts of Salvadoran landscapes, show that humans-and specifically subsistence farmers-played a central role in shaping the ecology of El Salvador beginning around 4000 years ago. It is argued that the anthropogenic deforestation of El Salvador should be conceptualized not solely as the outcome of a post-colonial unidirectional economic transformation, but instead as a dynamic historical cultural-ecological process that has repeatedly waxed and waned over the last several millennia. It is argued that the lasting imprint of this long history of pressure on forest resources in the country has resulted in dramatic losses of forest cover and biodiversity.