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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmental economics > Sustainability
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Insatiable Appetite - The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Paperback, Concise Revised Edition)
Loot Price: R1,132
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Insatiable Appetite - The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Paperback, Concise Revised Edition)
Series: Exploring World History
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Now in a concise edition created expressly for students and general
readers, this widely hailed study traces the transformation of the
tropics in modern times. Exploring the central role of the United
States in the ongoing devastation of tropical lands, Richard P.
Tucker shows how, in the late 1800s, American speculators first
became participants in the centuries-long history of European
economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as
buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they
evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas
where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer
markets at home. As corporate agro-industry emerged, the
speculators took direct control of the ecological destinies of many
tropical lands. Supported by the U.S. government's diplomatic and
military protection, they built private empires in the Caribbean,
Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West
Africa. Yankee investors and plantation managers mobilized
engineers, agronomists, and loggers to undertake what they called
the "Conquest of the Tropics," claiming to bring civilization to
benighted peoples and cultivation to unproductive nature. In
competitive cooperation with local landed and political elites,
they not only cleared natural forests but also displaced multicrop
tribal and peasant lands with monocrop export plantations rooted in
private property regimes. In a masterful narrative, Tucker
highlights the unrelenting pressure that the demands of U.S.
consumerism placed on fragile tropical lands. The forced
domestication of widely varied natural systems ultimately led to a
devastating decline in biodiversity. The author brings his analysis
to life with a series of vivid case studies of sugar, bananas,
coffee, rubber, beef, and timber each a virtual empire in itself.
All readers who are interested in environmental degradation and its
links to the world economy will be enlightened by this nuanced
history."
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