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Soy in South America constitutes one of the most spectacular booms
of agro-industrial commodity production in the world. It is the
pinnacle of modernist agro-industrial practices, serving as a key
nexus in food-feed-fuel production that underpins the
agribusiness-conservationist discourse of "land sparing" through
intensification. Yet soy production is implicated in multiple
problems beyond deforestation, ranging from pesticide drift and
contamination to social exclusion and conflicts in frontier zones,
to concentration of wealth and income among the largest landowners
and corporations. This book explores in depth the complex dynamics
of soy production from its diverse social settings to its
transnational connections, examining the politics of commodity and
knowledge production, the role of the state, and the reach of
corporate power in everyday life across soy landscapes in South
America. Ultimately, the collection encourages us to search and
struggle for agroecological alternatives through which we may
overcome the pitfalls of this massive transnational capitalist
agro-industry. This book was originally published as a special
issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature
face--including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation--are
the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these
assumptions into question, revealing forests' past, present, and
future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and
cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these
forces--from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems--has
masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence,
even in the forests of the tropics. Focusing on the history and
current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, The Social Lives
of Forests attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at
the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters
covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in
now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and
knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the
unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores
forests as places of significant human action, with complex
institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these
landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain
forests to timber farms, the face of forests--how we define,
understand, and maintain them--is changing.
Soy in South America constitutes one of the most spectacular booms
of agro-industrial commodity production in the world. It is the
pinnacle of modernist agro-industrial practices, serving as a key
nexus in food-feed-fuel production that underpins the
agribusiness-conservationist discourse of "land sparing" through
intensification. Yet soy production is implicated in multiple
problems beyond deforestation, ranging from pesticide drift and
contamination to social exclusion and conflicts in frontier zones,
to concentration of wealth and income among the largest landowners
and corporations. This book explores in depth the complex dynamics
of soy production from its diverse social settings to its
transnational connections, examining the politics of commodity and
knowledge production, the role of the state, and the reach of
corporate power in everyday life across soy landscapes in South
America. Ultimately, the collection encourages us to search and
struggle for agroecological alternatives through which we may
overcome the pitfalls of this massive transnational capitalist
agro-industry. This book was originally published as a special
issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
The fortunes of the late nineteenth century's imperial and
industrial powers depended on a single raw material - rubber - with
only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for
the Amazon, a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France,
Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new
nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest's riches. In
the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer,
journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil's
most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest
reaches of the river, among the world's most valuable, dangerous,
and little-known landscapes. "The Scramble for the Amazon" tells
the story of da Cunha's terrifying journey, the unfinished novel
born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for
both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a
beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving
migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his
masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy,
biology, and journalism he named "the Lost Paradise". Da Cunha
intended his epic to unveil the Amazon's explorers, spies, natives,
and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never
completed it - his wife's lover shot him dead upon his return. At
once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle
of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon,
and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha's
project, "The Scramble for the Amazon" is a work of thrilling
intellectual ambition.
The Amazon rain forest covers more than five million square
kilometers, amid the territories of nine different nations. It
represents over half of the planet's remaining rain forests. But is
it truly in peril? And what steps are necessary to save it? To
understand the future of Amazonia, one must know how its history
was forged: in the eras of large pre-Columbian populations, in the
gold rush of conquistadors, in centuries of slavery, in the schemes
of Brazil's military dictators in the 1960s and 1970s, and in new
globalized economies where Brazilian soy and beef now dominate,
while the market in carbon credits raises the value of standing
forest. Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn show in compelling
detail the panorama of destruction as it unfolded and also reveal
the extraordinary turnaround that is now taking place, thanks to
both social movements and the emergence of new environmental
markets. Exploring the role of human hands in destroying - and
saving - this vast, forested region, "The Fate of the Forest"
pivots on the murder of Chico Mendes, the legendary labor and
environmental organizer assassinated after successful
confrontations with big ranchers. A multifaceted portrait of Eden
under siege, complete with a new preface and afterword by the
authors, this book demonstrates that those who would hold a mirror
up to nature must first learn the lessons offered by some of their
own people.
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