Guardians Of The Brazilian Amazon Rainforest Environmental Organizations And Development

The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil’s position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil’s effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.

The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil’s position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil’s effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.

The aim of this book is to analyse the current development scenario in the Amazon, using Terra Preta de Índio as a case study. To do so it is necessary to go back in time, both in the national and international sphere, through the second half of the last century to analyse its trajectory. It will be equally important analyse the current issues regarding the Amazon – sustainable development and climate change – and how they still reproduce some of the problems that marked the history of the forest, such as the absence of Amazonian dark earths as a relevant theme to the Amazon. ​In a world in which the environment gains each time more space in the national and international political agenda, the Amazon stands out. Known around the world for its richness, the South-American forest is the target of different visions, often contradictory ones, and it plays with everyone’s imagination. This is where the terra preta de índio – Amazonian Dark Earths - are found, a fertile soil horizon with high concentrations of carbon with anthropic origins, which has generated great interest from the scientific community. Studies on these soils and their so singular characteristics have triggered crucial discussions on the past, present and the future of the entire Amazon region. Despite its singular characteristics, the importance of Amazonian Dark Earths – and a history of a more productive and populated Amazon – was hidden since its discovery around 1880 until 1980, when it is possible to identify the beginning of an increase in the number of research on these soil horizons. These hundred years between the first records and the beginning of the increase in the interest around these soils witnessed structural changes both in the national arena, with the military dictatorship and a change in the place of the Amazon within internal affairs, and in the international arena with changes that reshaped the role of the environment in the political and scientific agendas and the role of Brazil in the global context.

In Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon, Ed Atkins focuses on how local, national, and international civil society groups have resisted the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric projects in Brazil. In doing so, Atkins explores how contemporary opposition to hydropower projects demonstrate a form of ‘contested sustainability’ that highlights the need for sustainable energy transitions to take more into account than merely greenhouse gas emissions. The assertion that society must look to successfully transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources often appears assured in contemporary environmental governance. However, what is less certain is who decides which forms of energy are deemed ‘sustainable.’ Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon explores one process in which the sustainability of a ‘green’ energy source is contested. It focuses on how civil society actors have both challenged and reconfigured dominant pro-dam assertions that present the hydropower schemes studied as renewable energy projects that contribute to sustainable development agendas. The volume also examines in detail how anti-dam actors act to render visible the political interests behind a project, whilst at the same time linking the resistance movement to wider questions of contemporary environmental politics. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, sustainable energy transitions, environmental justice, environmental governance, and development studies.

Increasing concern over the environment in the past decade has incited new attempts at policy-making. International organisations and environmental NGOs play substantial roles. When Brazilian President Cardoso signed a decree in January 1996 allowing interested parties more leeway in filing injunctions against the demarcation of indigenous areas, he was attacked on all sides. National and international NGOs and the European Parliament protested, and requested that the World Bank, the European Union and the G7 take measures. As the environmental issues becomes more important in international politics, vested political and economic interests are threatened.

Sustainable development is often thought of as a product that can be obtained by following a prescribed course of interventions. Rather than conceptualizing it as a sweet spot of economic, ecological, and social balance, sustainable development is an ongoing process of embroilments requiring constant negotiation of often-competing aims. Sustainable development politics yield highly uneven results among different members of society and different geographic areas. As this book argues, such imbalances mean that sustainable development processes often prioritize economic over environmental goals, perpetuating and reinforcing economic and political inequalities. Governing the Rainforest looks at development and conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, where the government and corporate interests bump up against those of environmentalists and local populations. This book asks why sustainable development continues to be such a powerful and influential idea in the region, and what impact it has had on various political and economic interests and geographic areas. In other words, as Eve Z. Bratman argues, sustainable development is a political practice in itself. This book offers detailed case study analysis, including of the creation of vast conservation corridors, the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, and new forms of land settlement projects. Based on a decade of Bratman's ethnographic fieldwork throughout Brazil, and particularly along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Governing the Rainforest offers a fresh take on sustainable development within a multi-level analysis of actors, discourses, and practices.

This book brings together a valuable collection of case studies and conceptual approaches that outline the present state of Amazonia in the 21st century. The many problems are described and the benefits, as well as the achievements of regional development are also discussed. The book focuses on three themes for discussion and recommendations: indigenous peoples, their home (the forest), and the way(s) to protect and sustain their natural home (biodiversity conservation). Using these three themes this volume offers a comprehensive critical review of the facts that have been the reality of Amazonia and fills a gap in the literature.The book will appeal to scholars, professors and practitioners. An outstanding group of experienced researchers and individuals with detailed knowledge of the proposed themes have produced chapters on an array of inter-related issues to demonstrate the current situation and future prospects of Amazonia. Issues investigated and debated include: territorial management; indigenous territoriality and land demarcation; ethnodevelopment; indigenous higher education and capacity building; natural resource appropriation; food security and traditional knowledge; megadevelopmental projects; indigenous acculturation; modernization of Amazonia and its regional integration; anthropogenic interventions; protected areas and conservation; political ecology; postcolonial issues, and the sustainability of Amazonia.

A multi-disciplinary team of authors analyze the economics of Brazilian deforestation using a large data set of ecological and economic variables. They survey the most up to date work in this field and present their own dynamic and spatial econometric analysis based on municipality level panel data spanning the entire Brazilian Amazon from 1970 to 1996. By observing the dynamics of land use change over such a long period the team is able to provide quantitative estimates of the long-run economic costs and benefits of both land clearing and government policies such as road building. The authors find that some government policies, such as road paving in already highly settled areas, are beneficial both for economic development and for the preservation of forest, while other policies, such as the construction of unpaved roads through virgin areas, stimulate wasteful land uses to the detriment of both economic growth and forest cover.