The Future Of Amazonia

The future of Brazilian Amazonia, the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, hangs in the balance. Two decades of destructive development have provoked violent struggles for control over the region's resources, with disastrous social and environmental consequences. This multi-disciplinary collection reviews past experience but focusses on the latest phase of Amazonian settlement. Chapters by leading authorities examine such issues as colonisation in the most recent frontier areas, multinational mining projects, hydro-electric schemes, and the military occupation of Brazil's borders. After demonstrating how new government and business activities have exacerbated social tensions and ecological destruction, the volume considers alternative, more sustainable strategies.

The future of Brazilian Amazonia, the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, hangs in the balance. Two decades of destructive development have provoked violent struggles for control over the region's resources, with disastrous social and environmental consequences. This multi-disciplinary collection reviews past experience but focusses on the latest phase of Amazonian settlement. Chapters by leading authorities examine such issues as colonisation in the most recent frontier areas, multinational mining projects, hydro-electric schemes, and the military occupation of Brazil's borders. After demonstrating how new government and business activities have exacerbated social tensions and ecological destruction, the volume considers alternative, more sustainable strategies.

Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman’s place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.

This book presents an original and exciting study on Amazonia and ecological issues. It analyzes the main contemporary polemics from the perspective of culture and the nature sciences.

This timely book provides the first examination of the relationship between cultural and environmental variation in the Amazon, with special reference to the survival and welfare of indigenous societies. The particular strength of this collection is that it emphasizes ongoing changing elements rather than static ones in Amazonian human ecology in the context of colonization. Leslie Sponsel and twelve other contributors, including archaeologists, biological anthropologists, cultural ecologists, and nutritionists, review traditional and changing adaptations of indigenous societies to Amazonian ecosystems; they analyze the challenges presented to indigenes by the massive cultural and environmental impact of Westernization. They also discuss the applications of research results to the needs, interests, and priorities of indigenous societies. In his concluding chapter, Sponsel calls for anthropologists to contribute through their research to the empowerment of indigenous communities and organizations. "In the Amazon the only people who already know and practice ecologically sound economies are most indigenous societies. Documenting their ecologically sound values, knowledge, and technology is one of the most important tasks for cultural ecology".

A title that sets out how the Amazon Basin's indigenous self-determination meets corporate profiteering, where the future of natural resource stewardship is hotly debated, where subsistence living, extreme poverty, and the vagaries of the international commodities markets are revealed.

Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman’s place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.

Barbosa (sociology, San Francisco State University) provides a global, world-systemic analysis of the problem of deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He shows how changes in global ecopolitics demanding sustainable development, coupled with the onset of democracy in Brazil, substantially altered the battle over the future of Amazonia. He describes deforestation in the region in the context of an expanding frontier of global capitalism, and compares Amazon experiences with those of Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Indonesia.