The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon

Edén, Michael; Hecht, Susanna B.; Cockburn, Alexander

doi:10.2307/635281

Cited by 15 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…First, colonization policies forcefully enacted by the military regime (1964–1985) crystallized the role of the Amazon as a resource frontier, mobilizing modern‐colonial representations of ‘demographic emptiness’ and ‘natural resourcefulness’ to define its extractivist ‘vocation’ in relation to the industrializing southeast (Monte‐Mór, 2004; Malheiro et al ., 2021). Second, these state‐led colonization efforts also comprised migration policies that aimed to alleviate pressures for agrarian reform by redirecting large masses from the interior towns and metropolitan peripheries to the Amazon with promises of free land and job opportunities (Schmink and Wood, 1992; Hecht and Cockburn, 2011). The deliberate failure of the military state to fulfill these promises set in permanent motion a mass of landless workers who move across the region following job opportunities—particularly those related to extractivism, such as mining and hydropower dams (Monte‐Mór, 2004).…”

Section: Extractivism and Extensions In Urban Amazoniamentioning

confidence: 99%

HOUSING BEYOND THE METROPOLIS: Inhabiting Extractivism and Extensions in Urban Amazonia

Castriota

2024

Int J Urban Regional Res

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This article contributes to debates on the decentering of urban research by critically examining emergent forms of housing in the mining municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil, beyond the dominant lexicons that have emerged from the country's metropolises. The notion of ‘beyond the metropolis’ is offered here as a geographically situated, conceptual placeholder that empirically grounds calls for dislocating urban research. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Canaã in 2018 and 2019, after the construction of the largest open‐pit mine in human history, which attracted tens of thousands of migrants and more than doubled Canaã's population in five years, creating a severe housing crisis. By looking closely at how regional developers, local authorities, mining giant Vale as well as Amazonian majorities came up with their own ‘solutions’ to the housing problem they faced, I foreground the role of ‘extractivism’ and ‘extensions’ in driving and shaping urbanization and inhabitation—beyond the metrocentric emphasis on agglomerative dynamics driven by industrialization and rural‐to‐urban migration. This twofold conceptual grammar grounded in non‐metropolitan Amazonia is absent from current housing debates and illustrates the generative analytical potential inherent in the move beyond the metropolis.

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Section: Extractivism and Extensions In Urban Amazoniamentioning

confidence: 99%

HOUSING BEYOND THE METROPOLIS: Inhabiting Extractivism and Extensions in Urban Amazonia

Castriota

2024

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…The theft of Hevea (the rubber tree) and its reconfiguration as plantation monocultures in Dutch and British colonies (where the tree was immune to the disease that limited its spatial intensification in Amazonian biomes) collapsed the Amazonian biome economies, stranding its workers, who would, in the end, play an interesting role in the emergent democracy movements of the 1980s. They invoked harkening the climate catastrophes, and the subsequent "unfreedoming" that attended their translocations-still vivid living memory and central to their insurgent demands for citizenship (Hecht, 2011). As ENSO's make the world hotter and its storms more intense, we can expect to see new configurations of desperation and enslavement under intensified climates, as more unbridled forms of precarity and exploitation as "displacement capitalism" and its human and planetary predations, evolves.…”

Section: An El Niño Odysseymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts

Hecht

2023

Human Geography

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Mike Davis transformed the understanding of southern California and dramatically reshaped thinking about the region in his books and many articles for New Left Review. Less well known locally is his significant impact of the approaches to urban environmental history and the large-scale effects of climate events at a global level. Davis can be seen as foundational for global environmental history in his methodology: analyzing the teleconnections and impacts of a particular climate event, (in Victorian Holocausts this was an El Nino) and then parsing out the social effects. The sever El Nino he describes was key in the disenfranchisement of millions in the Colonial worlds and the creation of new indentured and sub-proletariat populations that became the labor force for new forms of plantation agriculture, infrastructure labor, and rubber extraction in tropical forests. Davis’ work provided early historical analysis on the impacts of colonial capitalism in the creation of climate vulnerability. Both his creativity in urban environmental history and its imaginaries, and the foundational research on global climate history are extraordinary contributions.

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“…The key authors of early PE1 (e.g. Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987; Hecht & Cockburn, 1989; Watts, 1983) built on neo‐Marxist power perspectives and therefore used arguments rooted in historical materialism and political economy (Bryant & Bailey, 1997). Neo‐Marxists see indeed human agency conceptually at the center of human‐environment interactions but as constrained and substantially produced by (historically grown) social structures (Marx, 1852).…”

Section: How To Critically Analyze Resettlement In River Deltas?mentioning

confidence: 99%