Amazonia exists in our imagination as well as on the ground. It is a mysterious and powerful construct in our psyches yet shares multiple (trans)national borders and diverse ecological and cultural landscapes. It is often presented as a seemingly homogeneous place: a lush tropical jungle teeming with exotic wildlife and plant diversity, as well as the various indigenous populations that inhabit the region. Yet, since Conquest, Amazonia has been linked to the global market and, after a long and varied history of colonization and development projects, Amazonia is peopled by many distinct cultural groups who remain largely invisible to the outside world despite their increasing integration into global markets and global politics. Millions of rubber tappers, neo-native groups, peasants, river dwellers, and urban residents continue to shape and re-shape the cultural landscape as they adapt their livelihood practices and political strategies in response to changing markets and shifting linkages with political and economic actors at local, regional, national, and international levels. This book explores the diversity of changing identities and cultural landscapes emerging in different corners of this rapidly changing region. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

"In some ways, The All Consuming Nation is an autobiography of the babyboom generation since it highlights the consumer culture and rising environmental consciousness that has been central to that generation's lived experience. That should appeal to a wide audience of regular readers. Those who are sensitive to such current issues as wealth inequality, climate change, and the environmental consequences of mass consumerism will also find the book as a way to see how we reached our contemporary crisis points and possible ways to curb current excesses. The book alternates chapters on the evolving consumer economy with chapters on environmental critiques of mass consumerism. It considers the technologies that have fuelled consumption, strategies such as planned obsolescence that sustain consumption, and the shift in retailing from brick and mortar to on-line shopping. Environmental critics have viewed every shift in patterns of increasing consumption as ultimately unsustainable. Finally, the book should serve as text for post World War II surveys in American History, Environmental History, as well as business and marketing courses"--

Environmental degradation in Latin America has become one of the most pressing issues on the international agenda. The volume began to crescendo when space shuttle astronauts photographed five thousand fires on a single night in the Brazilian Amazon state of Rondonia in 1985, and grew shrill when rubbertapper Chico Mendes was shot in 1988 trying to

Mother Jones is an award-winning national magazine widely respected for its groundbreaking investigative reporting and coverage of sustainability and environmental issues.

By March 2020, COVID-19 had affected nearly every community on earth, either with infections or with mobility restrictions. Significant peer reviewed research effort has gone into understanding the virus and its spread, mainly from an epidemiological and medical perspective. Political ecologists have been somewhat critical of such analyses because of their failure to understand the sociality of COVID-19 and its emergence. They emphasise the need to look for how the virus has acted upon inclusions and exclusions and current cleavages in society despite the fact that it can potentially attack anyone anywhere. Commentaries have therefore drawn attention to the more-than-human assemblages that allowed COVID-19 to infect humans; global food chains and capitalism; and social inequalities that underpin uneven exposure and access to health care. In this Research Topic we seek papers that engage with political ecologies of COVID-19. We welcome articles that are based on empirical research in specific contexts, attempting to understand the impacts of the viral outbreak, as well as articles which lay out research agendas for political ecologies of COVID-19. What questions need to be asked? What does it mean to take a socionatural and political ecological approach? What can we learn from the state(s) response in different places? How can such analyses add to the global conversation about the pandemic?