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.

Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come.

'An easily read book illuminating the multifarious process of environmental degradation, as well as the motley social movements, especially on a grass-root level, resisting the privatisation of common resources and ecological degradation on both a local and global level.' Capital & ClassTackling the key themes - such as the convergence of environment and social justice, global commodities, and the role of social movements - the contributors draw on examples from the Amazon, Mexico, Cameroon, India and the industrialised North.

Hardly a day passes without journalists, policymakers, academics, or scientists calling attention to the worldwide scale of the environmental crisis confronting humankind. While climate change has generated the greatest alarm in recent years, other global problems-desertification, toxic pollution, species extinctions, drought, and deforestation, to name just a few-loom close behind. The scope of the most pressing environmental problems far exceeds the capacity of individual nation-states, much less smaller political entities. To compound these problems, economic globalization, the growth of non-governmental activist groups, and the accelerating flow of information have fundamentally transformed the geopolitical landscape. Despite the new urgency of these challenges, however, they are not without historical precedent. As this book shows, nation-states have long sought agreements to manage migratory wildlife, just as they have negotiated conventions governing the exploitation of rivers and other bodies of water. Similarly, nation-states have long attempted to control resources beyond their borders, to impose their standards of proper environmental exploitation on others, and to draw on expertise developed elsewhere to cope with environmental problems at home. This collection examines this little-understood history, providing case studies and context to inform ongoing debates.

This volume provides an ample overview of state-of-the-art understanding of the multi-dimensional phenomenon of migration, in the characterisation of migration drivers, in environmental and agro-economic case studies and modelling issues as well as socio-political analyses. The analysis is geared to the consequences of climatic change, and the effects on soil, water and extreme weather that will drive populations to migrate.