Saving a rainforest and losing the world : conservation and displacement in the global tropics / Gregory M. Thaler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thaler, Gregory M., author.

Series:

Yale agrarian studies

Yale agrarian studies series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rain forest conservation--Amazon River Region.

Rain forest conservation.

Rain forest conservation--Indonesia.

Rain forest conservation--Bolivia.

Capitalism--Environmental aspects.

Capitalism.

Amazon River Region.

Indonesia.

Bolivia.

Physical Description:

xi, 296 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Conservation and displacement in the global tropics

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Offers an investigation of the false promises of land sparing, exposing how its illusory successes mask the failures of green capitalism. For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. But that land sparing promise is false. Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, this book traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Gregory M. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. The failure of land sparing exposes a harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Extraction: Plundering the periphery in Indonesian Borneo. Overview: Extractive regimes

1. Four hundred years of extraction

2. Deforesting the "Green Province"

3. Losing the forest, sparing the trees

Reflection: Green at last?

Production: A modernist transition in the Brazilian Amazon. An Amazonian success story

4. The Amazonian extractive economy

5. The logic of Brazilian land sparing

6. Greening the soy complex in Nova Ubiratã

7. Development and dispossession in São Félix do Xingu

Reflection: A day of fire

Displacement: "Brasileros" on the Bolivian frontier. The vortex of development

8. "The country jumps the fence"

9. San Ignacio de Velasco: from the lost world to the Zebu capital

Reflections: Feedbacks and false solutions

Epilogue: Alibis of ecocide

Appendix: Deforestation rates in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780300272482

0300272480

9780300272505

0300272502

OCLC:

1395421750