Amazonia, long consigned to a kind of fantasy world of wildlands and wild men, is now at planetary tipping point. The news is awash now with scenes of incandescent landscapes of crackling forests, indigenous martyrs, and the bovine imperialism of cattle ranching and implacable leaders who shrug at the increasingly exponential rates of clearing. Amazonia is now also a sort of natural experiment (in the multiple meanings of the term) on forms of governance and socio-environmental outcomes. Here is the experiment: from the period of 2004 to 2012, deforestation dropped by 80%, due to a range of factors: institutions, regulations, monitoring, new forms of governance and enforcement of multiple scales and alliances. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 inaugurated a rapid dismantling of the complex protective apparatus that had successfully reined in the ongoing socio-ecocide and accelerated an even more chaotic set of transformations. How was this achieved? It was not, I argue, just a new form of state engagement or lack of it, but emergent transformation of legalities in the laws related to nature engendered through recasting the roles and the rights of Amazonia in political economic life, a new discursive regime rooted in Christian nationalism, and shifts from "states of knowledge" to a necropolitics of indifference to the complex and widespread externalities that the clandestine, extractive, and agroindustrial economies have unleashed. Regardless of the election result: Jair or Lula, strong path dependencies are now in place, and not all dynamics are reversible. Amazonian alchemy does produce a lot of gold, but also involves the immense transmutation of matter mostly into green house gases, and now produces landscape death elixirs of mercurial toxins and glyphosate. This alchemy has severe implications for the Amazon tipping point, where it can flip in large areas to a more savanna biome, but also, as one of the five key planetary climate tipping points---and the only one mostly inhabited by humans, it has serious implications for our planetary future.
Speaker bio:
Susanna Hecht is a specialist on tropical development in Latin America, especially the Amazon Basin and Central America. Her research focuses on the political economies of development ranging from corporate frontiers of cattle and export commodity agriculture (like soy, oil palm) to populist land occupation. She also studies their comparative environmental and social impacts. She also explores alternatives to destructive development, and analyses the forms of conservation in inhabited landscapes whether through indigenous technologies, non timber extractive products, niche markets as well as new tenurial forms (such as extractive reserves), social movements and globalization, including the role of remittances and migratory networks in reshaping rural land uses. The impacts of emerging green markets and greenhouse gas offsets for smaller scale farmers also form part of her research concerns.
As one of the founders of the analytic approach known as Political Ecology, Dr Hecht has been engaged in understanding the theoretical and institutional dynamics that underpin deforestation and its alternatives. To this end she has integrated macropolitics into an understanding of local outcomes, but also explores the contributions that local processes can make to understanding and developing solutions to large scale problems.
Dr Hecht is the recipient of the David Livingstone Medal from the American Geographical Society, and the Carl O. Sauer Award. Her books have won numerous prizes, most recently her book, Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha won the Best Book in Environmental History from the American Historical Association.