Susanna B Hecht
Biographic Data
| ID | 107791 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanna B Hecht |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanna B |
| FAMILY NAME | Hecht |
| SIGNATURE | HECHT S B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4345-792X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 549 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Separating the cows from the cacao in the Brazilian Amazon: Institutional pathways of smallholder landscape transformation
Behind the Myth: Land Sparing and Deforestation in Brazil
The land sparing model, that is, the idea that agricultural intensification fosters environmental protection, lacks empirical validation. In Brazil, sustainable intensification through the conversion of degraded pastures into agricultural areas became a promising and widespread solution to deforestation. We investigate the mismatch between the land sparing discourse and the reality of productive and territorial strategies of large soybean produce…
Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system
The possibility that the Amazon forest system could soon reach a tipping point, inducing large-scale collapse, has raised global concern 1–3 . For 65 million years, Amazonian forests remained relatively resilient to climatic variability. Now, the region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system 1 . Long existing feedbacks bet…
Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815-1821
The 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora triggered a subsistence crisis in Europe, especially in Switzerland. This article retraces the founding of Nova Friburgo, a colony in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro composed of several hundred Swiss families, mostly from the rural canton of Fribourg. This study shows how the unusual central European settler migration to the Brazilian tropics was facilitated by a new class of entrepreneu…
Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts
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 a…
Archaeology and ethnography demonstrate a human origin for Amazonian Dark Earths
Archaeological research provides clear evidence that the widespread formation of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical lowland South America was concentrated in the Late Holocene, an outcome of sharp demographic growth that peaked towards 1000 BP. In their recent paper, however, Silva et al. propose that the high fertility of ADE is not of anthropic origin but instead the result of alluvial deposition starting in the Middle Holocene (8200-4200…
Tradescapes’ in the forest: Framing infrastructure’s relation to territory, commodities, and flows
Porque a Amazônia Brasileira está em chamas
.
Why the Brazilian Amazon Burns
The policies and collaborations between governments and civil society that kept forests standing in many parts of Amazonia have come to an end, at least for now
From “Green Hell” to “Amazonia Legal”: Land use models and the re-imagination of the rainforest as a new development frontier
Beyond Fordlândia: An Environmental Account of Henry Ford’s Adventure in the Amazon . Directed by Marcos Colón. Amazonia Latitude Films, 2017. 75 Minutes
Firing up: Policy, politics and polemics under new and old burning regimes
Changing fire regimes in the context of climate change call for new understandings of their diversity, use, policies, practices and politics. While catastrophic fires are redoubling calls for suppression, new political ecologies debate fire prohibition politics and emphasise understanding and incorporating local knowledge into management decisions. Latin American countries are characterised by strong regional tensions associated with environmenta…
Harnessing cross-border resources to confront climate change
Europe and the people without history
What is the scale of the Mediterranean? It is the scale of history ... -Fernand Braudel ([1949] 1996)The impact of Eric Wolf's work is so extensive, and has been so naturalized in critical studies o
Chapter 10. Trees have Already been Invented: Carbon in Woodlands
In the developed world, discussions of climate change mitigation and adaptation tend to focus on technological solutions such as decarbonizing electric grids and regulating emissions of methane, black carbon, and so on. However, an often overlooked strategy for reaching greenhouse gas reduction targets in much of the developing world is rooted, not in new technologies, but in vegetation management. Trees and other vegetation absorb carbon as they…
Heather F. Roller. Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil
Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900, written by Andrew Sluyter
Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: Globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America
Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities - serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products - and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the …
Between the devil and the deep blue sea: A meditation on Nietschmann’s cultural ecology and politics of history
Smallholders, forest management and rural development in the Amazon
The wry advice Brazilians always advance to novice researchers is that ‘Amazonia isn't for beginners’. The implication is that there are a lot of invisibilities, covert pathways and dynamics that m
The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence
Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: The Woodland 'Green Revolution
Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence - increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands - is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now…
The new Amazon geographies: Insurgent citizenship, "Amazon Nation" and the politics of environmentalisms
This article reviews the main themes-we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation-elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonia's role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernis…
Agricultural intensification and changes in cultivated areas, 1970–2005
Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensificat…
The new rurality: Globalization, peasants and the paradoxes of landscapes
Environment, development and politics: Capital accumulation and the livestock sector in Eastern Amazonia
Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: Globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America
Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities - serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products - and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the …
The new rurality: Globalization, peasants and the paradoxes of landscapes
Globalization, Forest Resurgence, and Environmental Politics in El Salvador
Soybeans, Development and Conservation on the Amazon Frontier
Bolivia's rate of deforestation throughout the 1990s was among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin. This drastic clearing stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow rates of landscape change that had prevailed in previous decades. This article reviews the models used for explaining deforestation, and argues that the new context of globalization, structural adjustment, regional integration and rapid technological change contributed to …
Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: The Woodland 'Green Revolution
Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence - increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands - is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now…
The new Amazon geographies: Insurgent citizenship, "Amazon Nation" and the politics of environmentalisms
This article reviews the main themes-we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation-elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonia's role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernis…
The Subsidy from Nature: Shifting Cultivation, Successional Palm Forests, and Rural Development
This paper outlines the importance of the small-scale extractive sector to extremely impoverished households in rural areas of tropical Brazil. Extractive activities are important as inputs to household reproduction, and are critical as a source of cash income. In the case study we analyze, small-scale extraction was roughly equivalent to wage labor and to agriculture in its contribution to household income. We suggest that in rural development a…
The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon
Amazonia: Agriculture and Land Use Research
Firing up: Policy, politics and polemics under new and old burning regimes
Changing fire regimes in the context of climate change call for new understandings of their diversity, use, policies, practices and politics. While catastrophic fires are redoubling calls for suppression, new political ecologies debate fire prohibition politics and emphasise understanding and incorporating local knowledge into management decisions. Latin American countries are characterised by strong regional tensions associated with environmenta…
Factories, Forests, Fields and Family: Gender and Neoliberalism in Extractive Reserves
This paper explores the theoretical debates on extraction and development in Amazonia, and the emergence of extractive reserves (ERs) as a tropical development alternative. It reviews the role of women in Amazonian rural economies and then analyzes the (often invisible) tasks of women within the reserves through an analysis of the gender division of labour in the collecting and processing of non-timber forest products and agriculture. It then con…
From “Green Hell” to “Amazonia Legal”: Land use models and the re-imagination of the rainforest as a new development frontier
Regional Development: Some Comments on the Discourse in Latin America
A recent issue of Society and Space was concerned with regional planning in Latin America. The papers focused either on sweepingly macrolevel analysis or on local community-based development strategies. This paper is an outline of some of the problems with this discourse as it was presented in the journal, and it is suggested that both groups have neglected the theoretical, empirical, and practical importance of ‘middle level’ analyses. It is at …
Realpolitik, Reality and Rhetoric in Rio
As Rio prepared for the 1992 Earth Summit by paving the road to the airport and placing in detention the young street kids regularly assassinated by death squads, the inhabitants of Rio, one of Brazil's most depressed cities in a disintegrating economy, positioned themselves for the windfall of 30000 participants in need of services ranging from taxis to transvestites. The Rio conference was one where the average citizen was excluded in no uncert…
Tradescapes’ in the forest: Framing infrastructure’s relation to territory, commodities, and flows
Defenders of the Amazon
The conflict between developoment, ecology and the rights of forest dwellers in the Amazon region has resulted in deadly violence
Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815-1821
The 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora triggered a subsistence crisis in Europe, especially in Switzerland. This article retraces the founding of Nova Friburgo, a colony in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro composed of several hundred Swiss families, mostly from the rural canton of Fribourg. This study shows how the unusual central European settler migration to the Brazilian tropics was facilitated by a new class of entrepreneu…
Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts
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 a…
The Last Unfinished Page of Genesis: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon
A preocupação de Euclides da Cunha com o meio ambiente, a economia política e a justiça social situa sua obra no âmbito daquilo que atualmente denomina-se ecologia política. Embora haja sempre o perigo de que a "escola" intelectual de hoje se torne a moda ultrapassada de ontem, a abordagem da Ecologia Política vem demonstrando grande longevidade. Nesse sentido, a obra amazônica de Euclides da Cunha é particularmente importante, devido à sua ênfas…
Amazonia: Agriculture and Land Use Research
Environment, development and politics: Capital accumulation and the livestock sector in Eastern Amazonia
Regional Development: Some Comments on the Discourse in Latin America
A recent issue of Society and Space was concerned with regional planning in Latin America. The papers focused either on sweepingly macrolevel analysis or on local community-based development strategies. This paper is an outline of some of the problems with this discourse as it was presented in the journal, and it is suggested that both groups have neglected the theoretical, empirical, and practical importance of ‘middle level’ analyses. It is at …
The Subsidy from Nature: Shifting Cultivation, Successional Palm Forests, and Rural Development
This paper outlines the importance of the small-scale extractive sector to extremely impoverished households in rural areas of tropical Brazil. Extractive activities are important as inputs to household reproduction, and are critical as a source of cash income. In the case study we analyze, small-scale extraction was roughly equivalent to wage labor and to agriculture in its contribution to household income. We suggest that in rural development a…
The fate of the forest: Developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon
Defenders of the Amazon
The conflict between developoment, ecology and the rights of forest dwellers in the Amazon region has resulted in deadly violence
The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon
The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon
Realpolitik, Reality and Rhetoric in Rio
As Rio prepared for the 1992 Earth Summit by paving the road to the airport and placing in detention the young street kids regularly assassinated by death squads, the inhabitants of Rio, one of Brazil's most depressed cities in a disintegrating economy, positioned themselves for the windfall of 30000 participants in need of services ranging from taxis to transvestites. The Rio conference was one where the average citizen was excluded in no uncert…
The Logic of Livestock and Deforestation in Amazonia
Susanna B. Hecht; The Logic of Livestock and Deforestation in Amazonia: Considering land markets, value of ancillaries, the larger macroeconomic context, and in
Development or Destruction: The Conversion of Tropical Forest to Pasture in Latin America
This interdisciplinary study focuses on the effects of forest destruction in Latin America, caused by the expansion of cattle production into these seemingly under-utilized areas. The high ecological and social costs are analyzed from the perspective of several disciplines, including anthropology, animal science, the environmental sciences, forestry and natural resource economics. The contributors explore the dynamics of cattle production, its so…
Indigenous Soil Management and the Creation of Amazonian Dark Earths: Implications of Kayapó Practice
Globalization, Forest Resurgence, and Environmental Politics in El Salvador
Soybeans, Development and Conservation on the Amazon Frontier
Bolivia's rate of deforestation throughout the 1990s was among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin. This drastic clearing stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow rates of landscape change that had prevailed in previous decades. This article reviews the models used for explaining deforestation, and argues that the new context of globalization, structural adjustment, regional integration and rapid technological change contributed to …
Cultural Survival In Post-Contact Amazonia
distance trade networks, sizable settlements, mound building, extensive raised-field systems and other earthworks, and enormous cumulative areas of anthropogenically enriched soils has long been known (Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger 2001). Adherents of the environmental determinist or pristine landscape schools either ignored or dismissively explained away this evidence. As Mann indicates, research findings over the last few decades have more …
Globalization and Forest Resurgence: Changes in Forest Cover in El Salvador
Globalization is often associated with deforestation, but its impacts on forest recovery are less known. We analyzed socioeconomic data, land-use surveys, and satellite imagery to monitor changes in woody cover in El Salvador from the early 1990s to the present. Even where rural population density exceeded 250 people per square kilometer, we documented a 22% increase in the area with more than 30% tree cover, and a 7% increase in the area with mo…
Factories, Forests, Fields and Family: Gender and Neoliberalism in Extractive Reserves
This paper explores the theoretical debates on extraction and development in Amazonia, and the emergence of extractive reserves (ERs) as a tropical development alternative. It reviews the role of women in Amazonian rural economies and then analyzes the (often invisible) tasks of women within the reserves through an analysis of the gender division of labour in the collecting and processing of non-timber forest products and agriculture. It then con…
Kayapó Savanna Management: Fire, Soils, and Forest Islands in a Threatened Biome
A nova ruralidade: Globalização, Camponeses E Os Paradoxos Das Paisagens
O desmatamento ocupa a maior parte das manchetes da imprensa, mas também há processos de expansãoflorestal espalhados pela América Latina que não têm a mesma visibilidade. Este artigo explora o porquêdeste processo ser tão invisível e discute algumas das teorias utilizadas para se entender a recuperaçãoflorestal. O artigo também examina uma série de estudos de caso. A globalização desempenha um papelcada vez mais importante na estruturação das ec…
The Last Unfinished Page of Genesis: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon
A preocupação de Euclides da Cunha com o meio ambiente, a economia política e a justiça social situa sua obra no âmbito daquilo que atualmente denomina-se ecologia política. Embora haja sempre o perigo de que a "escola" intelectual de hoje se torne a moda ultrapassada de ontem, a abordagem da Ecologia Política vem demonstrando grande longevidade. Nesse sentido, a obra amazônica de Euclides da Cunha é particularmente importante, devido à sua ênfas…
Agricultural intensification and changes in cultivated areas, 1970–2005
Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensificat…
The new rurality: Globalization, peasants and the paradoxes of landscapes
The new Amazon geographies: Insurgent citizenship, "Amazon Nation" and the politics of environmentalisms
This article reviews the main themes-we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation-elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonia's role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernis…
The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence
Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: The Woodland 'Green Revolution
Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence - increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands - is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now…
Geography (32 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (31 works) · Ecology (21 works) · Amazon rainforest (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (14 works) · Agroforestry (13 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Biology (13 works) · Ecology (13 works)