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Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
“Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.” —The Washington Post As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
"A thoughtful treatise on how popular representations of nature, through entertainment and tourism, shape how we imagine environmental problems and their solutions"--Provided by publisher.
Barbosa (sociology, San Francisco State University) provides a global, world-systemic analysis of the problem of deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He shows how changes in global ecopolitics demanding sustainable development, coupled with the onset of democracy in Brazil, substantially altered the battle over the future of Amazonia. He describes deforestation in the region in the context of an expanding frontier of global capitalism, and compares Amazon experiences with those of Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Focuses on international commerce as the greatest threat to the world's rain forests. Argues that no single industry or activity is to blame for deforestation, but that the ways in which consumers around the world spend and invest comprises a web of interests that lead to the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of habitats. Advocates consumer behavior meant to curtail the destruction.
An unflinching 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.
Through a series of case studies from around the world, Capitalism and Conservation presents a critique of conservation's role as a central driver of global capitalism. Features innovative new research on case studies on the connections between capitalism and conservation drawn from all over the world Examines some of our most popular leisure pursuits and consumption habits to uncover the ways they drive and deepen global capitalism Reveals the increase in intensity and variety of forms of capitalist conservation throughout the world
"Biotraffic delves into the complex world of biological resource trade, taking readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid 'homeland' turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, revealing the plant's transformation from a contested tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe to a modern-day remedy for the common cold. Linking past and present, the story of the pelargonium trade encapsulates a larger tale about colonial legacies and the fraught effects of global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs, government officials, and chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book's analysis extends beyond the mere extraction and commercialization of plant resources, offering a critical examination of how demand for these therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. In doing so, Biotraffic illuminates the multilayered dynamics of a global trade that not only exploits but also reconfigures the sociopolitical fabric of a region grappling with the afterlives of apartheid and the contemporary challenges of environmental and economic justice"--
In today's vernacular, Marx outed capitalism well over a century ago, but his explanation has been both ignored and misinterpreted by not only his detractors but also by many socialists and even a considerable number of Marxists as well. Today we are experiencing the full impact and suffering the repercussions of capitalism's inherent need to become, more than ever before, a fully internationalized and integrated system of socio-economic control and domination--the global system that many commentators have suddenly remembered Marx and Engels (1848) presciently forecasted in the Communist Manifesto. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy was triumphantly proclaimed. The Cold War was over, and we were promised a lasting peace. But as we enter the third millennium, we are facing escalating social divisions, injustice, and oppression, with an environment in varying stages of ecological decay. Daily we are bombarded by the schizoid media images of capitalism's extremes on television news: the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of some of the thousands suffering famine, or the millions living in the world's slums, and then the gleaming, yet vacuous smile and sumptuously adorned figure of some extravagant, wealthy individual who is one of the select members of the global upper-class. Are we becoming conditioned to accept such contrasts and regard them as normal and inevitable at a time when we have the potential to eliminate scarcity and eradicate human deprivation? The author argues that critical education is needed to form a movement capable of challenging and then transforming capitalism. She also offers an accessible account of Marx's dialectical critique and exposé of capitalism, clearly demonstrating the real enemy that should be the focus of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggles. This is an account that explains why our main focus should not be on greedy, individual capitalists or particular multinational corporations, or even their handmaiden institutions, such as, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. but instead the global network of capitalist social relations and consequent habituated human practices in which we are all involved. These together with the historically specific form of capitalist wealth are the real enemy--the essence of capitalism--that must be abolished in order for humanity to have any hope of social and economic justice in the future.
The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil’s position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil’s effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.