In this episode of URBAN NATURE, Geographer and Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Susanna Hecht and Gabriel Kozlowski discuss the Amazon region through the lenses of political ecology. Hecht offers a panorama of the major transformations the region went through over the last century from both a local and global perspective. In the process, she emphasizes the need to break with the idea of the Amazon as a frontier, as well as with the intellectual divide between nature and culture.

In the third episode, our guest is Susanna Hecht. Professor 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, and oil palm) to populist land occupation. She also studies their comparative environmental and social impacts. She also explores alternatives to destructive development and analyzes 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.

“That ideology of frontier is the ideology of conquest, and it doesn't reflect reality. It's a discursive way of creating a boundary. So what it does is that the frontier basically says there's no real civilization. On the other side of this. We are the civilization, and we'll just come to the frontier. We'll change the way it integrates into the world through our systems.” —Susanna Hecht, Geographer, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA

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A '74PODCAST Series, URBAN NATURE is hosted by Gabriel Kozlowski, Brazilian architect and curator working on urbanization from the perspective of political ecology. The Series presents guests from a diverse set of disciplines—including Anthropology, Biology, Philosophy, Political Science, Political Theory, Geography, Architecture, and the Arts, among others—that have been reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature.

The episode was recorded on Zoom in July 2022.

Produced by ISTANBUL'74.

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'74PODCASTBy ISTANBUL'74Jun 20, 2020