Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.     

Staples,links, and poles in the construction of regional development theories

The developmental trajectories of extractive economies differ systematically from those of industrial economies. Analysis of these differences is difficult, because the specific characteristics and location in space of particular extracted resources distinguish extractive economies from each other far more than commodities produced and location distinguish industrial economies. The peculiar distoritions of Harold Innis's studies of particular staples as these were incorporated into general statements about regional economic development illustrate some of the tensions between ideographic and nomothetic goals in the analysis of regional economies and the dangers of resolving these tensions by collapsing the particular into the general. Subsequent use of these regional economic development models to obscure problems of particular resource extractive projects illuminates some of the unintended practical consequences of theoretical errors.     

Boundaries are Made to be Crossed: The Magic and Politics of the Long-lasting Amazon/Andes Divide

The construction of Amazonia as a distinct entity, opposed to the Andes, results from processes associated with the expansion of Andean-centered state formations. Analysis of five short texts on the Amazon region, written in colonial and postcolonial Peru by a diversity of social actors, reveals a pervasive rhetoric of alterity whose content varies according to the particular objectives the authors had in mind. In all cases, however, the aim is the same, namely the imposition of boundaries of differentiation as justification for state integration, expressed in the commodification and symbolic consumption of the Amazonian Other. If the politics of boundary making consist in "peripheralizing" and "othering" the Amazon and its people, the magic of boundary making resides in the discursive sleight of hand through which contemporary agents conceal the fact that the Amazon has long ago been incorporated into the nation-state.     

Planning Other Families: Negotiating Population and Identity Politics in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines the ways in which globally driven population policies are experienced by rural, indigenous women in Amazonian communities on the periphery of formal, political power. As with other global development processes, population programs are actively resisted, accepted, and modified by the women who are their intended "targets." Through a nuanced exploration of the interface of indigenous identity with the discourse of empowerment and reproductive rights, this article traces the impact of internationally funded population and development programs on local identity politics in the Peruvian Amazon.     

Interventions: Dynamics of Contention

This profile looks at the indigenous mobilization against government attempts to open up the Peruvian Amazon to increased foreign investment. It draws parallels between the events in Peru and conflicts in countries such as Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador. It identifies the main similarities as the causes of the conflict (neoliberal reform), the action repertoire deployed in the protests, and the successful outcome of the action for the indigenous groups involved. We also look at the sources of support for the struggle, focusing in particular on the role played by political leaders such as Ollanta Humala and Bolivian President Evo Morales. We conclude by analysing the consequences of the protests for the wider political situation in Peru.     

The Quality of Urban Environments in the Brazilian Amazon

In the Brazilian Amazon during the 1980s,urban population growth outstripped rural growth, andby 1991, most of the region's population resided inurban areas. Much of this urban growth involvedestablishment of unplanned housing with inadequateinfrastructure, which resulted in rising pollution. This paper compares indicators of environmentalquality in urban populations of the Amazon in 1980 and1991, and among different kinds of urban populationsin 1991. The results show that environmental qualityin the region deteriorated during the 1980s as theproduction of and exposure to environmental hazardsrose while resources to ward off hazards eroded. Thefindings also show that environmental quality wasparticularly poor in more rapidly growing urbancenters. The urban Amazon may not afford an adequatestandard of living and this may generate out-migrationfrom the region.     

Statistical considerations for crowdsourced perceptual ratings of human speech productions

Crowdsourcing has become a major tool for scholarly research since its introduction to the academic sphere in 2008. However, unlike in traditional laboratory settings, it is nearly impossible to control the conditions under which workers on crowdsourcing platforms complete tasks. In the study of communication disorders, crowdsourcing has provided a novel solution to the collection of perceptual ratings of human speech production. Such ratings allow researchers to gauge whether a treatment yields meaningful change in how human listeners' perceive disordered speech. This paper will explore some statistical considerations of crowdsourced data with specific focus on collecting perceptual ratings of human speech productions. Random effects models are applied to crowdsourced perceptual ratings collected in both a continuous and binary fashion. A simulation study is conducted to test the reliability of the proposed models under differing numbers of workers and tasks. Finally, this methodology is applied to a data set from the study of communication disorders.     

The new ‘sustainable communitarian’ logging schemes and their critique inside multiple-use conservation areas in the Brazilian Amazon: preliminary notes

Deforestation has risen sharply in Brazil since 2012, and conservation areas are facing increased pressure. This article studies the rise of so-called ‘sustainable’, ‘communitarian’, and/or ‘cooperative’ logging schemes inside multiple-use conservation areas in the Amazon. The findings, based on fresh field research in Acre and Pará, reveal conflicts, problems, and risks associated with logging schemes, although they are portrayed in the international timber trade as certified and socio-environmentally sustainable solutions that help conservation. However, the expansion of logging presents a danger for curtailing forest degradation, fires, and corruption that is linked to the fast returns from sale of timber, especially inside conservation areas that have been mostly intact until now. There is an urgent need to change the strategy of promoting logging as a key source of income for forest-dwellers, and a need to change the policies allowing the expansion of ‘sustainable logging’.     

The Collective Self and the Ethnopolitical Movement: "rhizomes" and "taproots" in the Amazon

The present situation in the Amazon is frequently characterized by political tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. As a consequence, indigenous peoples are organizing in order to defend themselves and their land against the encroachment of representatives from the national society. To the Matsigenka, who live in the monta a of southeastern Peru, this process is relatively recent, and so is the conceptualization of ensuing conflicts in ethnic terms. Although ethnic criteria for constructing social identity is still largely alien to most Matsigenka, it has, to the indigenous organizations, come to serve as the model for defining political issues mainly because it is imposed by the dominant national society, which defines the rules. At the same time, categories of beings that are defined in notions of the cosmogony remain a significant factor in the Matsigenka conceptualization of the social world. The employment of two parallel models for constructing identity, which are occasionally conflicting, produces both conceptual confusion and organizational problems for the Matsigenka ethno-political movement.     

Household demographic factors as life cycle determinants of land use in the Amazon

This paper seeks to broaden the application of demographyto environmental studies by complementing existing macro-level approaches, which feature aggregate populations, with a micro-level approach that highlights household life cycles. I take up the case of small farm households in the Brazilian Amazon to present a theoretical framework that identifies demographic characteristics which dispose families to engage in different forms of land use as household age structures change. Empirical models show that net of theeffects of farmer background, neighborhood context, institutional context, and off-farm incomes, demographic variables indicative of the household life cycle exert significant effects on the prominence of land uses with distinct environmental ramifications. The findings not only reveal micro-level demographic factors which affect Amazon land cover, they yield implications forfuture changes in rainforest landscapes in northern Brazil, and suggest household life cycle models as an avenue for further demographic research on environmental change in Latin America and other contexts.