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Professor Susanna Hecht Receives Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Work on Human Impacts on Amazon Frontiers
Posted on April 07, 2008
Urban Planning Professor Susanna Hecht has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, one of only twenty five recipients in the Social Sciences. Applicants for Guggenheim fellowships are from all over the world. Dr. Hecht’s research on the Latin American tropics (especially the Amazon Basin) is widely known: her innovative studies of clearing on modern Amazon frontiers, and the alternatives to deforestation ranging from pre Colombian soil management, extractive reserves to modern day remittances have been instrumental in shaping how these questions are approached today.
Professor Hecht also studies the environmental history of the tropics with an eye to understanding how the past has shaped the present. She has just finished a book on the Amazon writings of Brazilian explorer and writer Euclides da Cunha. This research led her to the topic for which she is now a Guggenheim fellow.
Her study is outlined below:
Human impacts on Amazonia are generally read through two lenses. The first emphasizes powerful globalized markets for tropical commodities that have produced rapid and relentless deforestation on today’s Neoliberal frontier, while the second optic focuses on the extent and effects of pre-Columbian occupation, and its significance in the recasting of Amazonian settlement history, and for sustainability in inhabited landscapes the past and today. Structured as antipodes between pre-Columbian and modern civilizations, between tribute and advanced capitalist economies, this framing of Amazonian history places the questions of human impact in the distant past or current day. Intellectual emphasis of both approaches are concerned with questions of sustainability, but are either too recent or too far back in time to give much insight into what might be the more useful analytic category of resilience.
Both frameworks overlook an extremely important element in the economic history of the Amazon basin, the rubber boom. The literature on the impact of the boom has emphasized the egregious labor relations of debt peonage and terror slavery, and this seems to have occluded any understanding of the other dynamics , such as the environmental effects of this extensive and vibrant economy, whose heyday lasted for more than sixty years. Because latex extraction itself did not require forest clearing, the ecological effects of the boom are assumed to have been minimal, But in fact, there was deforestation largely due to steam travel and its demand for boiler wood.
The study uses an innovative blend of more than 150 years of mapping history, remote sensing, archival study and ecological research to construct the magnitude and the impact of the deforestation pulse that ushered the Amazon into the modern world, and to assess forest resilience under different clearing regimes in the Upper Amazon. This study will shed light on both Amazonian forest and social history.
Professor Hecht has received many prestigious awards and grants for her research, including those of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) Shelby Cullom Davis (Princeton) Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), American Council of Learned Societies, MacArthur Foundation, Heinz Foundation, Resources for the Future, Ford Foundation, World Wild Life Fund, Hewlitt Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as well as NASA and NSF among others.
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