URBAN NATURE - Episode 3: Susanna Hecht and Gabriel Kozlowski

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.