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.
“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