Product Description: São Paulo is one of the few places in the underdeveloped world where an advanced industrial system has grown out of a tropical raw-material-exporting economy. By 1960 there were 830,000 industrial workers in the state, producing $3...read more

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when that commodity was gathered in the wild. By 1913, however, cultivated rubber from Southeast Asia swept the Brazilian gathered product from the market. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to once again produce a significant rubber crop in Brazil. Dean traces the numerous attempts to plant rubber in Brazil, including the ill-fated Ford estates, and others established by the major multinational tire companies. He also analyzes the struggles of the Brazilian government to foster rubber development, in the hope of obtaining a domestic source of supply for national industries that are now dependent on imports from Southeast Asia. (view table of contents)

This text chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter of the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life-forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants. The story opens with the hunter-gatherers of 12,000 years ago and takes it up to the 1990s - through the invasion of Europeans in the 16th century; the ensuing devastation wrought by such developments as gold and diamond mining, slash-and-burn farming, coffee planting and industrialization; and the desperate battles between conservationists and developers in the late-20th century. Based on a great range of documentary and scientific resources, this book is enormously ambitious. More than a history of a tropical forest, or of the relationship between forest and humans, it is also a history of Brazil told from an environmental perspective. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Ilden, Dauril, Dean, Warren

Product Description: Book by Dean, Warren