Paradise in a Brazil nut cemetery : sustainability discourses and social action in Pará, the Brazilian Amazon

This book is about sustainable development and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It explores how Amazonian settlers construct their life in a settlement project and how this process accompanies the landscape change in the southeast of Pará State. The book critically examines discourses of sustainable development and natural resource management for the institutionalism and insufficient dealings with the settlers’ everyday practice of forest clearing. The study demonstrates rich social and political life of the settlers in ethnographic details and shows flexible community boundaries of settlement projects. Deforestation and sustainable development in the Amazon cannot be discussed without understanding changeable social and physical spaces from the settlers’ standpoint. This book further elaborates a critical account of development projects and international cooperation programs promoting sustainable development in the Amazon, based on the author’s own experience.