Insatiable appetite : the United States and the ecological degradation of the tropical world / Richard P. Tucker.

ISBN:

9780520923812

9780585390086

Title:

Insatiable appetite : the United States and the ecological degradation of the tropical world / Richard P. Tucker.

Author:

Tucker, Richard P., 1938-

Personal Author:

Tucker, Richard P., 1938-

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 551 pages) : maps

Contents:

America's sweet tooth: the sugar trust and the Caribbean lowlands -- Lords of the Pacific: sugar barons in the Hawaiian and Philippine islands -- Banana republics: yankee fruit companies and the tropical American lowlands -- The last drop: the American coffee market and the hill regions of Latin America -- The tropical cost of the automotive age: corporate rubber empires and the rainforest -- The crop on hooves: yankee interests in tropical cattle ranching -- Unsustainable yield: American foresters and tropical timber resources.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Tropical crops -- Economic aspects -- History -- 20th century.

Tropical crops -- Environmental aspects -- History -- 20th century.

Investments, American -- Tropics -- History -- 20th century.

Environmental degradation -- Tropics -- History -- 20th century.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2000

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
333.70913 21	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

In the late 1800s American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer markets at home. As corporate agro-industry emerged, the speculators took direct control of the ecological destinies of many tropical lands. Supported by the U.S. government's diplomatic and military protection, they migrated and built private empires in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.

Yankee investors and plantation managers mobilized engineers, agronomists, and loggers to undertake what they called the "Conquest of the Tropics," claiming to bring civilization to benighted peoples and cultivation to unproductive nature. In competitive cooperation with local landed and political elites, they not only cleared natural forests but also displaced multicrop tribal and peasant lands with monocrop export plantations rooted in private property regimes.

This book is a rich history of the transformation of the tropics in modern times, pointing ultimately to the declining biodiversity that has resulted from the domestication of widely varied natural systems. Richard P. Tucker graphically illustrates his study with six major crops, each a virtual empire in itself--sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber. He concludes that as long as corporate-dominated free trade is ascendant, paying little heed to its long-term ecological consequences, the health of the tropical world is gravely endangered.

Author Notes

Tucker Richard P. :

Richard P. Tucker is Professor of Asian and Environmental History at Oakland University, and Adjunct Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. He is coeditor of Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983), World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1987), and other books.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

This insightful work condenses and updates the original 2000 edition (CH, Apr'01, 38-4581), which was nearly twice as long. Tucker (adjunct professor, Univ. of Michigan) explores the ecological destruction of tropical environments by US capitalists and corporations. Case studies of sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, cattle, and deforestation in tropical Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia detail ecological degradation, practices of profit seekers, and the disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples. The catastrophic mismanagement of resources produced profit and wealth for indigenous elites, colonial systems, and industrial capitalists. Collectively they introduced technological and social systems to extract profits with little regard to long-term ecological consequences. Tucker traces how colonial powers and 20th-century American capitalists produced profits by controlling and influencing tropical governments, acquiring vast tracts of land, employing unsustainable environmental systems, destroying regions rich in biodiversity, and imposing poverty on tropical populations. The author largely attributes tropical degradation to the insatiable appetite of the American consumer. Unfortunately, this discounts the role played by corporations in creating new consumer demands and deploying political power, their objective being to extract profit from the sphere of production but not pay tropical environmental costs. The author's failure to use environmental economic concepts limits the scope of this valuable study. Summing Up: Recommended. All collections. B. F. Hope California State University, Chico