Imagining Amazonia: Development and Environment in the Brazilian Amazon

• Main Author: Patton, Caitlin Rose
• Other Authors: David C. Wood
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: VANDERBILT 2014
• Subjects: Latin American Studies
• Online Access: http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03202014-160407/

This paper creates a contextualized narrative of the history of Amazonian development projects. This project will examine understandings and representations of nature and the Amazon, and how these representations, and their assumptions, have influenced the trajectory of development projects by the Brazilian state. The first chapter reviews how humans theoretically and philosophically understand and construct the human nature relationship, in theory and practice. The second chapter examines how the dominant views of the human-nature relationship were formalized and operationalized under the military dictatorship's Operação Amazônia and fostered economic and social incorporation of the region through the Polonoroeste and Carájas programs. Finally, the third chapter will use the Brazilian states hydroelectric plan and the Belo Monte case study to examine the contested nature of the narrative of Amazonian nature by examining competing visions for the Amazons future advanced by the Brazilian state and international environmental contingent. Throughout these different chapter topics the same themes of modernity, progress, economic growth, conceptualization of nature and definitions of appropriate human-nature relationships are examined.