Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America (review)

Trouble in Paradise is an engaging survey of pressing environmental problems facing Latin America in the early twenty-first century. J. Timmons Roberts and Nikki Demetria Thanos skillfully blend vignettes and structural analysis to show that the region's environmental conflicts are best understood from an "eco-social" perspective. Inspired both by their considerable experience in Latin America and by environmental justice movements in the United States, they argue that the creation of societies based on sustainable and equitable resource use will require the construction of participatory democracies.

Following a brief introduction that provides a somewhat problematic sketch of Latin American history, Roberts and Thanos take readers on an eco-social tour of contemporary Latin America in five fast-paced chapters. Each examines a distinct set of environmental issues: pollution along the Mexican-U.S. border; agriculture, deforestation, and the conservation of biological resources in Central America; urban environments in Brazil; economic development in Amazonia; and indigenous eco-political struggles in Colombia and Venezuela. Most chapters begin with a story about the effects of eco-social dynamics on daily life, then widen the analysis to illuminate the forces that shape local and regional environments.

Roberts and Thanos make use of both quantitative and qualitative findings to evaluate the merits of popular perceptions and scholarly arguments concerning Latin American environments. For example, in their chapter on the borderlands they reject the contention that multinational corporations have moved to Mexico in order to find "pollution havens," arguing instead that a low-wage labor force has been the main attraction. They also note that maquiladoras, assembly plants, are not the only source of air pollution; thousands of unregulated brick kilns (whose expansion is linked to the housing needs of factory workers) spew significant amounts of contaminants into the air. Thus, the authors help to undermine oversimplified explanations of how corporations alone are responsible for environmental degradation.

An excellent chapter on urban environments in Brazil reminds readers (though not, unfortunately, the editor who authorized the book's trite and misleading title) that most people in contemporary Latin America live in cities where adequate supplies of safe drinking water, inadequate sewerage, and high levels of air pollution are pressing daily problems. From it one gains a much better understanding of why well-intentioned tropical forest conservation projects are often viewed by Latin Americans with a combination of resentment and bewilderment. Roberts and Thanos also consider the promise and peril of other widely touted solutions to Latin America's environmental problems, including international treaties, debt-for-nature swaps, eco-tourism, corporate environmentalism, and organic agriculture.

A concluding chapter aimed at college students begins by suggesting how individuals can promote alternative developmental pathways, but ultimately emphasizes that collective political action is necessary in order to move toward "global environmental justice." With this in mind, the authors provide both a traditional bibliography and a guide to on-line resources.

As Roberts and Thanos readily acknowledge, the complexity of Latin America's environments and histories cannot be captured in two hundred pages. Brazil receives much more attention than Argentina, Chile, and the Caribbean, forests and urban-industrial environments more than agro-ecosystems and coastal/aquatic environments. Readers of this journal will be particularly disappointed by the tendency to stress macroeconomic structures at the expense of both technology and culture. This tendency reflects the authors' decision to ground their historical analysis in world systems theory, a framework that has been rightly criticized for (among other things) its failure to account for the role of cultural processes in shaping the past. The on-the-ground sensitivities displayed by Roberts and Thanos when addressing contemporary eco-social dynamics beg for a model of historical eco-social change that world systems theory cannot deliver.

Their analysis would have been stronger had the authors consulted the growing body of literature on Latin American environmental history, and historians will learn little about technology, culture, and...