Latin American Research Review

Natural resources have long occupied a privileged position in the political economies of Latin America, and the consequences have often been less than positive. A “particularly virulent strain of dependency” (Lederman and Maloney, 141) is how William F. Maloney, the coeditor of one of the books reviewed here, characterizes this phenomenon, which has led to repeated underperformance in transforming the environment into human welfare and economic growth. This historical inability to use resources well is disturbing in light of the rapid expansion of the extractive frontier since the mid-1990s. The global search for minerals, hydrocarbons, and timber, a search that is at once market oriented and mercantilist in inspiration, has pushed natural resource concessions, exploration, and exploitation into new corners of Latin America. The growing regional demand for energy (in part to supply the planned extractive industries) only intensifies this process, while also inducing renewed vigor in the search for new sites for the generation of hydroelectricity. Meanwhile, increasing international and domestic demand for recreation and relaxation has driven expansion of the tourist and second-home economies into new stretches of coastline, waterfront, protected areas, and other ecologies. Of course, the world has entered a global recession that will dull the intensity of these processes, giving socio-environmental movements and organizations time to catch their breath and get a clearer handle on what is going on. However, in the medium term, it seems unlikely that the expansion of these diverse extractive frontiers will go away.

Not only has the region largely failed to transform natural resource dependency into sustained growth or welfare, but resource extraction has often had patently adverse effects. At an aggregate level, it has been associated with a relative concentration of benefits (“No hay chorreo,” or “There is no trickle down,” as is said in Peru) and with a failure to develop institutions to ensure transparent governance of the natural resource economy and the rents it generates. Meanwhile, in the localities affected by extraction, resources have all too often been removed and ecologies transformed at the expense of human well-being and environmental health, a process demonstrated by several of the books reviewed here, in particular those of Myrna Santiago, William Loker, and Heleen van den Hombergh.

As a consequence of those adverse impacts—along with the many processes of resource dispossession that accompany the extractive economy—the environment has become an increasingly important domain of contention and social mobilization. This has been commented on [End Page 178] before, of course: Lane Simonian has traced the long history of conservation in Mexico, and David Goodman and Michael Redclift have drawn attention to the politics of sustainability.¹ However, interventions such as these remained cautious, expressing uncertainty as to the real depth to which the roots of these environmentalisms reached. Environmental conservation was generally considered the concern of a small segment of privileged classes, while the so-called environmentalism of the poor was often understood...