This book is the most updated and comprehensive look at efforts to protect the Amazon, home to half of the worlds remaining tropical forests. In the past five years, the Basins countries have become the cutting edge of environmental enforcement through formation of constitutional protections, military operations, stringent laws, police forces, judicial procedures and societal efforts that together break through barriers that have long restrained decisive action. Even such advances, though, struggle to curb devastation by oil extraction, mining, logging, dams, pollution, and other forms of ecocide. In every country, environmental protection is crippled by politics, bureaucracy, unclear laws, untrained officials, small budgets, regional rivalries, inter-ministerial competition, collusion with criminals, and the global demand for oils and minerals. Countries are better at creating environmental agencies, that is, than making sure that they work. This book explains why, with country studies written by those on the front linesfrom national enforcement directors to biologists and activists.
1. Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Enforcement.- 2. Amazonia, Organized Crime and Illegal Deforestation: Best Practices for the Protection of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest.- 3. Deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon: The Case of the El Chor? Forest Reserve in Santa Cruz Department.- 4. Peru: A Legal Enforcement Model for the Amazon.- 5. Ecuador: Rainforest Under Siege .- 6. Colombia: Bridging the Gaps between What Is Needed and What Actually Exists Regarding the Protection of its Amazon.- 7. Environmental Penal Control in Venezuela: Amazonia and the Orinoco Mining Arc.- 8. Suriname: An Exposed Interior.
Mark Ungar is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. He is author of flÓ6