Author: Tucker, Richard P. [1938- ]
Title: Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World
Description: Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, (2000). orig.boards. 23x15cm, xiii,551 pp. Textual maps.. Minor rubbing. Some slight page-edge soil. VG, dustwrapper. ¶ Contents: Croplands: 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 Coast of the Automotive Age: Corporate Runner Empires and the Rainforest; Pasturelands: The Crop on Hooves: Yankee Interests in Tropical Cattle Ranching; Forestlands: Unsustainable Yields: American Foresters and Tropical Timber Resources. [" 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

Keywords: Environmental History, Tropical Economics, Agriculture Tropics, Croplands Forestry, Pasturelands Forest, Latin America, Environment Ecology, Degradation, United States