Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FEATURES, HABITAT, HEALTHY COMMUNITIES, PLANNING, REGULATIONS, RESILIENCE, WILDLIFE, tagged Acre, advocacy, agriculture, Amapá, Amazon, Amazon Basin, Amazon.com, bandeirantes, biomes, Bolivia, Brazil, Brazil Forestry Code, Brazilian Empire, Canopy, carbon emissions, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, climate change, coastal population centers, coivara, Colombia, colonialism, conservation, Cultural heritage, Daniel K. Ludwig, deforestation, demographic void, Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship, development, dictatorship, ecological genocide, ecological heritage, ECOLOGY, Ecuador, Emílio Médici, environmental protection, Ernesto Geisel, exploitation, Fazenda Cristalino, Federal Cultural Council, First Brazilian Republic, Ford Motor Company, Fordlândia, Guyana, Henry Ford, Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, indigenous peoples, Infrastructure, Integrar para não Entregar, Integrate or Surrender, Inter-American Development Bank, international corporations, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Jair Bolsonaro, Jari, Jeff Bezos, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, leaves, Logging, March to the West, Marcha para o Oeste, mineral extraction, nationalism, natural disasters, nutrients, Operação Amazônia, Operation Amazon, paper-pulp, Para, Peru, phosphates, plantation, Policy, Portugal, Preservation, President Getúlio Vargas, Rain Forest, Roberto Burle Marx, Rodovia Transamazônica, Rondon Commission, slash and burn, soil, sovereignty, Suriname, Trans-Amazonian Highway, um vazio demográfico, Venezuela, Volkswagen do Brasil, watersheds, wild-rubber latex, wildfire, Wolfgang Sauer, World Bank on February 25, 2020|
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As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
BY CATHERINE SEAVITT NORDENSON, ASLA
Who owns the Amazon? In news reports about the unprecedented number of fires burning in this vast forest during the past several months, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has vehemently answered “Brazil”—punctuating that claim with the charge that any nation holding a different opinion is simply a colonizer, usually a European one. Yet defined in terms of the river’s massive watershed, the Amazon rain forest—the world’s largest such tropical biome—falls within eight South American countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guyana.
Those same eight polities have been embroiled in a seven-year legal battle with Amazon.com, Inc. and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who would very much like to own .amazon—the domain name, that is. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—the independent body that vets global Internet addresses—has sided with Bezos. American corporate interests, once again, seem to have the upper hand over local cultural heritage and place-name identity, despite concerns voiced by Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and representatives from other governments that share the watershed.
Certainly, “owning” the Amazon has always been bound up in questions of sovereignty. And sovereignty has long been caught up in authoritative claims of possession. (more…)
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