Podcast appearances and mentions of susanna hecht

In this episode of URBAN NATURE, Geographer and Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Susanna Hecht and Gabriel Kozlowski discuss the Amazon region through the lenses of political ecology. Hecht offers a panorama of the major transformations the region went through over the last century from both a local and global perspective. In the process, she emphasizes the need to break with the idea of the Amazon as a frontier, as well as with the intellectual divide between nature and culture. In the third episode, our guest is Susanna Hecht. Professor Hecht is a specialist on tropical development in Latin America, especially the Amazon Basin and Central America. Her research focuses on the political economies of development ranging from corporate frontiers of cattle and export commodity agriculture (like soy, and oil palm) to populist land occupation. She also studies their comparative environmental and social impacts. She also explores alternatives to destructive development and analyzes the forms of conservation in inhabited landscapes whether through indigenous technologies, non-timber extractive products, niche markets as well as new tenurial forms (such as extractive reserves), social movements and globalization, including the role of remittances and migratory networks in reshaping rural land uses. The impacts of emerging green markets and greenhouse gas offsets for smaller-scale farmers also form part of her research concerns. As one of the founders of the analytic approach known as Political Ecology, Dr Hecht has been engaged in understanding the theoretical and institutional dynamics that underpin deforestation and its alternatives. “That ideology of frontier is the ideology of conquest, and it doesn't reflect reality. It's a discursive way of creating a boundary. So what it does is that the frontier basically says there's no real civilization. On the other side of this. We are the civilization, and we'll just come to the frontier. We'll change the way it integrates into the world through our systems.” —Susanna Hecht, Geographer, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA - A '74PODCAST Series, URBAN NATURE is hosted by Gabriel Kozlowski, Brazilian architect and curator working on urbanization from the perspective of political ecology. The Series presents guests from a diverse set of disciplines—including Anthropology, Biology, Philosophy, Political Science, Political Theory, Geography, Architecture, and the Arts, among others—that have been reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature. The episode was recorded on Zoom in July 2022. Produced by ISTANBUL'74.

August 31, 2021--Loreto Rojas and Cal Winslow, hosts of “Talking about California,” interview Susanna Hecht, Professor of Geography at UCLA's Environment and Sustainability Institute. In a conversation that ranges from the redwood forests of northern California to the heart of the Amazon in Brazil, Professor Hecht discusses human “management” of the earth's forests from Paleo-Indian times to the present. The program is part of a series of in-depth interviews that examine the fate of the California redwood forests, focusing on Mendocino County.

This past summer there was a brief flaring of concern about rainforest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon. Panicked headlines portrayed the whole region as on fire, the President of France took the President of Brazil to task, and ‘the lungs of the planet” were said to be risk. Brazil’s Foreign Minister responded by saying that the number of fires were not above average. This was presumably meant as reassurance, as well as defiance, It was, in fact, a tricky claim - there had been past years when there were even more fires, though the number in 2019 was double the number of the year before - but, even if it had been true, it would not have been that reassuring. The Brazilian rainforest has been on fire for a long time, as I think the following series will make clear.For two years in the mid-1960’s I lived near the little town of Sibu in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, a vast region of tropical rainforest. By the later 1980’s I was hearing, again and again, of a logging boom there. Not only were valuable tropical hardwoods being sold so cheap that they ended up in shipping pallets and other similarly wasteful uses, but forest peoples were losing their homes and livelihoods. Similar stories were coming from Brazil and elsewhere. I began to investigate, and the result was this five-hour effort, broadcast in 1989. It gathered stories from Sarawak and Brazil - but also from Canada where acid rain was believed responsible for the declining health of maple forests. - and it reflected on forest ecology and forest conservation through the world.Thirty years later, it remains germane, although many details may be out-of-date. It also contains a number of inspiring accounts of resistance from around the world. One caution concerns the conclusion of the fifth and final program in the series that maple decline in Canada was a direct result of acid rain. New scientific evidence, presented in the year after these broadcast, suggested that damage to roots sustained during an unusually harsh winter in the later 1970’s was also playing a key role in maple decline. This theory received some confirmation, when the maple bush began to recover out of proportion with any declines in acid rain. This demonstration that scientific theories are always, more or less, provisional became a lasting lesson to me and seems relevant at a time when the expression “settled science” has become something of an ideological cudgel.A transcript of the series is available on the transcripts page of this site. The lineo-up of speakers was as follows:#1 - José Lutzenberger, Barbara Zimmerman, Tom Lovejoy, Kenton Miller, Adrian Forsyth, Richard Evans Schultes, Susanna Hecht, Dan Janzen#2 - Job Dudley Tausinga, Theodore Panayotou, Bruno Manser, Mat Sylvan, Martin Khor, Randy Hayes, Peggy Hallward, John Seed, Neville Wren, Martin Teni#3 - Simon Dick, Catherine Howard, Susanna Hecht, Peggy Hallward, Darrell Posey, Guujaw#4 - Steve Schwartzman, Susanna Hecht, Robert Kasten, Ted Macdonald, Gary Hartshorn, Theodore Panayotou, Bill Burch, Kenton Miller#5 - Michael Herman, Arch Jones, Dick Klein, Dale Willows, Tom Hutchinson, Robert Bruck, Bernard Ulrich, Don Goltz, Ian MacLachlan

As we did in 2012, CLBR takes an Olympic detour to focus on the state of its host country – Brazil with Susanna Hecht of UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs and its Latin American Institute.  Among other things, Brazil is:the 5th largest and 5th most populous country on earth;the 7th largest economy;home to the 4th largest population of internet users;the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy;home to 21 of the 50 most violent cities in the world;suffering from a severe recession; andis in a state of political crisis.

Susanna Hecht, Professor of Urban Planning,UCLA

Byron Washom, UC San Diego, and Susanna Hecht UCLA explore the challenges to scaling solutions. Series: "UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit: UC Climate Solutions" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30295]

Byron Washom, UC San Diego, and Susanna Hecht UCLA explore the challenges to scaling solutions. Series: "UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit: UC Climate Solutions" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30295]

Leading experts describe sociological dimensions of communicating urgency and affecting change in public awareness and action on climate change. Series: "UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit: UC Climate Solutions" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30292]

Leading experts describe sociological dimensions of communicating urgency and affecting change in public awareness and action on climate change. Series: "UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit: UC Climate Solutions" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30292]

Susanna Hecht, Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, delivers a lecture entitled, "Tropicality, Tropicalism: Forest Resurgence and the Politics of Latin American Conservation"

Susanna Hecht, Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, delivers a lecture entitled, "Tropicality, Tropicalism: Forest Resurgence and the Politics of Latin American Conservation"