Susanna Hecht

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Dr. Hecht’s research focuses on the intersections of economies, cultures and land use, and the socio-environmental effects of these processes, an approach now widely known as political ecology.

Her focus area is the Latin American tropics, and more specifically Amazonia. Her research has major implications for understanding the dynamics of land use change and what they imply about human relations with nature, economies and tropical development. Her work includes analytics on climate change, mitigation and longer-term rethinking of longer-term strategies under globalization, intense migration and novel climate dynamics.

Her work has forged new understandings in the development of political ecology including that of deforestation and forest recovery, the “social lives of forests” as part of environmental history as well as current practices. These include the analysis and viability of traditional tropical land use practices such as agroforestry and the creation of Amazonian black earths (a legacy of and continuing practice by many indigenous populations as well as Amazon peasants). Her early work on indigenous anthropogenic soils was groundbreaking, as it documented how in fact these soils, the product of biochar–and low temperature fires— were produced. She also studies the impacts of migration on forest and land use. In addition to these more arcane systems, she has carried out extensive research on the livestock sector, analyzed in her book Fate of the Forest, and soy economies in Latin America (the main deforestation drivers) and has just edited a major themed issue on this topic for the Journal of Peasant Studies, the top ranked rural development journal.

Dr. Hecht’s interest in alternatives to deforestation involved engagement in the analytics of non-timber forest products and their development, including extractive reserves, which now cover more than 10 million Ha in the Amazon Basin and reflect the outcome of new institutions under the pressure of social movements of traditional peoples of various kinds. She has also paid attention to the gender implications that inhere in land use change from the most remote peasantries in the upper Amazon, to highly linked in central American women farmers whose family members reside in the US.

Forest resurgence in the tropics is now a widely documented phenomena but her work in this area more than a decade ago was landmark.

Through complex analyses that range from Forest transition theory, global markets, agrocecology and the foucauldian politics of governmentality, the widespread occurrence of forest recovery suggests a huge realm of new policy interventions and practices for this largely orphaned segment of forest dynamics. These questions are explored in two of her edited books. The Social Lives of forests, edited with ethnobotanist Christine Padoch and ethnoarcheologist Kathleen Morrison explored the ideologies, environmental histories, and current practices and processes that produced forests in the present day and in the past. Under current conditions forest recovery and control of clearing will be essential to any climate policy. This book thus shows how a complex range of activities—using global examples from the top scholars in a range of disciplines — have produced both livelihoods and forested landscapes. Another edited volume explored the questions of migration, resources and rural livelihoods with colleagues from the Central American policy and research NGO, PRISMA setting the stage for continuing research on the dynamics of migration. urbanization and land use, and their implications for forests and forest dependent populations.

Finally, her research focuses on historical ecology and environmental economics. Her book, The Scramble for the Amazon, won the American Historical associations Best Book in Environmental history Award in 2015, and her earlier volume, Fate of the Forest also won multiple awards. The key to these books is their use of the “natural archive” as well as the human one. Dr. Hecht’s rigorous historiography and scientific training coupled to rich and fluid prose have made her books academic best sellers. She is at work on the third volume for this trilogy on contemporary Amazonia

Using archival research, remote sensing, palynological data and forest census materials Dr. Hecht has been engaged in the analysis of “Deforestation” before modern Deforestation: that is understanding the nature and social dynamics of forest change over time including carbon loss and uptake in Amazonian ecosystems 100 years ago. These researches feed into an understanding of landuse change under current regional development scenarios and most especially the questions of the global carbon economy.

Dr. Hecht’s work has been funded by NSF, NASA, MacArthur Foundation, ACLS, Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, National Geographic Society, Shelby Cullom David fellowships and the Institute for Advanced studies and CASBS among many other sources. Her work has also received generous funding from UCLA’s Latin American Institute, The Global Public Affairs Program, the UCLA Academic Senate and the University of California Office of the President.

Dr. Hecht is a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and holds a Professorial appointment at the Graduate Institute for Development Studies in Geneva.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

The Social Lives of Forests
Subtitle: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence
Publisher’s webpage
Review in Science

The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha
University of Chicago Press.
Purchase on Amazon.com
Reviewed in The Nation

The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon
Purchase on Amazon.com

Susanna Hecht Wins Award for Best Book on Latin American Environmental History Award granted for research in the social and political history of the Amazon basin.

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Euclides Book cover 2

By Angel Ibanez
UCLA Luskin student writer

Dr. Susanna Hecht, professor of Urban Planning, has been honored as the winner of this year’s Elinor Melville Prize for the best book on Latin American Environmental History.

The Elinor Melville Prize, established in 2007, is a competitive award for the best book in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese published during the previous year on the “study of the mutual influences of social and natural processes in Latin America” and its scholarly contribution by the Conference on Latin American History.

Hecht’s book, The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha, tells the story of the vast exploitation of the Amazon basin by the nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers for its rubber, the journey of one of Brazil’s most accomplished writers to unveil the inner workings of the exploitation along the way and the complex social, political and environmental history of the Amazon.

Dr. Hecht’s research has focused on political ecology and her results have had major implications for climate change adaptation, mitigation and longer term rethinking of longer-term resilience strategies.  She has also been funded by the NSF, NASA, MacArthur Foundation, ACLS Guggenheim and the Institute for Advanced studies among many other sources.

 

Global Public Affairs Opens New Student-Faculty Discussion Series

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By Adeney Zo
UCLA Luskin Student Writer

Learning can come in many forms, including class lectures, discussions and research, but the first Global Public Affairs salon aimed to combine these forms into one engaging multi-departmental, student-faculty discussion.

Put together by Urban Planning professors Michael Storper and Steve Commins, this salon created a space for students and faculty from widely varied backgrounds in Public Policy to discuss major global public affairs topics outside of the traditional lecture setting.

The main topic of the night centered around the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2014 annual letter, titled “3 Myths That Block Progress for the Poor.” The letter aims to debunk the following three global affairs myths (through research and media examples):

  1. Poor countries are doomed to stay poor.
  2. Foreign aid is a big waste.
  3. Saving lives leads to overpopulation.

Once the debate commenced, students brought up points to defend or deconstruct each myth while faculty expanded on those ideas with information based on their own research and experience. Comments ranged from analysis of developmental markers to benefits of quantitative vs. qualitative data to dealing with corruption and misuse of foreign aid.

Professor Michael Storper led the discussion, emphasizing at the beginning that the goal of the salon was to take information learned in the classroom and apply it to engaging, intellectual debates. Other Luskin faculty members that participated included Steve Commins, Manisha Shah, Robert Schilling, Paavo Monkkonen and Susanna Hecht.

Hecht co-edits “The Social Lives of Forests”

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Urban Planning professor Susanna Hecht has published a new book. “The Social Lives of Forests,” co-edited by Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison of the University of Chicago and Christine Padoch of the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia, will be released in early March.

With 28 chapters in five parts, the book takes a comprehensive look at humanity’s multidimensional relationships with forests and woodlands. From the publisher:

“Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics.

“Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, ‘The Social Lives of Forests’ attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.”

The book is published by the University of Chicago Press.