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Amazon Rainforest Nearing a Tipping Point, Researchers Warn

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The collapse of the Amazon rainforest’s ecosystem, home to a tenth of Earth’s land species, could collapse much more quickly than earlier estimated, according to an international team of prominent researchers including UCLA’s Susanna Hecht. Their peer-reviewed paper, the first major study to focus on the cumulative effects of a range of variables including temperature, drought, deforestation and legal protections, appeared in the journal Nature and has been covered by news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC and the Guardian. A forest-wide collapse is “happening much faster than we thought, and in multiple ways,” the researchers said. The study called on governments to halt carbon emissions and deforestation and restore at least 5% of the rainforest. Hecht, professor at UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is director of the university’s Center for Brazilian Studies.

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Read the New York Times coverage

 

Hecht on 50 Years of Engagement with Amazonia

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Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin and director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, was a recent guest on the ’74 Podcast series “Urban Nature.” Hecht, who holds appointments in geography and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, discussed her five decades of research and engagement with the Amazon as well as changes in the region over the past century. Topics of the program, recorded in July, included the ideological view of the Amazon as a frontier. “It was not actually ever a frontier,” said Hecht, arguing “that ideology of frontier is the ideology of conquest. It doesn’t reflect a reality.” Hecht, an authority on forest transitions and sustainable agriculture, as well as a founding thinker in the field of political ecology, described the Amazon as a “major center of civilizations … a major area with large-scale urban structures with linkages between those structures,” as opposed to a void that is subject to what she calls a “development tsunami.”

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Hecht on Threats to the Vital Amazon Rainforest

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Tilly Analyzes Restructuring of Best Buy

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to Retail Dive about the internal reorganization of Best Buy following a recent large wave of layoffs. The company has been struggling to compete against generalist stores, such as Walmart and Target, as well as Amazon. Over the last decade, Best Buy said it prized a “human-centric approach” focusing on the company’s front-line workers, but it recently cut many full-time employees in favor of part-time staff who are expected to be knowledgeable about all areas of the store. “It’s clear that the entire store-based consumer electronics industry has faced incredible pressure from online sales,” Tilly said. “The fact that Best Buy survived and bounced back is miraculous, when a lot of other companies were going down.” The pandemic made competition even tougher by shifting more things online. “If you’re just competing with online sales, what is the difference between Best Buy and Amazon?” Tilly asked.

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Jacoby Sheds Light on Amazon Business Model

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Professor of Public Policy Sanford Jacoby was featured in a Capital & Main article about how Amazon’s business model has hindered unionization efforts by the company’s workers. “The thing you have to remember about Amazon is that it’s really two companies these days,” said Jacoby, author of the recently published “Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank.” “There’s the Amazon we know as consumers and then there’s Amazon Web Services, which is a much more profitable part of the company.” He explained that AWS, which sells data storage and processing to companies and generated $13.5 billion in 2020, is more profitable than the division where consumers buy items online and have them delivered. Jacoby noted that Amazon uses revenue from AWS to subsidize low prices for consumers and fast delivery, which increases the pressure on warehouse workers to meet the high demand. 

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Hecht Named Director of UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies The urban planning professor focuses on the intersections of economies, cultures and land use in Latin America

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Geographer Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning at the Luskin School, has been named director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, effective July 1. A specialist on tropical development in Latin America, especially Amazonia, she also holds joint appointments in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the department of geography at UCLA.

Hecht takes over leadership of the interdisciplinary research center, which serves UCLA faculty and students whose scholarship focuses on Brazil, from José Luiz Passos.

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, of which she is recognized as a founding thinker. Her work spans climate change, mitigation and the rethinking of longer-term strategies in light of globalization, intense migration and novel climate dynamics.

Her published books include “The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present and Future of Woodland Resurgence” (Chicago, 2014; co-edited with Kathleen D. Morrison and Christine Padoch); “The Scramble for the Amazon and the ‘Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha’ ” (Chicago, 2013), which won the American Historical Association’s Best Book in Environmental History Award in 2015; and “Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon” (Chicago, 2011; co-authored with Alexander Cockburn).

In addition to journal articles and book chapters, Hecht has also written monographs published by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the National Academy of Sciences, the World Resources Institute and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (Cali, Colombia).

She has won multiple academic awards, including the American Geographical Society’s David Livingstone Centenary Medal and the Carl Sauer Award, both for distinguished research on Latin America. She is a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and holds a professorial appointment at the Graduate Institute for Advanced Development Studies in Geneva.

—UCLA International Institute

Tilly on Economic Imbalance Exacerbated by Amazon’s Search for HQ2

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Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly discussed Amazon’s failure to reverse the concentration of wealth and power in the United States in a Ringer article explaining disappointment in the company’s choice for a second headquarters. Amazon garnered national attention when it announced the search for a home for “HQ2,” inviting cities with at least 1 million residents, an established mass transit system and proximity to an international airport to apply. Many saw this as an opportunity to spur economic growth in cities beyond established hubs. However, Amazon ultimately chose two smaller sites in New York and Virginia — both close to CEO Jeff Bezos’ personal homes in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Many cities vying to lure HQ2 were never realistic options for Amazon, Tilly said. He added, “The whole thing was a show with the ultimate purpose of getting the best possible benefits from one or more cities on the short list they already had in mind. I don’t think there was a genuine process of scoring the map of the United States.” 

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