Abstract
The introductory chapter reviews the meaning and fundamental features of the advance of development, what is later detailed and exemplified in the other parts of the book. The chapter presents the rationale, the justification and the structure of the study and explains that its main purpose is to examine the contested nexus between development goals and environmental problems. Environment-development dilemmas are actually much broader and more complicated than suggested by simplistic narratives of progress and conservation. The main attention of the first chapter is on the socio-cultural construction of development frontiers as spaces of opportunity and likely rewards for those who persevere helps to maintain social inequalities. Interrogating the frontier is a formidable challenge for critical, left-wing thinking (primarily concentrated on justice and equality), considering that frontier making is by definition a generation and perpetuation of inequalities. Likewise, critical scholars need to develop the ability to work through the political, apparently chaotic process of landscape change and silent resistance through the interstices of the established, taken-for-granted foundations of the frontiers of environment and development.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In his study on territorial conquest and European border disputes, Namier (1942: 69–70) perspicaciously observed that: ‘One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future. But in fact, when discussing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future’.
References
Barbier, E. B. (2012). Scarcity, Frontiers and Development. The Geographical Journal, 178(2), 110–122.
Bowman, I. (1927). The Pioneer Fringe. Foreign Affairs, 6(1), 49–66.
Bukharin, N. (1929 [1917]). Imperialism and World Economy. London: Martin Lawrence.
Bunker, S. G. (1985). Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange and the Failure of the Modern State. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Cronon, W. (1992). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton and Company.
Durkheim, É. (2002 [1897]). On Suicide: A Study on Sociology. Trans. J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson. London: Routledge.
Evans, R. (2007). A History of Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gros, F. (2019). Désobéir. Paris: Flammarion.
Harvey, D. (2006 [1982]). The Limits to Capital. New Edition. London/New York: Verso.
Hemming, J. (1987). Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians. London: Papermac.
Hogan, R. (1985). The Frontier as Social Control. Theory and Society, 14(1), 35–51.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2014). The Political Ecology of the State: The Basis and the Evolution of Environmental Statehood. London: Routledge.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2015). The Production of Poverty and the Poverty of Production in the Amazon: Reflections from those at the Sharp End of Development. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 26(4), 176–192.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2017). Agribusiness and the Neoliberal Food System in Brazil: Frontiers and Fissures of Agro-neoliberalism. London: Routledge.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2018a). Amazon’s Dead Ends: Frontier-Making the Centre. Political Geography, 65, 98–106.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2018b). Place-Making at the Frontier of Brazilian Agribusiness. GeoJournal, 83, 61–72.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2019). Peasant Farming in the Southern Tracts of the Amazon: The Reluctant Alterity of Agribusiness. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 18, 375–400.
Ioris, A. A. R. (2020). Frontier Making in the Amazon: Economic, Political and Socioecological Conversion (Key Challenges in Geography: EUROGEO Book Series). Cham: Springer.
Latour, B. (1996). Not the Question. Anthropology Newsletter, 37(3), 4–5.
Lund, C., & Rachman, N. F. (2018). Indirect Recognition. Frontiers and Territorialization around Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, Indonesia. World Development, 101, 417–428.
Magdoff, F., & Williams, C. (2017). Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Mann, G. (2008). A Negative Geography of Necessity. Antipode, 40(5), 921–934.
Martins, J. S. (2009). Fronteira: A Degradação do Outro nos Confins do Humano. São Paulo: Contexto.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital, Volume I. Trans. B. Fowkes. London: Penguin.
McDowell, S., & Crooke, E. (2019). Creating Liminal Spaces of Collective Possibility in Divided Societies: Building and Burning the Temple. Cultural Geographies, 26(3), 323–339.
Mellor, M. (2000). Feminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective. Ethics and the Environment, 5(1), 107–123.
Namier, L. B. (1942). Conflicts. New York: Books for Libraries Press.
Quaini, M. (1982 [1974]). Geography and Marxism. Trans. A. Braley. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Rancière, J. (1998). Aux Bords du Politique. Paris: Gallimard.
Rasmussen, M. B., & Lund, C. (2018). Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The Territorialization of Resource Control. World Development, 101, 388–399.
Rist, G. (2008). The History of Development. London: Zed Books.
Rivière d’Arc, H., & Apestéguy, C. (1978). Les Nouvelles Franges Pionnières en Amazonie Brésilienne. Études Rurales, 69, 81–100.
Rogers, T. J., & Bain, S. (2016). Genocide and Frontier Violence in Australia. Journal of Genocide Research, 18(1), 83–100.
Sachs, W. (Ed.). (2010). The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books.
Santos, M. (1985). Espaço e Método. São Paulo: Nobel.
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Heaven/London: Yale University Press.
Théry, H. (Ed.). (1997). Environnement et Développement en Amazonie Brésilienne. Paris: Belin.
Turner, F. J. (1920). The Frontier in American History. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Wakefield, E. G. (1967 [1834]). England and America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System I. New York: Academic Press.
Watts, M. J. (2018). Frontiers: Authority, Precarity, and Insurgency at the Edge of the State. World Development, 101, 477–488.
Whitehead, N. (Ed.). (2003). Histories and Historicities in the Amazon. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Pres.
Woollacott, A. (2015). Settler Society in the Australian Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, S. (2011). Hegel’s Century. In S. Žižek, C. Crockett, & C. Davis (Eds.), Hegel and the Infinite (pp. ix–xi). New York: Columbia University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ioris, A.A.R. (2021). Environmental Roots of Development Problems. In: Ioris, A.A.R. (eds) Environment and Development . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55416-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55416-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-55415-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-55416-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)