In Country: Resources on This Part of the Amazon

All afternoon I have been thinking about the impact of Cargill and the soy industry on this region. Perhaps these musings of mine partly contain a sense of guilt about my participation in the degradation of the Amazon. After all, I drink soy milk rather than cow's milk. Indeed I raised Hope to be a soy milk drinker rather than a cow's milk drinker beginning when she was an infant. Typically we purchased our soy milk by the case from the Costco off of Highway 99. Now I am wondering where that soy originated. Did the milk we drank in Elk Grove come from the plant here in Santarem, Brasil? I don't know, but I am going to try to find out!

In the mean time, here are some resources on the issue of deforestation. All of these titles are from the Los Rios catalog.

Barbosa, Luiz, C. The Brazilian Amazon Rainforest : Global Ecopolitics, Development, and Democracy. Lanham, MD : University Press of America, 2000.

Le Breton, Binka. The Greatest Gift : The Courageous Life and Death of Sister Dorothy Stang.
New York : Doubleday, 2007.

London, Mark and Brian Kelly. The Last Forest : The Amazon in the Age of Globalization.
New York : Random House, 2007.

Margolis, Mac. The Last New World : The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier. New York : Norton, 1992.

Millard, Candice. River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. New York : Doubleday, 2005.

There are a couple other titles from the 1980s, including a video. Obviously the information in them would be obsolete but they may serve as prescient reminders of present realities. We can know the future when we listen to the voices.