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For 50 years, the American-Colombian Corporation owned the largest property in Colombia: the Lands of Loba. While the principal investors, men from Utah and later also Laurance and Nelson Rockefeller, dreamed of making a fortune from this tropical "fairyland," none of their plans bore fruit and they eventually lost control to thousands of so-called squatters. To explain the failure of an American free-standing company, this article emphasizes misguided perceptions and a challenging external environment rather than managerial inexperience. Examining recycled notions of tropical abundance demonstrates how ideas of nature can influence investment decisions. Overlapping property rights and tension between possession and title complicated company efforts to raise capital. Local resistance and a fractured political landscape further limited its influence. Ultimately, the very scale of the property both generated delusions of grandeur and frustrated the company's territorial control.

This article explores the discourse of development in southern Belize, and the appropriateness of post‐development ideas to understand its effects. It investigates a prevailing notion in development texts from the region that population pressure represents an environmental threat, an odd image for a country with so few inhabitants and so many trees. It also examines the consequences of apparent attempts by the government to employ development projects to defuse local contention over plans to privatize Maya land tenure. While post‐developmentalists have opened up fruitful avenues of analysis this study suggests that some of their conclusions are overstated. In particular, it questions the de‐politicizing effect of development discourse, and the notion of grassroots movements searching for alternatives to development, amounting to a 'rejection of the entire paradigm'.

Primera Parte. Historias de países, regiones y paisajes. Las revoluciones ecológicas de México / Chris Boyer, Martha Micheline Cariño Olvera. El gran caribe en la metamorfosis de la tropicalidad / Reinaldo Funes Monzote. Improntas y remanentes indígenas en los Andes tropicales / Nicolás Cuvi. El dilema de la "cuna espléndida": naturaleza y territorio en la construcción de Brasil / José Augusto Pádua. Selvas: amenazantes y amenazadas / Claudia Leal. El muro y la hiedra: narrativas ambientales de un continente urbano / Lise Sedrez, Regina Horta Duarte -- Segunda Parte. Historias transversales. Cocina casera: campesinos, cocina v diversidad agrícola / John Soluri. Un continente cubierto de pasto: ganadería y transformación del paisaje / Shaw Van Ausdal, Robell W. Wilcox. Desde el fondo de la tierra: trabajadores, naturaleza y comunidades en las industrias minera y petrolera / Myrna Santiago. Prodigalidad y sostenibilidad: las ciencias ambientales y la búsqueda del desarrollo / Stuart McCook. Parques latinoamericanos: naturaleza profunda, despoblamiento y el ritmo variable de la conservación / Emily Wakild.

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region