Amazon in trouble: rain forest destruction doubles.
BRASILIA, Brazil -- Imagine beetles that are as big as teacups, orange frogs, pink dolphins, vampire catfish, and foot-wide blue butterflies. Those are just some of the weird and colorful creatures that inhabit the Amazon rain forest in South America. If you want to see these unique...

Learning from burning.
The Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts will conduct a controlled burn of two and a half square kilo meters of transition forest between the Amazon and the "Cerrado" savannas of central Brazil, as part of a study assessing the impact of agricultural burns. This is the...

Afterword.
McAnany rightly emphasizes the complexity of the globalization process. As an anthropologist, I tend to be most interested in the changes the process causes in culture, and through culture in the individual's sense of self-identity and personal worth. Others might stress the economic factors involved and the ways they...

News Bites.
* April 23-29 is national "Turn off Your TV" week. Coincidentally, it is also "Roll Back the Rug and Teach the Kids the Electric Slide" week. Americans spend an average of four hours each day, or nine years by age 65, watching TV. Wouldn't you rather spend that time...

The coyote choir.
I like to watch coyotes play and hunt. There are many of them near my cousin Marco's house in the mountains of New Mexico. We can see them romping across the meadows and down the dry stream beds. We don't see them often in the daytime. The coyotes have...

Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil's Contestado Rebellion, 1912-1916.
Brazilians are not fanatics nor are they the stuff of martyrs. The ordinary Brazilian has been called "l'homme genial," someone who is free and easy in ways and beliefs. Catholicism, long the official faith, failed to make Brazilians exemplars of a moral code. Paradoxically, and indeed remarkably, several millenarian cults...

Chemical weapons for plants.
Chemical Weapons for Plants How does your garden grow? With fertilizers and pesticides, probably. If you want to raise zucchini to the zenith, and tempting tomatoes, you need plenty of water, rich soil, and a strong defense against weeds and insects. Even in the best-kept garden,...

Sheep on the land.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I teach a diverse group of students many of whom were either born in foreign countries or have relatives there. When I ask them to describe their experiences with nature they often write about their countries of origin, and sometimes about farms where they visit...

The stubbornest Americans: A tale of the farmers who refused to flee the Dust Bowl.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great America Dust Bowl By Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin, $28.00 For several days just after Christmas 2005, a series of wildfires raged in Oklahoma and northern Texas. Caused by a devastating combination of...

Scred cow? Canada's response to the BSE crisis; Evaluating North American integration, science, and questions of intrusiveness and autonomy.
I. INTRODUCTION This study focuses on foreign and domestic pressures related to Canada's first indigenous case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in May 2003. At the international level, the integration of the North American cattle and beef industry, export considerations in other markets, and the role of...