The Amazon rainforest is nearing a critical tipping point, calling for a transformative approach to land use that addresses intersecting forms of socioecological injustice in the planet’s most biodiverse region. Drawing on sustainability science, political ecology, and ecological economics, this chapter examines the ethical dimensions of land use in the Amazon, with particular focus on the bioeconomy. We explore practices developed by Indigenous peoples, other local communities, and environmental activists in response to ecosystem degradation and social injustice driven by foreign interests, local elites, and dominant sectors, especially agribusiness. These initiatives – framed as ‘sociobioeconomies’– foster land and water stewardship rooted in multispecies justice, sustaining the relationships and lifeways of diverse forest communities. Inspired by such practices, we advocate for a land use ethic that recognizes the interconnectedness, intrinsic value, and agency of all forms of life– human and more-than-human– and that is inclusive, relational, intercultural, and grounded in diverse, often marginalized, knowledge systems, contributing to transformative regional change.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ encounters with yagé (ayahuasca) as a critical inflection point in his literary development and spiritual imagination. Marcus Boon explores the 1950s Amazonian journeys that led to The Yage Letters (1963) and its expanded edition The Yage Letters Redux (2006), arguing that Burroughs’ experiences with the vine laid the groundwork for his later explorations of language as virus, the cut-up method, and his cosmological vision of control and resistance. Intertwining Cold War paranoia, psychedelic experimentation, and postcolonial critique, Boon situates yagé not as an outlier in Burroughs’ oeuvre but as a key to understanding its epistemological and aesthetic radicalism. The chapter maps Burroughs’ legacy in the broader literary and anthropological discourse on ayahuasca, showing how his early visions resonate with – and complicate – contemporary movements for psychedelic healing, spiritual tourism, and decolonial thought. Burroughs, Boon suggests, helped carry yagé out of the jungle and into a globalized discourse of language, healing, and power.

Chapter 5, “Envisioning a Plurinational Governance”, analyzes the role and aspirations of Indigenous peoples in the international governance of the Amazon. Based on the analysis of COICA international politics and ACTO strategies and actions regarding Indigenous peoples, the Chapter argues that the international governance of the Amazon has excluded Indigenous peoples by recognizing a limited version of self-determination with no political rights. Many ACTO officials reject the possibility of having the representativeness of Indigenous peoples in the deliberative processes of the organization. However, the continued indigenous activism has opened new opportunities for institutionalizing their participation within ACTO. Despite ACTO’s political weakness and the different institutional challenges of COICA, Indigenous peoples struggle to decolonize the international governance of the Amazon and enact what would be a plurinational international governance.

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the findings and arguments developed in the previous chapters. It also provides a reflection on the policy implications of the study for reforming the international governance of the Amazon and other international rainforests, such as the Congo rainforest. Finally, it provides some reflections on how the proposed framework can be applied to global commons, such as the high seas and seabed beyond national jurisdictions, and outer space.

Chapter 4 critically examines the fact that sometimes innovations not only fail to solve crucial problems, but are the problem itself. Specifically, it explains why Ring doorbell exemplifies the threat of home surveillance innovation. The billion-dollar Amazon subsidiary sold millions of Americans on the promise of security via surveillance without any credible evidence that its system works. But rather than encouraging people to adopt proven security upgrades, such as better locks and secure package drops, Ring wins customers by making its digital innovation seem essential amid a climate of rising fear. By fighting against boring yet effective alternatives, Ring’s anxiety-inducing features have further normalized intensive networked surveillance and helped turn innocuous neighborly interactions into potential threats.

This chapter examines the national-scale origins and political linkages of land mafias and rural militias in Brazil. These linkages, especially to political power, explain how, over just a few decades, an RDPE of active and open land-grabbing mafias has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand an RDPE system to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system. The land-grabbing process is linked to illegalities and violence, which are mutually self-reinforcing through the logics operating in these systems. This chapter examines the rapid post-2019 transformation of pastures into monoculture soybean or corn plantations, especially in southeastern Acre and along the paved BR-163 highway. Part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing and its mafia-like tactics, whose continuation is ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. The situation worsened, especially during the reign of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), as land mafia dynamics penetrated deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

Peru’s Amazon is the site of a violent and fast-moving gold-mining rush, which has caused divides within Indigenous communities and devastating environmental impacts from the mercury used in gold extractivism. There has been a massive increase in illegal or informal gold mining, especially in Peru’s Madre de Dios province. Tens of thousands of miners operate on rafts in the rivers or dig for gold by increasingly mechanized means. In Madre de Dios there is a gold-mining RDPE that explains the bulk of land and forest use. In addition to an exploration of the dynamics of gold extractivism, this chapter also assesses the conflicts and resistance at play in this context. Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon, are currently facing huge extractivist pressures, which has started to polarize many communities and change their relationship with the extractivist phenomena. Some community members have started to extract gold illegally and destructively, while most resist these temptations, invoking nonmodernist cosmologies and understandings that place barriers to extractivist expansions.

This chapter is a novel intersectorial analysis of deforesting industries in Brazil linked to illegal land grabbing/land value speculation, including ranching, monoculture plantation expansion, logging, and infrastructure development. The driving and pulling causes of deforestation in the Amazon are explored through a deeper analysis of the ranching-grabbing regionally dominant political economy (RDPE). Ranching speculating is by far the most prominent key driver and dominant political-economic sector in explaining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Counterintuitively, politically enabled illegal land grabbing/speculation have become more lucrative in many places than the actual ranching activities on the deforested land. Drawing on field research and expert interviews in the Brazilian Amazon, this chapter explains how ranching opens lands for other forms of extractivism, especially the expansion of monoculture plantations. The relations and distinct yet interlinked business logics within ranching and soybean plantation sectors yield an analysis of “modern” and “primitive” forms of agribusiness. The particularities of Amazonian cattle capitalisms are explored via regional comparisons.

The conclusion unites the key empirical, theoretical, and methodological lessons, showcasing findings on the causes of deforestation relevant for several scholarly fields. The book’s original contribution and approach highlight the importance of RDPEs as the ultimate cause of deforestation. These RDPEs are also building blocks of global capitalism and regional drivers of deforestation, enabled by state actions, yet simultaneously resisted by progressive state and civil society actors. Ranching-grabbing in Brazil and gold mining–organized crime in the Amazon are explored as particularly important extractivist systems that help to explain deforestation in the Amazon at a deeper level. The book also discusses clearcutting and how it is driven by the aims of the pulping, papermaking, and wood energy sectors in Finland. Finland is a Nordic welfare state in the EU, which provides a novel comparison of how regionally dominant extractivist systems can vary yet still cause loss of forests across the North–South divide in the world-system. The lessons are related to broader discussions around global forests and deforestation.

In 2011, the Brazilian Government began dismantling the country’s robust framework for Indigenous land rights by enacting measures to deny Indigenous Peoples’ access to their ancestral lands. From 2019 to 2022, the government did not recognize or title a single hectare of Indigenous lands, despite more than 700 pending requests for demarcation (or formal designation and titling). A change in government and six land demarcations in 2023, however, show signs of a new era for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and relationship with the state. This chapter analyzes evolving Indigenous land rights pre- and post-constitutionalization in 1988, the result of intense political mobilization and shifting colonialist perceptions of Indigenous Peoples. This chapter also discusses the main obstacles faced by Indigenous Peoples in enforcing Brazil’s protective land rights framework, accounting for the structures of settler colonial states – structures that permit institutional and physical violence against Indigenous Peoples by state and non-state actors alike. Finally, this chapter examines the opportunities created since the change in government in 2023, proposing new avenues to advance Indigenous Peoples’ constitutional land rights in Brazil.

Chapter 6 examines Iranian cult and myth as evidenced in the Nart sagas of Transcaucasia, but also among Scythians as well as in Zoroastrian tradition, including the psychotropic cult substances Haoma (Iranian) and Soma (Indic). The Greek polis of Dioscurias in the Caucasus is explored as a place where Hellenic and Indo-Iranian divine-twin myth and cult affiliation meet, as indeed they do in the Pontic polis of Sinope. Aeolian connections are conspicuous at both locales.