Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Political Ecology of Rainforest Destruction, Second Edition

Unweaving the Web of Destruction

The continuing devastation of the world’s tropical rain forest affects us all—spurring climate change, decimating biodiversity, and wrecking our environment’s resiliency. Millions of worried people around the world want to do whatever it takes to save the forest that is left.

But halting rain forest destruction means understanding what is driving it.

In Breakfast of Biodiversity, John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto insightfully describe the ways in which such disparate factors as the international banking system, modern agricultural techniques, rain forest ecology, and the struggles of the poor interact to bring down the forest. They weave an alternative vision in which democracy, sustainable agriculture, and land security for the poor are at the center of the movement to save the tropical environment.

John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto
Foreword by Vandana Shiva
ISBN 0-935028-96-X
September 2005
256 pages, index

This new, fully updated edition of Breakfast of Biodiversity discusses important new developments in our understanding of rain forest biology and assesses the impacts of a decade of “free” trade on the rain forest and on those who live in and around it.

“One of the best short books on the rain forest crisis.”
—Larry Lohmann, co-editor, The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests

“A detailed and sophisticated study.”
—Susan E. Place, Latin America Research Review

View PDFs of the Table of Contents, the Foreword by Vandana Shiva, the Preface, Chapter 1, or the Index.