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Adamastor is a freshly divorced, frustrated bureaucrat trying to reinvent his life. Richie is a young, struggling actor. Together with Ernesto, a rakish, expat Argentine showman, they create Eden-Brazil, an ecotourism destination in a stunning swath of coastal rainforest. Inspired to provide visitors with the ultimate return to nature, they decide to stage the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, complete with Adam, Eve, snake, apple, the works. But recreating an earthly paradise as something more than another roadside attraction is no easy feat. In this charming, tragicomic tale, Moacyr Scliar employs his signature humor and talent for crisp storytelling, weaving together a playfully serious parable of environmentalist ideals clashing with the realities of local politics, global consumer culture, and competing visions of authentic nature.

Tourism is becoming one of the world's most important economic activities. There is hardly a place on earth, no matter how inaccessible, that has not been visited by some traveler seeking adventure, enlightenment, or simply change from the familiar world back home.

In this pathfinding book, David Zurick explores the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry—adventure travel. He raises important questions about what constitutes the travel experience and shows how the modern adventure industry has commercialized the very notion of adventure by packaging it as tours.

Drawing on two decades of personal travel, as well as the writings of others, Zurick unravels the paradox of adventure travel—that the very act of visiting remote places untouched by Western culture introduces that culture and begins irreversible changes. This first in-depth look at adventure travel opens new insights into the physical, philosophical, and spiritual attributes of the travel experience. Written in a lively style, the book is intended for everyone interested in travel and its effects on both travelers and the people and places they visit.

An easy-to-use bilingual field guide in English and Malagasy on the grasses of Madagascar. 

Field Guide to the Grasses of Madagascar is the first photographic compilation of information on Madagascar’s Poaceae, featuring around half of the known grass species on the island. Compiled by a team of Malagasy and international botanists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Kew Madagascar, and partner institutions, it consolidates expert-generated and expert-verified information in Malagasy and English.

This book contains information on 269 species of grasses, with a general introduction and an index to Malagasy common names in addition to Latin names. The book also provides a critical foundation to the ongoing work of assessing the current biodiversity, distribution, uses, and evolution of the island’s grass flora. 

Whether you’re a weekend traveler, extreme adventurer, or family on vacation, The Michigan Eco-Travelerlights the way to a greener getaway. Naturalists, conservationists, and hospitality experts will find the book equally helpful in responding to the ever rising demand for sustainable recreation.

Where nature meets history—explore Alabama’s hidden river legacy.

The Tensaw River introduces one of the American South’s richest and most fertile natural features. Author Mike Bunn is director of Historic Blakeley State Park, which is nestled in a prominent bend of the majestic Tensaw River. Reading Bunn is like sailing with a knowledgeable captain along the river’s natural and cultural byways as he offers a treasury of stories and facts that illuminate the river’s astonishing flora and fauna and the sweep of human history along the river’s ageless, meandering waterways.

Forming the eastern boundary of the expansive Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Tensaw has had little industrial development. Left largely undisturbed, the river still flows free and bountiful into the grand estuary of Mobile Bay in ways and along vistas that would be recognizable to Native Americans centuries ago and to pioneers who arrived before Alabama became a state.

Bunn’s unforgettable stories in The Tensaw River trace the construction and occupation of the Bottle Creek site, an important mound complex built by Southeastern Native Americans a millennia ago. Nearby Blakeley is a spectral antebellum ghost town whose lost memories also tease the imagination. During the Civil War, the boom of artillery fire in the battle that sealed the fate of the city of Mobile echoed along the bends in the Tensaw.

Located near popular Gulf Coast travel destinations, the Tensaw’s forty-one-mile-long “Forgotten Cultural Heritage Corridor” is a gateway to the enchanting beauty of—and humankind’s enduring relationship to—the landscape of the American South.

Winner of the 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award

Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration is a lively ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism and its engagement with marine and terrestrial biodiversity on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila, located in the ecologically critical Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.

In this highly readable text, anthropologist Keri Vacanti Brondo provides a pioneering theoretical framework that conceptualizes conservation voluntourism as a green industry. Brondo argues that the volunteer tourism industry is the product of coloniality and capitalism that works to produce and sustain an economy of affect while generating inequalities and dispossession. Employing a decolonizing methodology based on landscape assemblage theory, Brondo offers “thinking-like-a-mangrove” to attend to alternative worldings in Utila beyond the hegemonic tourist spectacle–dominated world attached to the volunteer tourism industry. Readers journey through the mangroves and waters alongside voluntourists, iguanas, whale sharks, turtles, lionfish, and islanders to build valuable research experience in environmental management while engaging in affective labor and multispecies relations of care.

Conservation organizations benefit from the financial capital and labor associated with conservation tourism, an industry boosted by social media. This critical work asks us to consider the impacts of this new alternative tourism market, one that relies on the exchange of “affect” with other species. How are human socialities made through interactions with other species? What lives and dies in Utila’s affect economy? Why are some species killable? Who gets to decide?
 

How the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s reshaped the lives of young Kichwa men

We Are Important People Now illuminates the trajectories and life experiences of young Napo Kichwa men who have worked as tour guides in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, in the wake of the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s. Anthropologist Ernesto J. Benitez analyzes the socioeconomic situation of these men and the motivations and desires that drive them to seek service-based employment. Benitez discusses how the tour guides go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. The opportunities for self-transformation are at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. They now see their indigeneity as an asset, but their urban lifestyles, pursuits of intimate relationships with foreign tourists, and sometimes-dismissive attitudes toward Kichwa people in rural Ecuador distance them socially from the broader Kichwa population. 

Importantly, the book interrogates the possibilities and limitations that produce—and are produced by—such emergent forms of identity formation, situating the current period within a broader analysis of the colonial and postcolonial history of the area. It pays special attention to how different processes of interaction with and incorporation into colonial and state productive and biopolitical regimes have impacted the historical production and performance of Kichwa ethnic and gendered identities in the Upper Amazon region. A wide swath of anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and gender and Indigenous studies specialists will be edified by this timely and accessible narrative.