Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable development has become the basis for a vast number of “green industries” from eco-tourism to carbon sequestration. In The “Greening” of Costa Rica, Ana Isla exposes the results of the economist’s rejection of physical limits to growth, the biologist’s fetish with such limits, and the indebtedness of peripheral countries.

Isla’s case study is the 250,000 hectare Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area, created in the late 1990s as the result of Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swaps. Rather than reducing poverty and creating equality, development in and around the conservation area has dispossessed and disenfranchised subsistence farmers, expropriating their land, water, knowledge, and labour.

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets such as carbon credits, intellectual property, cash crops, open-pit mining, and eco-tourism, few of whose benefits flow to the local population.

Ana Isla is a professor in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. She works on issues of development, sustainable development, climate change, ecofeminism, environmental justice, gender and society. She is the author of The "Greening" of Costa Rica: Women, Peasants, Indigenous People and the Remaking of Nature.

Claudia von Werlhof is Professor Emerita at the University of Innsbruck, in the Department of Political Science and Sociology. Her work focuses on the "modern world system,"seen from the South, the neoliberal globalization of "capitalist patriarchy," alternatives to patriarchal societies inspired by matriarchal and Indigenous societies/civilizations, as well as on the elaboration of the "Critical Theory of Patriarchy" as a new paradigm. Her books in English include Women: The Last Colony; There is an Alternative; and The Failure of Modern Civilization and the Struggle for a "Deep" Alternative.

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