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.

This chapter provides an overview of the rapid decline of commercial inland rice cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry after the Civil War. Faced with new questions of labor and economies, land owners looked toward new commodities to produce on the former rice plantations. Timber companies began purchasing these tracts in large numbers and agressively harvesting trees and, once again, dramatically altering the landscape. By the turn of the twentieth century, these tracts became part of the United States Forestry Service or incorporated into the growing development surrounding Charleston.