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The vulnerability of the Amazon has widely increased with the COVID-19 global pandemic and with the dismantlement of environmental protection policies in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration. By contrast, local initiatives focusing on sustainable production, conservation, enhancing local people's quality of life, and supporting a more inclusive economy have emerged throughout the region and are building resilience in face of these disruptions. They represent seeds for transformation towards more sustainable trajectories from the ground up. In this context, women play a significant role, but their actions and voices are poorly understood, studied, or even considered. In this article, we use a novel approach to engage and highlight women's experiences by connecting decolonial and process-relational perspectives. Decolonial and process-relational thinking are closely linked in many ways, including in that they embrace difference as a mode of experiencing social-ecological relations. One particular aspect of this link is the shared focus on liminal thinking or thinking from the borders, what we call 'betweenness'. In our decolonial praxis, we highlight women's perspectives on their particular and diverse ways of life in the Amazon as they confront diverse pressures. To this end, we collaborated with 39 women from Santarém and neighboring towns in western Pará through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and facilitated dialogues. We discuss their perspectives on regional transformation, particularly the expansion of large-scale agribusiness around rural communities, and their understanding and responses to these changes. We reflect on the mutual learning experience resulting from the transdisciplinary engagement between researchers and collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond the Amazonian cities, distinct spatial units arranged in networks compose an extended urban space, usually invisible to government agencies and public polities. This article empirically reveals this space by studying the localities' characteristics and connections. In southwestern Pará, Brazil, 236 communities were sampled using field expeditions. Variables related to the locality organization, history, health and education services, urban infrastructure, and land use were explored in a fuzzy cluster analysis. Local production and consumption flows were considered in the locality network analysis. The fuzzy analysis allowed identifying a hierarchy of localities for which the geographical location influences the spatial distribution patterns of five groups. On the other hand, consumption and production networks identified different locality's articulations, with persistent dependence on cities. These results characterize extensive urbanization at the local level and highlights the participation of the local populations configuring the Amazonian territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical deforestation is a significant driver of global environmental change, given its impacts on the carbon cycle and biodiversity. Loss of the Amazon forest, the focus of this article, is of particular concern because of the size and the rapid rate at which the forest is being converted to agricultural use. In this article, we identify what has been the most important driver of deforestation in a specific colonization frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. To this end, we consider (1) the land-use dynamics of smallholder households, (2) the formation of pasture by large-scale ranchers, and (3) structural processes of land aggregation by ranchers. Much has been written about relations between smallholders and ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon, particularly those involving conflict over land, and this article explicates the implications of such social processes for land cover. Toward this end, we draw on panel data (1996-2002) and satellite imagery (1986-1999) to show the deforestation that is attributable to small- and largeholders, and the deforestation that is attributable to aggregations of property arising from a process that we refer to as frontier stratification. Evidently, most of the recent deforestation in the study area has resulted from the household processes of smallholders, not from conversions to pasture pursuant to the appropriations of smallholders' property by well-capitalized ranchers or speculators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]