Common stereotypes of a homogeneous Amazonia belie the complexity and diversity of peoples and landscapes across the region. Although often invisible to the outside world, diverse peoples—indigenous, traditional, migrant, urban dwellers and others—actively construct their identities and shape cultural and political landscapes in diverse ways throughout the region. This volume combines political ecology, with its emphasis on identity, politics, and social movements, with insights from cultural geography's focus on landscapes, identities and livelihoods, to explore the changing nature of Amazonian development. These papers focus on indigenous identity and cosmology; changing livelihoods and identities; and transboundary landscapes. They highlight the diversity of proactive, place-based social and political actors who increasingly raise their voices to contest and engage with Amazon development policies. Based on their history, social values, and livelihood practices, such groups propose alternative ways of understanding and managing Amazonian landscapes.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a strong social movement of rubber tappers in the Amazonian state of Acre achieved remarkable policy goals, gaining new forms of land rights as well as political representation through their alliance with indigenous groups, environmentalists, political parties and human rights advocates. Allies of the social movement entered politics and took state power in 1999 as the “Forest Government,” building on the rubber tapper's legacy to embrace the unique cultural and political history of the state, and implementing ambitious plans for forest-based development under the banner of “forest citizenship.” In the past 25 years, however, rubber tapper identity has changed rapidly as many rubber tappers migrate to urban areas, or increasingly shift from traditional rubber tapping to more intensive land uses such as commercial agriculture and small-scale animal husbandry. This paper uses data collected from household surveys, key-informant interviews and ethnographic research to explore the idea of what it means to be a “rubber tapper” and “forest citizen” today. We examine the contradictory nature of changing land-use and cultural revitalization efforts among diverse rural and urban populations, and the implications of this diversity for the future of the Forest Government's policies, and the rubber tappers.

The Extractive Reserve System is championed as a win–win model of sustainable development in which rubber tappers serve to protect the forest while improving economic growth and resident well-being. Recently, reserves are being questioned in terms of their environmental sustainability, as many rubber tappers increasingly turn to market agriculture in times of economic duress and instability. This study explores land-use/land-cover change in six rubber estates within the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, using both remote sensing analysis and household surveys, and addresses the differences in deforestation by livelihood trajectories. A remote sensing analysis between 1986 and 2003 shows that some communities are close to surpassing the allowable limits of deforestation. Rubber tapping plays a less important role in livelihood strategies, as welfare is linked to non-extractive activities. Households pursue diverse livelihood activities including extractivism, small-scale market cultivation, animal rearing, and cattle production. The results suggest that land-use/land-cover change is highly dynamic in the reserve.

Resource-use decisions affect the ecological and human components of the coupled human and natural system (CHANS), but a critique of some frameworks is that they do not address the complexity and tradeoffs within and between the two systems. Land system architecture (LA) was suggested to account for these tradeoffs at multiple levels/scales. LA and landscape ecology (LE) focus on landscape structure (i.e., composition and configuration of land-use and land-cover change [LULCC]) and the processes (social-ecological) resulting from and shaping LULCC. Drawing on mixed-methods research in the Southern Great Plains, we develop a framework that incorporates LA, LE, and governance theory. Public land and water are commons resources threatened by overuse, degradation, and climate change. Resource use is exacerbated by public land and water policies at the state- and local-levels. Our framework provides a foundation for investigating the mechanisms of land systems science (LSS) couplings across multiple levels/scales to understand how and why governance impacts human LULCC decisions (LA) and how those LULCC patterns influence, and are influenced by, the underlying ecological processes (LE). This framework provides a mechanism for investigating the feedbacks between and among the different system components in a CHANS that subsequently impact future human design decisions.

Cimarron County, Oklahoma and Union County, New Mexico, neighboring counties in the Southern High Plains, are part of a vital agricultural region in the United States. This region experiences extended periods of cyclical drought threatening its ability to produce, creating an incentive for extensive center pivot irrigation (CPI). Center pivots draw from the rapidly depleting High Plains Aquifer System. As a result, the prospect of long-term sustainability for these agricultural communities is questionable. We use Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems to quantify growth in land irrigated by CPI between the 1950s and 2014, and key informant interviews to explore local perspectives on the causes and impact of such growth. In Cimarron County, OK, CPI increased by the mid-1980s, and has continually increased since. Results suggest adaptation to drought, a depleting aquifer, high corn prices, and less rigid groundwater regulations contribute to CPI growth. Conversely, CPI in Union County, NM, increased until 2010, and then declined. Results also suggest that drought-related agricultural changes and more aggressive well drilling regulations contribute to this decrease. Nevertheless, in both counties, there is a growing concern over the depleting aquifer, the long-term sustainability of CPI, and the region’s economic future.

Smallholders remain an important part of human-environment research, particularly in cultural and political ecology, peasant and development studies, and increasingly in land system and sustainability science. This introduction to the edited volume explores land use and livelihood issues among smallholders, in several disciplinary and subfield traditions. Specifically, we provide a short history of smallholder livelihood research in the human-environment tradition. We reflect on why, in an age of rapid globalization, smallholder land use and livelihoods still matter, both for land system science and as a reflection of concerns with inequality and poverty. Key themes that emerge from the papers in this volume include the importance of smallholder farming and land-use practices to questions of environmental sustainability, the dynamic reality of smallholder livelihoods, the challenges of vulnerability and adaptation in contemporary human-environment systems, and the structural and relative nature of the term “smallholder.” Overall these contributions show that smallholder studies are more pertinent than ever, especially in the face of global environmental change. Additionally, we argue that questions of smallholder identity, social difference, and teleconnections provide fertile areas of future research. We conclude that we need to re-envision who the smallholder is today and how this translates into modern human-environment smallholder studies.