In folktales told throughout much of the Brazilian Amazon, dolphins take human form, attend raucous dances and festivals, seduce men and women, and carry them away to a city beneath the river. They are "encantados," or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits, and with shiny black shoes reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and...

Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of...

The essays collected here offer important new reflections on the multiple images of and rhetoric surrounding the rain forest. The slogan Save the Rain Forest emblazoned on glossy posters of tall trees wreathed in vines and studded with monkeys and parrots promotes the popular image of a marvelously wild and vulnerable rain forest. Although representations like these have fueled laudable rescue efforts, in many ways they have done more harm than good, as these essays show. Such icons tend to conceal both the biological variety of rain forests and the diversity of their human inhabitants. They...

The essays collected here offer important new reflections on the multiple images of and rhetoric surrounding the rain forest. The slogan Save the Rain Forest emblazoned on glossy posters of tall trees wreathed in vines and studded with monkeys and parrots promotes the popular image of a marvelously wild and vulnerable rain forest. Although representations like these have fueled laudable rescue efforts, in many ways they have done more harm than good, as these essays show. Such icons tend to conceal both the biological variety of rain forests and the diversity of their human inhabitants. They...