This book consciously seeks to avoid the mentality of "trade-offs", where pro-development advocates view conservation efforts as impediments and conservationists are convinced that development inevitably leads to a loss for nature.
This is the first chapter in Timothy Killeen's meticulously researched two-volume study of the challenges facing the fight to preserve the Amazon rainforest.
Killeen's enormously ambitious effort seeks to understand and explain all the complex and interrelated phenomena driving (and impeding) change across the region. If you are concerned about the fate of the Amazon, you must read this book.
Nonetheless, the text provides a longer historical perspective to show how policies create legacies that reverberate over decades, long after they have been recognised as being fundamentally flawed.