Susanna Hecht has worked in Latin America for more than 30 years. She has lived and researched tropical ranching, industrial soy farming in Brazil and Bolivia, worked with native populations (the Kayapo), rubber tappers in Acre state, forest extractors in Maranhao, quilombos ( former runaway slave settlements) in Amapa and Rondonia) and with peasant groups in the eastern Amazon. She has also studied forest recovery in El Salvador and Mexico.Susanna is a scholar but one also engaged in activism that supports forests AND people who have lived and shaped them. This has led her into Amazonian forest history, Latin American social history, as well as exploration of alternatives to destructive and socially retrograde forms of development. With a background in soil science and agroecology she has explored the soil impacts of different land uses and made important contributions to the discovery and management of "Terra Preta" the anthropogenic, high nutrient soils of Amazonia, and studied how local populations have managed various resources. In Central America she has studied (using remote sensing) how areas that were almost totally cleared a couple of decades ago now have recovered their forests.She is considered a "political ecologist": that is someone who looks at how politics, history and economics have shaped today's tropical landscapes.