Synopsis A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics of and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history and environmental and policy studies, Nature in the Global South features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. The essays examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes and peasants are understood and transformed; how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being; and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among the rural, urban, and global allies.