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Susanna B. Hecht is an American geographer and a professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. Her early work on the deforestation of the Amazon led to the founding of the subfield of political ecology. This subfield of geography embraces sociology, economics, history, literature, ecology, environmental studies and a wide variety of other fields in an effort to paint a more intricate picture of a particular geographic region and the influence it has on the world around it as well as how the world impacts the region. The Amazon rain forest is her primary subject of inquiry and she is the co-author of the watershed book, Fate of the Forest: Destroyers, Developers and Defenders of the Amazon with Alexander Cockburn, originally published in 1990, but which has been updated and reissued by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. In 2004, Fate of the Forest was named one of the most influential books in cultural geography by the American Association of Geography. The book has become a classic text in environmental studies, and has won numerous awards. She is widely considered a preeminent authority on forest transition and sustainable agriculture. In addition to her academic work, she has also written popular articles for the Nation, New Left Review and Fortune Magazine.
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