Last Fall, Dr. Robert Walker talked with the Florida Museum of Natural History about What Florida Can Learn from the Amazon Fires.
Robert Walker, a professor of Latin American geographers and geography in the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies, grew up in Clearwater, Fla. He remembers driving down long stretches of I-75, peering out at mile after mile of slash pine and palmetto on his way to splash in the crystal-clear Silver Springs.
Walker liked to hunt, fish and surf. A Florida kid, through and through. As he got older, his love of science, sense of wanderlust and attraction to tropical environments drew him to one of the last truly wild places on Earth—the Amazon rainforest.
Walker’s research focuses on tropical deforestation in the Amazon Basin, something he’s witnessed rise and fall since he first started studying it in the 1980s. In his field work, he talks to peasant farmers, ranchers, indigenous people and loggers to get the full story about how people change their environment.
Read the whole story at What Florida Can Learn from the Amazon Fires.