Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book acknowledges the role of global capitalism in the marginalization of people affected by biodiversity enclosures. It makes visible other kinds of power that become mechanisms of land dispossession. The book complicates the tensions between and among agro-pastoralists and environmentalists in the making of a park on the urban periphery. It struggles over common property forest are not simply over resources but are also reflected in ethnic contests. Sharlene Mollett rethinks the relations between "parks and people" by illuminating the limits to territorial formalization inside the Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, and reflects on the how a history of colonial power in the Honduran Mosquitia is not erased by territorial legislation, however significant. Mollett also thinks through the ways protected area practice and the state's extractivist development agenda are linked through a shared logic of Indigenous peoples' dehumanization.