"Expansive in both space and time, this captivating book takes you into the ecologically and culturally rich forests of the Darien and halfway around the world. With short chapters authored by diverse voices, the book weaves together ecology, history, and anthropology to provide insights into the myriad forces that have shaped and continue to shape interactions between humans and nature at local to global scales."--Dr. Liza Comita, Yale University "Relatively few scholarly books transcend the usual barriers that divide and exclude academic disciplines, audiences, and public interests. This book does so beautifully by inviting readers of all kinds to glimpse the Wounaan people of Panama through uplifting first-person narratives and no-nonsense accounts of their historical struggles involving rosewood trees, especially cocobolo rosewood ( Dalbergia retusa ). Based in deep and long-term interdisciplinary research and communicated through diverse voices, it takes us on a journey from the demand of 'cocobolo fever' in East Asian markets to its supply through rampant logging of cocobolo rosewood in Wounaan lands, with all the disheartening and uplifting turns involving land rights, environmental degradation, and exploitation of natural resources."--James R. Welch, author of Persistence of Good Living: A'uw Life Cycles and Well-Being in the Central Brazilian Cerrados "In the history of global capitalism, certain commodities take the center stage.

Yet, as the rosewood fever shows, nonhumans are always more than their commodity form. In gathering global and Indigenous stories about life in the Panamanian forest and beyond, this book reminds us that histories of environmental depletion and care are inevitably open-ended."--Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile.