<p>Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable development has become the basis for a vast number of “green industries” from eco-tourism to carbon sequestration. In<em>The “Greening” of Costa Rica</em>, Ana Isla exposes the results of the economist’s rejection of physical limits to growth, the biologist’s fetish with such limits, and the indebtedness of peripheral countries.</p><p>Isla’s case study is the 250,000 hectare Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area, created in the late 1990s as the result of Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swaps. Rather than reducing poverty and creating equality, development in and around the conservation area has dispossessed and disenfranchised subsistence farmers, expropriating their land, water, knowledge, and labour.</p><p>Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets such as carbon credits, intellectual property, cash crops, open-pit mining, and eco-tourism, few of whose benefits flow to the local population.</p>