This article contributes to political ecologies of forest-based climate change mitigation strategies by assessing Brazil's first subnational jurisdictional REDD+ program. Proponents of jurisdictional REDD+ argue that the approach brings more social and environmental benefits than small-scale REDD+ projects and addresses negative socio-economic impacts of deforestation pressures on forest-dependent communities. Our analysis tell a different story. We assess Acre's sub-national jurisdictional (SNJ) program to show that reworking the scale of REDD+ is not only key to its persistence and stabilization but also how implementation politics often further environmental injustice. We draw qualitative field research in the state of Acre into conversation with a critical analysis of SISA and the ISA Carbono program implementation. Our findings illustrate two interwoven points vital to political ecologies of REDD+. First, the socio-environmental ambitions of Acre's SNJ REDD+ program were strongly influenced by the political ecologies of popular movements and a history of state-led environmental governance initiatives. Second, Acre's SNJ REDD+ has not met several of its social-environmental goals like bolstering forest-dependent peoples' rights or equitably distributing program benefits across sectors despite most extensively operating on the lands of forest-dependent communities. Consequently, we argue that Acre's SNJ REDD+ track record has reinforced rather than alleviated injustice against Indigenous peoples and traditional forest extractivist communities.
{"title":"A political ecology of jurisdictional REDD+: Investigating social-environmentalism, climate change mitigation, and environmental (in)justice in the Brazilian Amazon","authors":"Marcelo Santos Rocha da Silva, Joel E. Correia","doi":"10.2458/jpe.4713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.4713","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes to political ecologies of forest-based climate change mitigation strategies by assessing Brazil's first subnational jurisdictional REDD+ program. Proponents of jurisdictional REDD+ argue that the approach brings more social and environmental benefits than small-scale REDD+ projects and addresses negative socio-economic impacts of deforestation pressures on forest-dependent communities. Our analysis tell a different story. We assess Acre's sub-national jurisdictional (SNJ) program to show that reworking the scale of REDD+ is not only key to its persistence and stabilization but also how implementation politics often further environmental injustice. We draw qualitative field research in the state of Acre into conversation with a critical analysis of SISA and the ISA Carbono program implementation. Our findings illustrate two interwoven points vital to political ecologies of REDD+. First, the socio-environmental ambitions of Acre's SNJ REDD+ program were strongly influenced by the political ecologies of popular movements and a history of state-led environmental governance initiatives. Second, Acre's SNJ REDD+ has not met several of its social-environmental goals like bolstering forest-dependent peoples' rights or equitably distributing program benefits across sectors despite most extensively operating on the lands of forest-dependent communities. Consequently, we argue that Acre's SNJ REDD+ track record has reinforced rather than alleviated injustice against Indigenous peoples and traditional forest extractivist communities. ","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47651756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amidst the many socio-ecological crises facing the world today, the biodiversity crisis is considered one of the most foundational. According to scientists, we have entered yet another mass extinction event in the history of the planet, though the first triggered by the impacts of the combined, uneven actions of one species. This introductory paper to a Special Section on the "Political ecologies of extinction" frames this crisis through political ecology, and explores what political ecologies of extinction could look like and focus on in the 21st century. Building on emerging literatures and the author contributions, it agrees that extinction is much more than the endpoint of a long and rocky road of the decline of a species. It is an uneven, historical process that conjoins political, geographical, socio-ecological, and other factors. Most of all, a political ecology of extinction highlights the intertwined forces of political economy, power and ecology whereby I argue that a special focus should be on how biological diversity and our understanding of it has changed over time, especially the last two centuries. The capitalist intensification of pressures on biological diversity combined with changing perceptions of the value of diversity during this time have led to a moment where extinction decisively moves from a biological endpoint to a political inflection-point. How to relate these two 'points' to historical and contemporary, local and global forces of political economy and power is central to political ecologies of extinction, as exemplified by the articles in this Special Section. This introductory article lays out their core themes, and derives from them further pointers and questions for developing this field.
{"title":"Political ecologies of extinction: from endpoint to inflection-point. Introduction to the Special Section","authors":"B. Büscher","doi":"10.2458/jpe.4828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.4828","url":null,"abstract":"Amidst the many socio-ecological crises facing the world today, the biodiversity crisis is considered one of the most foundational. According to scientists, we have entered yet another mass extinction event in the history of the planet, though the first triggered by the impacts of the combined, uneven actions of one species. This introductory paper to a Special Section on the \"Political ecologies of extinction\" frames this crisis through political ecology, and explores what political ecologies of extinction could look like and focus on in the 21st century. Building on emerging literatures and the author contributions, it agrees that extinction is much more than the endpoint of a long and rocky road of the decline of a species. It is an uneven, historical process that conjoins political, geographical, socio-ecological, and other factors. Most of all, a political ecology of extinction highlights the intertwined forces of political economy, power and ecology whereby I argue that a special focus should be on how biological diversity and our understanding of it has changed over time, especially the last two centuries. The capitalist intensification of pressures on biological diversity combined with changing perceptions of the value of diversity during this time have led to a moment where extinction decisively moves from a biological endpoint to a political inflection-point. How to relate these two 'points' to historical and contemporary, local and global forces of political economy and power is central to political ecologies of extinction, as exemplified by the articles in this Special Section. This introductory article lays out their core themes, and derives from them further pointers and questions for developing this field.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42700609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we investigate socio-ecological conflicts surrounding the proposed Second International Airport project near Nijgadh, a town in the southern Terai region of Nepal. Praised by the Nepali government as a gamechanger for Nepal's economy, it has come under scrutiny by environmental activists after plans emerged for extensive clearing of the densely forested project site. While public and political debates have focused on the environmental impacts of the project, the area is also home to nearly 8,000 people, most of whom have no formal land rights and belong to Janajati groups, who face displacement. The apparent lack of attention to the project's consequences for local communities raises questions about the safeguarding of their interests. Drawing on justice theories and political ecology, we conducted a case study to investigate the residents' struggle for justice, recognition, and visibility amidst a strong dichotomy of mainstream developmentalist and conservationist discourses. During two months of fieldwork in Nepal, we gathered empirical evidence, including observations, interviews, and project documentation. Our findings suggest that the misrecognition of local communities, particularly in Tangiya Basti, began long before the airport project, and is intertwined with distributive and procedural injustices, reinforced by power asymmetries of various kinds. Overall, we argue that while the airport project is often framed as an environmental conflict, it is also a conflict over claims to social justice and livelihood security.
{"title":"A political ecology of aviation and development: an analysis of relations of power and justice in the (de)construction of Nepal's Second International Airport","authors":"Hanna Geschewski, M. Islar","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2304","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we investigate socio-ecological conflicts surrounding the proposed Second International Airport project near Nijgadh, a town in the southern Terai region of Nepal. Praised by the Nepali government as a gamechanger for Nepal's economy, it has come under scrutiny by environmental activists after plans emerged for extensive clearing of the densely forested project site. While public and political debates have focused on the environmental impacts of the project, the area is also home to nearly 8,000 people, most of whom have no formal land rights and belong to Janajati groups, who face displacement. The apparent lack of attention to the project's consequences for local communities raises questions about the safeguarding of their interests. Drawing on justice theories and political ecology, we conducted a case study to investigate the residents' struggle for justice, recognition, and visibility amidst a strong dichotomy of mainstream developmentalist and conservationist discourses. During two months of fieldwork in Nepal, we gathered empirical evidence, including observations, interviews, and project documentation. Our findings suggest that the misrecognition of local communities, particularly in Tangiya Basti, began long before the airport project, and is intertwined with distributive and procedural injustices, reinforced by power asymmetries of various kinds. Overall, we argue that while the airport project is often framed as an environmental conflict, it is also a conflict over claims to social justice and livelihood security.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44092630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) is a long-lived understory species in Appalachian forests and the most valuable medicinal plant in North America. Indeed, "digging" for ginseng roots is an important livelihood strategy throughout Appalachia. Increasingly, however, concern for ginseng populations is escalating, and state and federal policies have introduced new harvesting restrictions, as well as new law enforcement efforts that target ginseng diggers. Here I am interested in troubling the high-profile narrative that ginseng populations are crashing due to the unscrupulous practices of Appalachian diggers. I draw on ecological research, historical documents, and my own ethnographic fieldwork to argue that we need a fuller understanding of both ginseng population demographics and the potential causes for ginseng decline before we embrace a narrative that disenfranchises those who depend on and, in many cases, have helped steward this enigmatic plant. This research speaks to growing tensions between rural livelihoods and conservation efforts worldwide.
{"title":"The knotty politics of ginseng conservation and management in Appalachia","authors":"Justine Law","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2286","url":null,"abstract":"American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) is a long-lived understory species in Appalachian forests and the most valuable medicinal plant in North America. Indeed, \"digging\" for ginseng roots is an important livelihood strategy throughout Appalachia. Increasingly, however, concern for ginseng populations is escalating, and state and federal policies have introduced new harvesting restrictions, as well as new law enforcement efforts that target ginseng diggers. Here I am interested in troubling the high-profile narrative that ginseng populations are crashing due to the unscrupulous practices of Appalachian diggers. I draw on ecological research, historical documents, and my own ethnographic fieldwork to argue that we need a fuller understanding of both ginseng population demographics and the potential causes for ginseng decline before we embrace a narrative that disenfranchises those who depend on and, in many cases, have helped steward this enigmatic plant. This research speaks to growing tensions between rural livelihoods and conservation efforts worldwide.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46066653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article sets out a political ecology approach to thinking about security. It draws together conceptual debates from IR, green criminology and political ecology in order to develop new ways of thinking about and analyzing the political ecologies of security. To date political ecologists have focused on conflicts and struggles, but have not fully engaged with thinking about security. In this article we examine the ways that responses to the illegal wildlife trade have encouraged and supported greater integration between conservation and security. We use the example of the deployment of private military companies for anti poaching training and operations to tease out the key features of a political ecology approach to security; this focuses on excavating the relations between capital, nature and security, being attentive to the dynamics of race and gender, and taking an ethically engaged positionality to highlight the voices of marginalized communities. In so doing, the purpose of this article is to act as a starting point for developing a much clearer and stronger conceptual basis for political ecologists to engage with questions of security.
{"title":"Political ecology of security: tackling the illegal wildlife trade","authors":"Rosaleen V. Duffy, D. Brockington","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2201","url":null,"abstract":"This article sets out a political ecology approach to thinking about security. It draws together conceptual debates from IR, green criminology and political ecology in order to develop new ways of thinking about and analyzing the political ecologies of security. To date political ecologists have focused on conflicts and struggles, but have not fully engaged with thinking about security. In this article we examine the ways that responses to the illegal wildlife trade have encouraged and supported greater integration between conservation and security. We use the example of the deployment of private military companies for anti poaching training and operations to tease out the key features of a political ecology approach to security; this focuses on excavating the relations between capital, nature and security, being attentive to the dynamics of race and gender, and taking an ethically engaged positionality to highlight the voices of marginalized communities. In so doing, the purpose of this article is to act as a starting point for developing a much clearer and stronger conceptual basis for political ecologists to engage with questions of security.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45372592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many non-human species trouble human-oriented forms of multispecies life, which leads to classifying some of these species as pests. One of the fields of daily life most disturbed by the action of pests is modern capitalist agriculture, leading to different types of pest management by which human beings attempt to eliminate pests’ opposition to the anthropogenic appropriation of the work/energy of multispecies assemblages, an appropriation which is essential for capital circulation. In dominant modern capitalist cosmologies, the disturbances caused by pests automatically justify and require their attempted extermination. Without denying that pests are troubling, I argue that the technoscientific framing of our relationship with these species is insufficient as a way of understanding and interacting with them. Rather than exclusively seeing pests as a problem, the manner in which humans interact with these species points us to several foundational - and in themselves problematic – aspects of modern capitalist world-ecology. Taking my research on networks concerned with kiwifruit farming and commercialization in Portugal as a basis for my arguments, I look at how actors in these networks propose to deal with Halyomorpha halys, the brown marmorated stink bug, in an attempt to think with this species about the (inextricably connected) socio-ecological unsustainability of modern capitalist world-ecology and the bio-thanato-political strategies of immunization employed to deal with non-human species in this political ecological system.
{"title":"Pestering Capitalism. Thinking with Halyomorpha halys about multispecies relations and ecological unsustainability","authors":"João Aldeia","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2370","url":null,"abstract":"Many non-human species trouble human-oriented forms of multispecies life, which leads to classifying some of these species as pests. One of the fields of daily life most disturbed by the action of pests is modern capitalist agriculture, leading to different types of pest management by which human beings attempt to eliminate pests’ opposition to the anthropogenic appropriation of the work/energy of multispecies assemblages, an appropriation which is essential for capital circulation. In dominant modern capitalist cosmologies, the disturbances caused by pests automatically justify and require their attempted extermination. Without denying that pests are troubling, I argue that the technoscientific framing of our relationship with these species is insufficient as a way of understanding and interacting with them. Rather than exclusively seeing pests as a problem, the manner in which humans interact with these species points us to several foundational - and in themselves problematic – aspects of modern capitalist world-ecology. Taking my research on networks concerned with kiwifruit farming and commercialization in Portugal as a basis for my arguments, I look at how actors in these networks propose to deal with Halyomorpha halys, the brown marmorated stink bug, in an attempt to think with this species about the (inextricably connected) socio-ecological unsustainability of modern capitalist world-ecology and the bio-thanato-political strategies of immunization employed to deal with non-human species in this political ecological system.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43228053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents a story about a plant – Lacandonia schismatica – who subverted disciplinary traditions in botany and reconfigured its geopolitical orders of knowledge. To tell this story, we focus on Lacandonia’s plantiness, Lesley Head and colleagues’s (2012) concept to signify each kind of plant’s unique biophysical characteristics, capacities, and potentialities, and through which they co-produce the world. We trace how L. schismatica intervened in, and (re)configured processes of knowledge production, environmental politics, and identity formation in the Lacandon Forest, Chiapas, Mexico, where it was found. Lacandonia’s plantiness came into being through sudden macromutations; this unexpected but viable plant species participated in reviving an old debate in evolutionary biology: macroevolution versus gradualism. We also analyze how Lacandonia’s plantiness compelled shifts in environmental politics in Chiapas and identity formation in Frontera Corozal, the Chol community where L. schismatica was first located. We conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of vegetal ethics for addressing contemporary environmental crises.
{"title":"Monster plants. The vegetal political ecology of Lacandonia schismatica","authors":"Leticia Durand, J. Sundberg","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2399","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a story about a plant – Lacandonia schismatica – who subverted disciplinary traditions in botany and reconfigured its geopolitical orders of knowledge. To tell this story, we focus on Lacandonia’s plantiness, Lesley Head and colleagues’s (2012) concept to signify each kind of plant’s unique biophysical characteristics, capacities, and potentialities, and through which they co-produce the world. We trace how L. schismatica intervened in, and (re)configured processes of knowledge production, environmental politics, and identity formation in the Lacandon Forest, Chiapas, Mexico, where it was found. Lacandonia’s plantiness came into being through sudden macromutations; this unexpected but viable plant species participated in reviving an old debate in evolutionary biology: macroevolution versus gradualism. We also analyze how Lacandonia’s plantiness compelled shifts in environmental politics in Chiapas and identity formation in Frontera Corozal, the Chol community where L. schismatica was first located. We conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of vegetal ethics for addressing contemporary environmental crises. ","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41919240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.
{"title":"Reshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: Managed Retreat as Colonial Decontextualization","authors":"Nathaniel L. Jessee","doi":"10.2458/jpe.2835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2835","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47145647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, then Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos proposed constructing a multi-national biodiversity corridor that would extend from the Andes to the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Santos highlighted increased militarization of the territory as one advantage of the corridor. In this model, ecological conservation becomes a matter of national/natural security, in the form of counterinsurgency to counter illegal economies. Climate change and ecological disaster mean the forest needs the military power of the State to save it from destruction. We argue that such conservation entails a form of necropolitics lying in wait; because to conserve one part is to condemn the other – framed as the enemy – to certain destruction, as land is simultaneously designated for large-scale development projects. Conservation, in effect, becomes tied to a form of extinction. Our article examines two increasingly militarized frontiers that work through conservation in Colombia. The first is where the Andes meets the Amazon rainforest, an area that has seen an increase in deforestation following the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. Deforestation is often attributed to the cultivation of coca (used to produce cocaine), and the solution posited by the government is to eradicate the plant. We argue that eradication of illicit crops is a form of enforced extinction that militarizes the forest, targeting both human and non-human inhabitants. The second frontier concerns coal mining on the Caribbean coast, where mass environmental devastation induced by the industry has led to a forced reorganization of life in the region. The military guards the sites of extraction and those who oppose coal mining become targets for elimination. We bring these two cases – coal and coca – into dialogue, to trace the extinction-driven expansion of extractive economies, a process intertwined with armed conflict, narcotrafficking, and now with transitional politics.
{"title":"Extinction in transition: coca, coal, and the production of enmity in Colombia's post-peace accords environment","authors":"H. M. Martin, Oscar Pedraza","doi":"10.2458/jpe.4780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.4780","url":null,"abstract":"At the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, then Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos proposed constructing a multi-national biodiversity corridor that would extend from the Andes to the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Santos highlighted increased militarization of the territory as one advantage of the corridor. In this model, ecological conservation becomes a matter of national/natural security, in the form of counterinsurgency to counter illegal economies. Climate change and ecological disaster mean the forest needs the military power of the State to save it from destruction. We argue that such conservation entails a form of necropolitics lying in wait; because to conserve one part is to condemn the other – framed as the enemy – to certain destruction, as land is simultaneously designated for large-scale development projects. Conservation, in effect, becomes tied to a form of extinction. Our article examines two increasingly militarized frontiers that work through conservation in Colombia. The first is where the Andes meets the Amazon rainforest, an area that has seen an increase in deforestation following the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. Deforestation is often attributed to the cultivation of coca (used to produce cocaine), and the solution posited by the government is to eradicate the plant. We argue that eradication of illicit crops is a form of enforced extinction that militarizes the forest, targeting both human and non-human inhabitants. The second frontier concerns coal mining on the Caribbean coast, where mass environmental devastation induced by the industry has led to a forced reorganization of life in the region. The military guards the sites of extraction and those who oppose coal mining become targets for elimination. We bring these two cases – coal and coca – into dialogue, to trace the extinction-driven expansion of extractive economies, a process intertwined with armed conflict, narcotrafficking, and now with transitional politics.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44303903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the heart of any colonization project, and therefore any move to de-colonize, are ways of seeing nature and society, that then allow particular ways of governing each. This is plainly visible in a number of tools that exist to measure progress towards (or regress from) environmental sustainability. The tools use indices and indicators constructed mostly by environmental scientists and ecologists. As such, they are not neutral scientific instruments: they reflect the worldviews of their creators. These worldviews depend on three dimensions: the values they prioritize, the explanatory theories they use and the futures they envision. Through these means different tools produce conflicting notions of the sustainability of our economies and societies. In this article, we shed light onto the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that lie behind key international sustainability indices and indicators: the Environmental Performance Index,Domestic Material Consumption, Material Intensity, the Material Footprint, the Carbon Footprint, the Ecological Footprint and CO2 emissions (territorial). The variables included in these indices, the way they are measured, aggregated and weighted all imply a particular way of understanding the relationships between economy, society and environment. This divergence is most clearly visible in the fact that some indices are negatively correlated with each other. Where one index might plot growing environmental sustainability, another shows its decline. Our results highlight that those devices and the theories informing them are particularly interesting for way how colonialism is materialized. Some of these measurements hide the material roots of prosperity and the ecological (and economic) distributional conflicts exported to the poorer countries by the global North, and others show how its production and consumption levels are reliant upon a socio-ecological 'subsidy' imposed on Southern countries. These subsidies represent injustices that present a primafacie case for decolonizing indices and indicators of environmental governance.
{"title":"Seeing environmental injustices: the mechanics, devices and assumptions of environmental sustainability indices and indicators","authors":"Marina Requena-i-Mora, D. Brockington","doi":"10.2458/jpe.4765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.4765","url":null,"abstract":"At the heart of any colonization project, and therefore any move to de-colonize, are ways of seeing nature and society, that then allow particular ways of governing each. This is plainly visible in a number of tools that exist to measure progress towards (or regress from) environmental sustainability. The tools use indices and indicators constructed mostly by environmental scientists and ecologists. As such, they are not neutral scientific instruments: they reflect the worldviews of their creators. These worldviews depend on three dimensions: the values they prioritize, the explanatory theories they use and the futures they envision. Through these means different tools produce conflicting notions of the sustainability of our economies and societies. In this article, we shed light onto the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that lie behind key international sustainability indices and indicators: the Environmental Performance Index,Domestic Material Consumption, Material Intensity, the Material Footprint, the Carbon Footprint, the Ecological Footprint and CO2 emissions (territorial). The variables included in these indices, the way they are measured, aggregated and weighted all imply a particular way of understanding the relationships between economy, society and environment. This divergence is most clearly visible in the fact that some indices are negatively correlated with each other. Where one index might plot growing environmental sustainability, another shows its decline. Our results highlight that those devices and the theories informing them are particularly interesting for way how colonialism is materialized. Some of these measurements hide the material roots of prosperity and the ecological (and economic) distributional conflicts exported to the poorer countries by the global North, and others show how its production and consumption levels are reliant upon a socio-ecological 'subsidy' imposed on Southern countries. These subsidies represent injustices that present a primafacie case for decolonizing indices and indicators of environmental governance.","PeriodicalId":46814,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Ecology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47096251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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