Resources: Forestry, Article

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.

One of the biggest buzzwords in forest and land conservation today is “rights”. Environmental NGOs, legal activists, corporate consultants, international institutions and many others are championing “rights-based approaches” as key to effective environmental policy. But, argues this short article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, the “rights” discourse can be a source of confusion.

Classically, environmental racism is defined in terms of the racialized distribution of pollution. But it's also about the ways people, ethnic groups, nature and pollution are co-defined in the first place. This aspect of environmental racism is perhaps even more visible in forests than elsewhere, argues this piece from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, available here in English, French and Portuguese.

A Spanish-language version of the article is also available from The Corner House upon request.

The "rights of nature" debate is becoming increasingly important both in the Andean context and in the wider global political debate. This set of brief notes suggests ways of approaching the issue that may help connect it to the ongoing debate between commoners and neoclassical economists, as well as help avoid the exoticisation of the Andean concept of pachamama.

This article explains how today's carbon markets construct a tradable product by postulating a series of false equations – between reducing carbon dioxide and tackling fossil fuel dependence, between different greenhouse gases, between different places and times, between hypothetical and real emissions reductions, between biotic carbon and fossil carbon, and so forth. Competition to exploit cascades of ever more fanciful equations to increase profits ensures that the carbon markets become ever more damaging to the cause of combating global warming.

Un álgebra interminable: las contradicciones de los mercados climáticos

Los mercados de carbono, que constituyen el enfoque principal de los gobiernos del mundo frente a la crisis climática, construyen un producto comercializable postulando una serie de ecuaciones falsas. Estos mercados equiparan la reducción de dióxido de carbono con la lucha contra la dependencia de combustibles fósiles; equiparan los distintos gases de efecto invernadero, así como lugares y tiempos diferentes. Estos mercados dicen que las emisiones hipotéticas y reales son las mismas y que el carbono biótico y el carbono fósil también son los mismos. Estas ecuaciones tienen la función de proteger o incrementar los beneficios empresariales, y los intereses capitalistas están siempre dispuestos a inventar más ecuaciones. El resultado es que los mercados de carbono son cada vez más perjudiciales para la lucha contra el calentamiento global.

One lesson the financial crisis teaches us is: beware of the new carbon markets that constitute today's main official response to climate change. These markets are startlingly similar to the financial derivatives markets that have thrown banking systems into a tailspin. (German version also available.)

Mercados de incertidumbres y mercados de carbono: variaciones en temas de Polanyi

Una de las lecciones que la crisis financiera nos enseña es a tener cuidado con los nuevos mercados de carbono que constituyen hoy la principal respuesta oficial al cambio climático. Este artículo de la revista New Political Economy argumenta que estos mercados son sorprendentemente similares a los mercados de derivados financieros que arrojaron a los sistemas bancarios al caos en 2008.

The new export market in biological carbon-cycling capacity is likely to have effects similar to export markets in soya, paper pulp, petroleum, timber, palm oil, maize, bananas, coffee or tourism. What are the best ways of encouraging discussion among affected communities about this new form of globalisation? asks this article for the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin.

Tradeable carbon credits from forests cannot be scientifically quantified. NGOs interested in participating in markets for such credits need to be aware of the climatic damage they sanction as well as the damage they may do to communities affected by fossil fuel exploitation.

The intersections between international nature conservation and ethnic politics are of serious and growing concern to many social movements in Southeast Asia. This paper offers evidence that international environmentalist practices interact with local and national conditions to advance the structural work of ethnic discrimination and racism in Southeast Asia. The racist outcomes of these practices do not flow exclusively from unprofessionalism, faulty science, irrationality, immorality or incorrect beliefs -- and anti-racist strategy has to accommodate this insight.

This article outlines two options put forward to tackle global warming -- reduce fossil fuel use or plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide -- and analyses the substantial differences between the two approaches.

This short article from 1993, from the journal Medicine and War, argues that the 1992 Earth Summit failed to address key issues of land distribution, rights and security. In doing so, it made it impossible to address its own purported environmental goals, which require respect for ordinary people's efforts to conserve the land and forests on which they depend.

This essay sketches some of the pressures behind -- and some of the dangers of -- the expansion of the pulp and paper industry in Southeast Asia over the last decade. It describes some of the mechanisms by which the industry has enclosed land and water in two of the countries most affected, Indonesia and Thailand, and outlines the various forms of opposition the industry is meeting. It concludes by indicating some of the strategies the industry is using to manage this resistance.

This opinion piece shows how environmental activists, ecological economists, development experts and deep green theorists tell self-serving and one-sided stories about Noble Savages, Eastern religions, “traditional communities” and ordinary householders. This "Green Orientalism" both arises from and perpetuates power imbalances. It must be constantly challenged by stories told from other points of view.