Resources: Forestry

Many new schemes are afoot to allow the North to pay the South for conserving its forests in return for permission to continue using fossil fuels. But how would a market in pollution rights generated by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) play out in reality?

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.

21. Vast plantations of genetically modified (GM) trees would undoubtedly have significant social and environmental impacts, including displacement of people from their lands, and pollen and gene drift to non-GM trees. GM trees are a technofix for problems created by industrial pulpwood plantations and the worldwide paper, timber and fruit industries. Tackling the challenge posed by GM trees entails alliance building with groups ranging from seed savers to communities battling encroachment of industrial tree farms on their land.

Tree plantations to "compensate" for industrial carbon-dioxide emissions are being established in many parts of the world, often infringing local land and water rights in the South. Understanding the discourses through which the carbon "offset" market is being created is crucial to political action on climate change.

18. Sensational images of wildfires often prompt calls for sweeping, high-tech measures to control fire in the open. Yet fire in the open is a planetary necessity. The problem is too little controlled open burning in the North, and too much wildfire in the South -- and too many catastrophic, destructive blazes and not enough cleansing, fertilizing ones. Constructive debate about climate change, agriculture or forestry requires a careful look at the culture, ecology and politics of global fire.

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.

Violence over and against forests cannot be explained by population increase nor by other linear, office-bound models of change which pit abstracted “humans” against an abstracted “nature”. This book chapter uses examples from England hundreds of years ago and from Viet Nam during the US war there to show that local people’s struggle for their rights to use the forests were continually threatened and partly defined by interests operating outside the forests.

 4.Popular movements seeking radical structural change have long called for the right to participate in the planning and implementation of development projects. Many development agencies now aim to make their programmes more “participatory”. But “participation” can be little more than a means of engineering consent to programmes that have already been decided upon. Analysis of the UK-funded Western Ghats Forestry Project in India suggests that not participating in such programmes may in some cases be a better way for popular movements to achieve structural change.

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.