The Forest for the Trees: Equivocations in tropical forest conservation and climate change mitigation efforts in the Amazon

Keywords: Trees, multispecies, plants, climate justice, Indigenous peoples, forests, worlds, ontology, Amazon
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 18

Abstract

The uneven responsibilities and consequences for climate change that form the premise of the climate justice movement are especially salient when considering other-than-human species. The trees of the Amazon are some of the earth’s most important carbon sinks who are also increasingly threatened by deforestation. For Indigenous Amazonians, trees are more than just resources on the one hand and repositories of carbon on the other. In Amazonian worlds, trees are relational beings that serve as teachers, healers, kin, and protectors of the forest. Deforestation therefore is not just a threat to the planet’s climatic regulation, but also means losing the earth's elders, wisdom keepers, and protectors of a host of other species and forest spirits. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, in turn, have been important forest defenders, with Indigenous territories shown to have even less deforestation than state-managed protected areas. However, international climate change mitigation efforts continually fail to provide adequate benefits to Indigenous peoples for their role in forest protection. Such failure is more than just a political issue, but is also the result of equivocations, in which climate change mitigation efforts may involve fundamentally disparate assumptions about the nature of trees and the purpose of conservation. I draw from research conducted alongside both a Shipibo-led community forest conservation project in Peru and a Kichwa-led forest conservation initiative in Ecuador to argue that meaningful climate action must consider how to support Indigenous forest protection initiatives both materially and ontologically, and find ways to actively enroll more-than-humans in such efforts.