The Word for World is Forest: “Forests” and Worlds Otherwise on the Edge of the Frontier
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2022
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Abstract
Despite global efforts, deforestation is increasing. Commodity-driven deforestation is the leading driver of global forest loss — forests that, to a large extent, were formed through Indigenous communities’ forest cultivation over generations. For those communities, the defense of their forests is grounded in the notion of relationality – that is, the life-generating relations that connect forests and communities over generations. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the relational notion of living forests can orient our responses to their destruction. It explores how deforestation is intertwined with ongoing frontier colonization in Colombia and Indonesia, including how the notion of the “forest” itself is implicated in these dynamics. In following the force of the life of the forest, I turn to the possibilities for life’s ongoingness on the frontier. I explore how Indigenous and communities’ forest cultivation and forest farming constitute a form of resistance and response to ongoing colonization and forest destruction, opening the possibilities for differential forest futures. This dissertation explores the following research questions: (1) How is ongoing frontier colonization intertwined with the destruction of forests and their diverse life-worlds? (2) How does Indigenous and communities’ forest cultivation and farming constitute a form of resistance to ongoing colonization and destruction that generates the conditions for forest resurgence to germinate? To respond to these questions, I look to the forest itself. I follow the force of the life of the forest from destruction to the possibilities of life’s ongoingness on the frontier. I think with forests and with the Indigenous and other communities whose life-worlds are entangled with them. Our deforestation crisis is exposing the limitations of our thinking and proposed responses to forest loss. This dissertation calls for a thorough and open rethink of those responses, proposing that we need to ‘de-forest’ our thinking to consider how the notion of the “forest” is implicated in its ongoing colonization and destruction. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for (re)thinking forests and for thinking (with and like) them. This framework that I outlined for rethinking forests and thinking with and like them grows out of ethnographic fieldwork carried out on the deforestation frontiers of Putumayo, Colombia and East Kalimantan, Indonesia from 2016 to 2019. This involved participant and non-participant observation of national fora and local meetings related to forests, protests, and collective farm work, all while conducting open conversations and interviews (147 in Colombia and 36 in Indonesia) focused on communities' relationships with forests. The claim that I make in this dissertation, that the relational notion of living forests can orient our responses to their destruction, carries important implications for research concerning forests. Theoretically, this dissertation calls for decolonizing forests and responses to their destruction. The “forest” is not necessarily coterminous with tree cover. It is instrumental to the ongoing colonization and destruction of forests and the life-worlds of Indigenous and other communities. Recognition of this is imperative in challenging the colonial thought in which the “forest” is grounded and responses to their destruction derived. “Forests” continue to condition our responses to their destruction. This carries important implications for the fate of forests and the Indigenous and other forest communities who defend them. Critically, this is largely lacking in the considerable literature on deforestation and related interventions which tends to reinforce the coloniality in which “forests” and their destruction remain rooted. Recent research points to the need for investigation of how forests and their relations are conceived otherwise. This work recognizes and reflects on how coloniality continues to condition our relationships with forests. It includes calls for communities’ inclusion in responses to deforestation though often within the context of their continued colonization. There is little thought given to how communities resist this nor in terms of decolonizing forests and their relations. Contributing to this gap, this dissertation foregrounds the relational condition of living forests to illuminate the limits of our thinking, to open the possibilities for other ways of thinking and theorizing, and to give detail and depth to how the relational condition of forests can offer orientation for responding to forest destruction. Despite calls to decolonize forests and responses to their destruction, including from critical and Indigenous thinkers, notions of the “forest” and related interventions to end their destruction continue to corrode this relationality. This dissertation challenges the constitutive relationship of ongoing frontier colonization, forest destruction, and notions of “forests,” in order to open the possibilities for responding to deforestation that emerge through the relational worlds of forests themselves. This dissertation draws inspiration from critical and decolonial theories that confront the coloniality in which the “forest” and our thinking is grounded. It contributes to this literature in demonstrating how communities together with the forest itself resist ongoing colonization and destruction, including the implications of decolonizing forests and their relations. It calls for grounding our thinking within forests themselves and thinking with the Indigenous and other communities who think with and like them. I draw inspiration from recent work on the ontological diversity of forests, drawing it into conversation with Indigenous thinking grounded in their relations with ‘other-than-human’ life-worlds. This dissertation considers how those relational life-worlds of forests offer ontological openings that can challenge how we think them and in turn our responses to their destruction. With this, I outline a theoretical orientation that embraces the potential of ethnography to critically investigate diverse notions of forests. I explore these ontological openings through ethnographic investigation into the forest relations intrinsic to forest cultivation and farming of Indigenous and other communities in Colombia and Indonesia. Their thinking is embedded within and emerges through their relations with the other-than-human life-worlds of forests. It involves “learning from the forest” and learning to think with and like forests. This interrupts their ongoing colonization and destruction, opening the possibilities for differential forest futures grounded in the notion of relationality. Considering how those communities do their thinking with forests, I contend, offers insight into decolonizing our thinking of forests towards thinking with and like them, and orienting our responses to deforestation. Communities’ thinking relationally with and like forests is embodied in their cultivation of rastrojo. Rastrojo is integral to the forest cultivation of Indigenous and other communities that I describe throughout this dissertation. It constitutes the continuum of Indigenous communities’ forest cultivation characteristic of forests in Colombia and Indonesia. For other communities navigating life on the edge of the frontier, rastrojo is the recolonization of the farm with the forest, constituting a form of resistance to the ongoing colonization and destruction of forests grounded in a reparative relationality with the forest on which their lives depend. Their cultivation of rastrojo is to “convivir” or live together with the forest, constituting a form of resistance to ongoing colonization and destruction grounded in a reparative relationality with the forest. Rastrojo indicates destruction — the impacts of ongoing colonization — and resurgence. Rastrojo forms connections fomenting other forms of life in opposition to ongoing colonization and destruction, generating the possibilities for differential forest futures. Differential forest futures depend on those resurgent relations with the other-than-human world and their generative potential to resist ongoing colonization and the destruction it engenders. This involves the reparation of communities’ relations with forests — relations disrupted through ongoing war, colonization, and forest destruction. The cultivation of rastrojo involves the cultivation of those relations that in turn generate the conditions for resurgence while confronting the ongoing colonization and destruction of those interconnected life-worlds. Resurgence is grounded in those relations, connecting the past to future generations, and in resistance which depends on the reparation of communities’ relations with the other-than-human life-worlds of forests. In this dissertation, I consider the implications of this resurgent relationality for decolonizing conservation. The reparative relationality of rastrojo offers orientation for decolonization centered on the resurgence of forests and their life-worlds, that is, on the resurgence of relations oriented towards the continuity of life. Rastrojo not only interrupts colonial notions of forests, including interpretations of forest loss derived from them, it indicates responses to forest destruction grounded in relationality, rather than conservation interventions imposed onto those relations. Though those relations remain overlooked in dominant conservation interventions grounded in notions of “forests” that obscure and continue to disrupt those relations. Considering forests in terms of their relations opens the possibilities for responding to deforestation differently. Through the cultivation of rastrojo — and the reparation of communities’ relations with forests — responses to forest destruction emerge through those relations, rather than through interventions imposed on them. In this context, the conservation of forests depends on the reparation of those relations disrupted through the ongoing war on forests. The conservation of forests depends on those relations of life-generating connections. Decolonizing conservation, I contend, requires a radical transformation towards conservation rooted in relationality.
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Keywords
Decolonization, Deforestation, Ecocide, Forests, Rastrojo, Relationality