Sasha on forests

Conceptions of Human-Thing Entanglement in Forest Industrialization and Carbon Offsetting

As progress in science and technology increasingly tests the meaning of boundaries between the human and the natural, I think study in the field of Political Ecology has enormous potential to describe, document and navigate contemporary life in ways that are unreachable by other disciplines. I am specifically fascinated by documentation of human engagement with nature in increasingly unusual and hybrid forms. In this vein I am reminded of the work of the anthropologist Ian Hodder, who proposes that throughout the history of civilization, humans have become increasingly “entangled with things,” in a process that is both inevitable and irreversible. Hodder traces human-thing entanglement back to early settled cultures in the Middle East, and examines these early communities’ use of specific clays as an example of a situated interdependncy of humans and nonhuman materials. A better way to articulate human-thing entanglement may be through what Gilles Deleuze calls agencement. As argued by scholars like Bruce Braun, the term agencement is extremely powerful as a notion which rejects humanist notions of agency altogether, suggesting rather a “coming together” of disparate elements in what is best translated as an assemblage, or a collection of things. Unlike Latour’s actants, which are often mistakenly associated only with nonhumans, agencement suggests a more seamless network of agency defined by relations and not by hierarchy of the human over the natural.

The theme of “human-thing entanglement,” or in other words the interdependency of humans and nonhumans, arises in many of the case studies we investigated this week. Scott Prudham’s paper on the Douglas Fir traces industrial tree improvement on the Pacific Coast of Western Oregon and Washington as locus of interweaving scientific, economic and natural concerns. He argues that the efforts made by numerous scientists and timber organizations, as well as representatives of the United States government like the National Forestry Service, to “redesign” the Douglas Fir for more streamlined industrial use, is an example of the real subsumption of nature by capital. Prudham defines the “problem of nature” as the effective resistance of trees and their biological processes to capitalist aims and objectives. The Douglas Fir trees, in this case study, are translated directly into capital costs and benefits even as their very biology confounds and complicates the success of such capital investment. Returning to the cognitive tool of agencement, we can understand Prudham’s case study not only as an example of the way in which capital is translated through and within units of nature, but also as a case of agency in the nonhuman world, in which the biological properties of trees have agency in placing real limits on the mechanisms of economy and capital.

In Carbon Colonialism? Offsets, Greenhouse Gas Reductions and Sustainable Development, A. Bumpus and D. Liverman offer various perspectives on the way political ecology can become a critical platform from which to study the trade of carbon offset credits. They pose questions on the effectiveness of carbon trading markets, and employ Foucault’s notion of governmentality to place pressure on the carbon offset as a tool that may generate complex environmental and social concerns. I am particularly fascinated with understanding the “nature” of the carbon offset as a mechanism for linking Northern capital with Southern carbon (i.e. in forests, sequestration schemes, and renewable energy projects) and in doing so enacting a “spatial fix.” The methods needed to analyze such transfers of carbon must truly be multiscalar, taking into account the local agencies of units of carbon (sequestered or released) as well as transnational flows of capital, information and images. Recalling the idea that carbon offset trading is the latest incarnation of what David Harvey would call “accumulation through dispossession” I think it would be interesting to examine the imaginative potential of the carbon offset – how a unit which is defined as the equivalent of a metric tonne of carbon dioxide gas is actually cognitively mapped and understood by local project organizers in CDM and REDD schemes as well as by western executives who wish to neutralize their carbon footprints. At the core of such an imaginative investigation lies the fact that a metric tonne of carbon dioxide gas is difficult if not impossible to visualize, as it lacks defined form or texture. How do actors in voluntary and obligatory carbon markets relate their actions to a product which in essence is a representation of a unit of invisible gas? How do the actions of firms and individuals in the global carbon market perhaps internalize the space or mobility of a carbon emission or a carbon offset? I think an aesthetic or creative perspective on this, especially if framed within debates in the global political ecology of carbon offsets, could be extremely rewarding.

Works Cited:

Braun, B. (2008) Environmental issues: inventive life. Progress in Human Geography, 32(5): 667-679.

Bumpus A and Liverman D. 2011 Chapter 10 in Peet et al. Carbon colonialism? Offsets, Greenhouse Gas Reductions and Sustainable Development

Hodder, I. (2011), Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17: 154–177. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01674.x

Neumann, R. P. 2009. Political Ecology. In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by K. Rob and T. Nigel. Oxford: Elsevier.

Prudham, S. 2003. Taming trees: Capital, science, and nature in Pacific Slope tree improvement. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (3):636-656