Tree Plantation Extractivism In Chile

This book examines how extractivism transforms territories and affects the well-being of rural people, drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted on tree plantations in Chile. The book argues that pine and eucalyptus monoculture plantations in southern Chile are a form of extractivism representing a mode of nature appropriation that captures large amounts of natural resources to produce wooden-based raw materials with little processing and an export-oriented focus. The book discusses the nexus of extractivism, territorial transformations, well-being, and emerging resistances using a participatory action research methodological approach in the Region of Los Ríos, southern Chile. The findings show how the configuration of an extractivist logging enclave generated a substantial and irrevocable reordering of human-nature relations, resulting in the territorial and ontological occupation of rural places that disrupted the fundamental human needs of peasants and indigenous people. The book maintains that Chile's green growth development approach does not challenge the consolidated tree plantation enclave controlled by large multinationals. Instead, green growth legitimises the extractivist logic. The book draws parallels with other countries and regions to contribute to wider debates surrounding these topics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive industries, development studies, political ecology, and natural resource governance.

Attempts to `civilize' the exploitation of natural and mineral resources are globally promoted. The body of rules and regulations -often the outcome of prolonged socio-environmental and political struggles- is impressive. However, the outcomes of their implementation are much less convincing. The chapters in this book show how international law is curtailing national and local regulation, while existing legislation is often watered-down, circumvented or reinterpreted with severe environmental, health and socio-economic impacts, particularly in the `global south'.

This book proposes strategies for improving the resilience and conservation of temperate forests in South America, such that these forests can provide ecosystem services in a sustainable way. As such it contributes to the design of a resilient human-forest model that takes into account the multiculturalism of local communities, in many cases including aspects of ecological economics, development economics and territorial development planning that are related to indigenous peoples or first nations. Further, it provides proposals for public and territorial policies that improve the state of conservation of native forests and forest ecosystems, based on a critical analysis of the economic factors that lead to the degradation of forest ecosystems in South America today. This edition was conceived by members of the Transdisciplinary Research Center for Social and Ecological Strategies for Sustainable Forest Management in South America at the Universidad Austral de Chile. It includes contributions by distinguished researchers from around the world, combining the fields of economics, ecology, biology, anthropology, sociology and statistics. It is not, however, simply a collection of works written by authors from different disciplines, but rather each chapter is in itself transdisciplinary. This approach makes the book a unique contribution to enhancing social, managerial and political approaches to forestry management, helping to protect forest ecosystem services and make them more sustainable. This, in turn, will benefit local communities and society as a whole, by reducing the negative externalities of forestry management and enhancing future opportunities.

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

The Rise of Green Extractivism tackles the understudied interconnections between extractivism and climate-smart policies and their implications for rural livelihoods, both theoretically and empirically. This new variation of extractivism arises as an innovative way in which capitalist production and accumulation unfolds and constitutes a convenient analytical tool in today's focus on reducing or compensating for emissions. The book consolidates 'extractivism' as a theoretical framework that fully challenges contemporary capitalism’s dynamics, particularly in the current global environmental crisis. It explores new dynamics of accumulation, resource grabbing and legitimation strategies. These are approached as mechanisms of appropriation of resources that produce social, economic and ecological implications to be considered in the current agrarian question debates. By analysing the implementation and outcomes of green policies, the author shows that new strategies of capital accumulation arise through the creation of new commodities, markets, vehicles of accumulation and ways of legitimising capital accumulation. A new and 'greener' frontier of accumulation is constituted. These emerging processes of commodification bring along new waves of expropriation that further cut into the necessary consumption of rural populations. Insights from empirical cases explored in this book show how this new wave of green investments and projects, directly linked to climate change concerns, are further expropriating livelihoods and fuelling capital accumulation in the name of the fight against climate change. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and researchers of political economy, globalisation, development studies, economics, political ecology, agrarian studies and environmental studies. It will also inform and provide policymakers with evidence-based insights into their decision-making process when designing and implementing climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, especially in developing countries.

Offering a thought provoking theoretical conversation around ecological crisis and natural resource extraction, this book suggests that we are on a trajectory geared towards total extractivism guided by the mythological Worldeater. The authors discuss why and how we have come to live in this catastrophic predicament, rooting the present in an original perspective that animates the forces of global techno-capitalist development. They argue that the Worldeater helps us make sense of the insatiable forces that transform, convert and consume the world. The book combines this unique approach with detailed academic review of critical agrarian studies and political ecology, the militarization of nature and the conventional and ‘green’ extraction nexus. It seeks radical reflection on the role people play in the construction and perpetuation of these crises, and concludes with some suggestions on how to tackle them.

This book explores the existential redistributions that extractivist frontiers create, going beyond existing studies by bringing into the English-language discussion much of the wisdom from Latin American rural and forest communities’ understandings of extractivist phenomena, and the destruction and changes in lives and lived environments they create. The author explores the many different types of extractivism, ranging from agroextractivist monocultures to mineral extraction, and analyzes the differences between them. The existential transformations of Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado regions, previously inhabited by Indigenous people but now being deforested by colonizers who expand soybean plantations, are analyzed in detail. The author also compares extractivisms with the local and broader existential changes through global production networks and their shifts, produced by monoculture plantation-based extractivist operations. Anchored in the author’s own ethnographic data and comparison of lessons across multiple extractivist frontiers, the chapters integrate the many accounts of violence, and onto-epistemic and moral changes in extractivist enclaves, looking at these with the help of political ontology. The book offers details on how to characterize and compare different types and degrees of extractivisms and anti-extractivisms. This transdisciplinary book provides new organizing concepts and theoretical frameworks for starting to analyze the unfolding natural resource politics of the post-coronavirus era, the advancing climate emergency, and the ever more chaotic multi-polar world. It will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of international development, global value chains, political economy, Latin American Studies, political ecology, and international trade, as well as anyone engaged with the practical and political issues related to globalization. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Exploring the emerging and vibrant field of critical agrarian studies, this comprehensive Handbook offers interdisciplinary insights from both leading scholars and activists to understand agrarian life, livelihoods, formations and processes of change. It highlights the development of the field, which is characterized by theoretical and methodological pluralism and innovation.