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FINAL Rojas Dissertation, Working Copy Jan 4 CLIMATE POLITICS AFTER NATURE AND THE MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES IN BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) by David Manuel Rojas January 2015 © 2015 David Manuel Rojas CLIMATE POLITICS AFTER NATURE AND THE MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES IN BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA David Manuel Rojas, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of an environmental policy known as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation—the “+” signifies improved carbon stocks). REDD+ was designed to lessen climate change by reducing deforestation in Amazonia—a goal that would be achieved by paying landholders to keep their forests standing. This proposal has been highly influential at United Nations (UN) environmental forums. I study REDD+ as a scheme that, in the region of Amazonia in which I worked, reflects peasant and scientific understandings of tropical forests. REDD+ proposals engage forests as humanized spaces long transformed by global capitalist dynamics and that will be further transformed by purportedly unavoidable socio-environmental crises. I claim that this policy marks a profound shift in the ecological imagination. Environmental debates at the UN have often portrayed Amazonia as “pristine Nature”—a non-human realm that experts believed could be made into an inside in which they could further contemporary modes of human living. In contrast, I argue that REDD+ schemes engage Amazonia as a human-shaped space of intensifying environmental crises that experts cannot bring under control. In chapter one I explore the links between REDD+ proposals and mid- twentieth-century development projects in Brazil, focusing on how developmental planners and REDD+ proponents both assumed that Amazonia’s transformations by the forces of industrial capitalism were unavoidable. In chapter two I examine descriptions of REDD+ offered by Amazonian peasants. They saw this policy as yet another instance of economic forces that challenges poor peasants to establish particularly hostile relations with humans and non-humans alike. I examine the scientific practice of pro-REDD+ scientists in chapter three. I show that Amazon- based environmental scientists investigate Amazonia as a shifting socio-natural situation that will continue unraveling in the foreseeable future. Chapter four studies REDD+ contributions to UN negotiations that climate diplomats themselves see as insufficient to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change. My multi-sited approach advances the understanding of contemporary environmental politics by examining REDD+ as radical philosophical-anthropological proposition: that humans should learn to endure the worlds they have made into precarious spaces. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH David Rojas obtained his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he completed two years of undergraduate coursework in plastic arts before switching careers to study political science—a program from which he graduated with honors in 2002. He continued his studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, receiving an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology Analysis in 2004. In 2007 he began his doctoral studies at Cornell University’s Anthropology Department, focusing on the study of climate politics in Brazilian Amazonia iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to dozens of persons I cannot mention by name, as it would violate their anonymity and identify the institutions with which they were affiliated during my research. I am particularly grateful to peasants in Amazonia who invited me to live with them and patiently thought me about life in areas undergoing rapid socio- natural shifts. I am also very grateful to officials working in environmental NGOs in Amazonia who took time from their busy schedules to answer my questions, introduce me to the people with whom they work, and take me along as they traveled carrying out their work. Local politicians, ranchers, and agro-industrial farmers in Amazonia also showed generosity with their time and opened the doors of their offices and homes for me. I was extremely lucky to meet environmental scientists who were not only willing to engage in conversations that wove scientific and personal issues together, but also allowed me to travel with them to a field experiment. My work at UN forums on the environment would not have been possible without the collaboration of social movement leaders and diplomats who helped me with my research despite the time constraints they faced at these summits. Given the complicated issues I here address it is possible that several of those who helped me in my research would disagree with my analysis and conclusions. I hope my writing conveys how much I learned from all my interlocutors and my sincere appreciation for their political efforts to engage with impossibly difficult problems. During my time in Brazil I had the honor to be affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). At the UnB I worked under the supervision of Gustavo Lins Ribeiro whose work on macro-industrial infrastructures and world anthropology offered great inspiration. At the UnB I had the pleasure to have a desk in the Katakumba (the graduate student office space) where I benefited from the company and anthropological insights of the graduate body at large iv and in particular of Jóse Arenas, Anderson Vieira, and Luis Cayón. Eduardo Paulon Girardi (then a professor at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso) received me in his home, invited me to join him in a fieldtrip to the southern Amazon, and offered valuable insights based on his knowledge of rural issues in Brazil. I was lucky to have in the household of Marcel Taminato and Nathalia Campos a space in which I felt at home. Marcel and Nathalia not only shared with me their sharp assessments regarding life in Brazil but also received me at their place for extended periods of time at some of the most challenging moments during my research. I had the great fortune of having a dissertation committee who supported a complex research design and allowed me to aim for complex questions that, while deeply rooted in the anthropological canon I could not have tackled without their inter- disciplinary guidance. I have the great honor to be one of the first students supervised by Marina Welker whom I met in my first semester and Cornell and since offered continuous inspiration on the multi-sited study of emerging economic and moral issues. I have been extremely lucky to have Marina’s challenging support throughout my research and her unwavering assistance in the post-field stages of my studies. Phillip McMichael taught me new ways of thinking about the global significance of rural issues. From Phil I also tried to learn his distinctive combination of openness of mind, critical rigor, and engaged scholarship. I was fortunate to work with Timothy Campbell whose expertise in continental philosophy and biopolitics inspired me to address climate politics not merely as a discursive puzzle but as a practical wager on life and death. Wendy Wolford’s work in land issues in Brazil offered great inspiration for my work, particularly during the writing stages of my degree. The dissertation benefits from ideas of fellow students and more senior anthropologist who offered invaluable insights that proved decisive for shaping my argument. I arrived in Southern Amazonia after Terrence Turner and Jane Fajans v described areas of agro-industrial expansion as a “science fiction” landscape in which forests and savannahs were being turned into mono-crops and large, wealthy cities were built equipped with high-rises and boutiques. Over beers at a workshop in Bielefeld, Werner Krauss suggested dividing my argument into four thematic chapters and I owe to him my argument’s underlying order. It was also in Bielefeld when I started to work anthropologically on the opposition between “inside” and “exteriors” and I thus owe my gratitude to the workshop organizers, Ingmar Lippert, Franz Krauze, and Niklas Hartman. Eduardo Kohn helped me in deciding the focus of one of the chapters when mentioned that my research brought to his mind Bruno Latour’s fieldwork in Amazonia. Fellow graduate students at Cornell were always a source of ideas and companionship, in particular Daena Funahashi, Andrew Johnson, Melissa Rosario, Saiba Varma, Chika Watanabe, and Courtney Work. At UN summits I had the fortune to meet Deborah Delgado Pugley who shared with me her expertise on all things UNFCCC. For material support of my fieldwork I gratefully acknowledge the Wenner- Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Cornell’s university Sage Scholarship supported some of my fieldwork and writing. Generous support for my writing also came from Cornell’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Bucknell University was an academic home during the last stages of my research and I was lucky to enjoy a collegial environment working alongside scholars such as Jason Cons, Erin Lentz, Emek Uçarer, David Mitchell, Edmund Searles, Michelle Johnson, Allen Tran, and Alejandra Roncallo. It is impossible for me to overestimate the support that my parents Sol Roa, Manuel Rojas, and Carlos Silgado offered me, along with my sisters Sol, Natali, Juanita and Ana Camila. I met Sezi Seskir just months before starting my
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