Tree flexing: Forest politics and land struggles in the green economy

Abstract

Planting trees is widely regarded as a positive contribution to combating climate change and establishing a future-proof, green economy. Yet, there is mounting evidence from many tropical, sub-tropical and temperate regions of the world that tree plantations can have multiple negative economic, social and environmental impacts. These are not always accounted for by the private and public institutions who have heavily supported the forestry sector in recent decades. This ‘tropical provocation’ reports from a recent fieldtrip to the Wallmapu, the region the Mapuche Indigenous people call their ancestral homeland. There, I saw with my own eyes that the so-called green economy does not work for Mapuche communities, as they experience extreme water shortages, wildfires and other plundering from what they regard as their territory.

It is November 2022. We are driving on Ruta 5, the long highway connecting the capital, Santiago, with the South of the country. With breaks, it takes about seven hours to get to Araucanía, one of the main tree plantation regions of Chile. Near Los Ángeles we come off Ruta 5, taking smaller roads towards Angol. The hot, dry Santiago has given way to a humid climate, with low hanging clouds and lush vegetation. It's a kind of landscape I know from parts of Europe. Rolling, green hills. This region is inhabited by an Indigenous people known as the Mapuche, which means ‘people of the land’. The Mapuche, who call it Wallmapu, claim ancestral rights to this region, as they have lived here for over 2000 years. Everywhere I look are trees. I have widely studied the political economy of tree plantations in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, but it has been over ten years since I last set foot in a plantation area. I’m shocked. The whole landscape is made up of eucalyptus and pine monocultures, with trees neatly standing in rows upon rows. Our destination for today is Purén, a small town in Western Araucanía. We have been given a Mapuche contact there to talk about their territorial struggles with the forestry companies and the Chilean state.

Suddenly, cars are stopping in front of us. We see flashing police lights. When we get closer, we realise it is not the traffic police but the military. Soldiers with machine guns and armoured vehicles are checking every car at a checkpoint. I can see the confusion and fear on the face of my Chilean friend and colleague, Francisco Valenzuela, from the University of Chile. ‘What should we say?’, he asks? ‘I don’t know’, I respond. Growing up in East Germany, I’ve always had a difficult relationship with power-displaying authorities. Too often as a child, I saw my parents fearing any kind of checkpoint situations. We were always told then: ‘Just shut up; don’t say anything!’. But now I am the adult. If asked, we would have to come up with something. So, we quickly decide to say that we are visiting a friend in the area. My heart is pumping at a higher rate. Despite the car's air conditioning, I can feel the sweat on my forehead. As we are waiting to go through the checkpoint, Francisco tells me that he used to have a girlfriend who lived in this area. I could see that he was developing the narrative in his head of what to say. He's 15 years younger than me, so probably didn’t experience first-hand the worst excesses of the Pinochet military dictatorship. But he was aware. On our long drive from Santiago, we had talked a lot about the strange connections between Chile and East Germany (Rosenberg, 1995). The police state. The spies. The fear. The Honeckers. As it turns out, we were just waved through by the military personnel. No questions asked. Thank goodness, I think to myself.

Later, we discuss the militarization of this area as we drive to Purén. I find out that a state of emergency has been in action in this area for some time. A particular legal framework has been created, which has to be voted on and renewed by the Senate every 15 days, giving the army the ability, under the authority of the executive branch, to operate as police. So, technically, the army supports the police to pacify the area, which has been rocked by Mapuche resistance actions for many years (López Godoy, 2022).

The road to Purén is full of trucks carrying huge logs of timber. From time to time, I can see timber yards on the roadside. But mostly my eyes are fixated on the massive expanses of forests. To call them ‘forests’ would be giving the forestry companies planting them too much credit. There are really ‘green deserts’ (Böhm and Brei, 2008; Misoczky, 2010). They are nothing more than monocultural crops of timber and pulp biomass. There is not much else growing in these plantations than Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) and eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus nitens) (Carte et al., 2021). Both species are non-native, fast-growing trees that have been increasingly used by forestry companies around the world, typically planted in tropical, sub-tropical or temperate climates with above-average rainfall (Calviño-Cancela and van Etten, 2018). As a result, these trees can be harvested in as little as 5–7 years (Zhang and Wang, 2021), which is a much faster turnaround, creating much higher yields, than in typical Canadian or Northern Europe growing areas; the home of many global forestry companies.

Early on during the Pinochet dictatorship, in 1974, Decree Law 701 was passed to pave the way for the massive expansion of tree plantations in Chile, giving subsidies and tax incentives to forestry companies (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2017). It was a strategic decision. Forestry was identified as a key economic development strategy, prioritizing the extractive industries. It also intensified the colonialisation of those parts of the country where the Mapuche claim, to this day, ancestral rights to their territory (Wallmapu) south of the Bíobío River. Today, the forestry industry is Chile's third largest sector, contributing about 2% to the country's GDP and 8% of its exports, worth about US$ 6 billion (Schmalz et al., 2022). The plantations increased from about 250,000 ha in 1974 to over 3 million ha at the end of the 2010s (Alvarez-Garreton et al., 2019), resulting in ecosystem-defining land-use changes (Uribe et al., 2020) that have left the native so-called Valdivian temperate rainforest disintegrated and degraded or, on most occasions, simply cut down (Donoso and Romero, 2020). Three companies (Arauco, CMPC and Masisa) dominate the industry, owning more than half of Chile's planted forests (EFI, 2019).

The Mapuche have resisted the invasion of their territory by forestry companies from the mid-1970s onwards (Torres et al., 2015). The historical context is important to understand here. Chile is a very young nation-state. The Spaniards never colonized the South of the country. When Chile declared independence from Spain in 1810, large parts of the Wallmapu were fully intact (Crow, 2013). It was not until the 1880s that the Mapuche territories were invaded by the Chilean army, occupying the Wallmapu and putting the Mapuche into reservations. Through storytelling and other ancestral memory practices, the culture, cosmology and landscape of the Wallmapu territory continues to live amongst Mapuche communities (Crow, 2013). They seek visibility, voice and recognition, demanding sovereignty over their territory (Richards and Gardner, 2013). Yet, their ancestral rights are mostly ignored or outright oppressed by the Chilean state and the forestry companies (Herr, 2019).

Near Purén, we are invited to talk to Max Reuca, Werkén of the Ignacio Reuca community in the area. A werkén is a community spokesperson and messenger who has the legitimacy of the community and chiefs to represent them. When we spoke to Max, he eloquently told us the story of their historical struggle for recognition and sovereignty; their collective pain of being oppressed. This is not only a general, cultural oppression but one that has daily, practical relevance (Maher and Buhmann, 2019). Mapuche communities literally have run out of water. The millions of non-native pine and eucalyptus trees suck up so much water from the ground that there is literally nothing left for the people living near the plantations. All this is happening in a climatic zone that has had, historically speaking, above-average rainfall of more than 1000 mm per year. This is why it is targeted by the forestry companies. Trees need plenty of water to grow. However, the climate has been changing in central and Southern Chile. Since 2009, the annual rainfall has been decreasing by about 25% to 30%. It has been called the ‘megadrought’ (Torres et al., 2022). The ‘water shortage has mainly affected rural communities, with the gradual drying up of wells and watersheds that have been their traditional sources of water for all purposes, including human consumption, irrigation and cultural ceremonies’ (Torres et al., 2022: 160). As a result, many Mapuche communities have to be supplied by water trucks. Yet, this is often not enough for all their daily home usages, including raising their livestock and watering their crops. The Mapuche feel robbed of their commons (Torres-Salinas et al., 2016). The private forest companies – with the help of the Chilean state – have literally robbed them of the basic necessities they need to make a living.

There is plenty of evidence from around the world that when communities feel threatened by the extractive industries, when they are not able to provide the basics to their children, then they resist (Caretta and Zaragocin, 2020; Otto and Böhm, 2006). The Mapuche are not one homogenous group. Hence, they have used multiple and changing modes of resistance over the past decades, ranging from mounting legal challenges to forming political parties and from civil disobedience to outright violent and open conflict with forestry companies (Torres-Salinas et al., 2016). ‘In 1997, Mapuche protesters occupied a portion of a pine monoculture and burnt two trucks of the plantation company … In 2002, a 17-year-old Mapuche activist was shot by the police during eviction from a plantation estate. Two months later, more than a dozen hooded Mapuche with homemade shotguns and Molotov cocktails invaded the same plantation's worker camp, setting fire to the quarters’ (Gerber, 2011: 173). In recent years, the violence has escalated even more (Youkee, 2018). The Mapuche have burned down entire stretches of plantations and even Christian churches. The Chilean state authorities have responded with more repression. The Mapuche and the Chilean state are now engaged in a ‘landscape of power’ (Escalona Ulloa and Barton, 2020), struggling over the future of land rights, recognition of Mapuche territories and cultures as well as the wider political and economic development model of the country.

After Purén, we go onto Valdivia, the site of a largely urban protest movement against Arauco, one of the largest pulp and paper companies in Latin America, which opened a large pulp mill near the city in the mid-2000s. Within a few months of opening, a rare species, black-necked swans, started dying downriver (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2015). The local residents organized protests against the company, and the conflict even drew international attention. However, when we met up with Dasten Julián-Vejar, a lecturer at the Universidad Austral de Chile, he showed more interest in the often invisible aspects of the rapidly expanding forestry industry in Chile. While companies such as Arauco do employ Mapuche people, their pay and work conditions are often very poor, Dasten said. Employment in the forestry sector, whether it is in transport, processing or literally tree felling, is most often precarious and dangerous, entrenching long-standing social and economic inequalities (Schmalz et al., 2022).

Support for the hegemonic tree plantation model of development has come from unexpected corners recently. While the fast-growing pine and eucalyptus trees are mostly used for pulp and paper as well as timber production, they have a much wider array of industrial usages, from wood pellets for wood-based energy generation to ethanol and biodiesel production, and from feedstock to bioplastics and biochemical applications. Because of their multiple and growing usages, Kröger (2016) calls this phenomenon ‘flex trees’. This tree flexing is increasingly important for the emerging green economy, or what is sometimes called bioeconomy. In an era of climate change and multiple other environmental challenges, planting trees is seen as a positive step towards carbon neutrality, achieving net-zero emission targets. The global forestry industry is increasingly positioning itself at the heart of the green economy (ICFPA, 2023). In the UK, for example, DRAX, the biggest power station of the country, has been using wood pellets, mostly imported from North America, to produce electricity. It claims that ‘in 2021, 93% of the power generated by Drax was renewable’, working towards carbon negativity (i.e. actually removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere) by 2030 (DRAX, 2023). There is mounting evidence, however, that wood pellets for power generation are not nearly as green as they are made out to be (Brack et al., 2021; Ember, 2021). They are often transported over large distances, creating incentives for land-use change (i.e. cutting down old-growth forests to then replant them as monocultures), which is often not accounted for.

To further support the sustainability credentials of tree plantations, forestry companies often have them certified as ‘sustainable’, using labels such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). While the FSC claims that it is ‘committed to working with Indigenous Peoples by upholding their ownership, use and management rights across all forests’ (FSC, 2023), in practice the organization can do very little against policies and cultures of repression by national institutions and global forestry companies (Ehrnström-Fuentes and Kröger, 2018). While on paper the FSC promotes sustainable forestry practices, in reality, it is a Western, corporate-oriented scheme that aims to put consumers and environmental NGOs at ease about the big business of growing trees (Moog et al., 2015). Yet, it is blind towards place-specific contexts and the different ontological practices and worldviews, such as those articulated by the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples (Ehrnström-Fuentes and Böhm, 2022).

This is not the end of the tree flexing opportunities. As public and private organizations across the world aim to reduce their carbon footprints, there has been renewed interest in carbon offsetting. While offsetting developed a negative reputation in the 2000s and 2010s, due to corruption, carbon double-counting and other malpractices (Böhm and Dabhi, 2008), it has recently been reinvented as ‘net-zero’ and ‘nature-based solutions’ approaches (Böhm and Sullivan, 2021). Yet, the fundamentals of such approaches have not changed. They allow big polluters, often based in the Global North, to continue with business-as-usual while claiming that their products and services are ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘net zero’. For example, Aldi, the big German supermarket chain, was recently in the news for selling ‘carbon neutral’ milk to its German customers. The German TV network ZDF ran a documentary, exposing the scheme as greenwash, given that the company purchases carbon credits of questionable quality from eucalyptus plantations in Uruguay (Lang, 2022). Here, the urgency of climate change mitigation is used to support industrial activities that have negative, landscape-wide ecological impacts in geographies that are often thousands of miles away in the Global South. Such climate finance opportunities are increasingly sought by forestry companies as another avenue to flex the value of tree plantations, positively contributing, so they claim, to global climate change targets (McKinsey, 2022).

The expansion of tree plantations has been a global phenomenon, particularly affecting tropical, sub-tropical and temperate climates in countries of the Global South (Kröger, 2014). There have been large-scale and intersectional economic, social and ecological impacts, which have been largely negative. They have mostly benefitted international and national elites that have enclosed previously common lands, turning trees into cash crops for profit-making. Very few high-quality jobs have been created in this process, as forestry has become a highly mechanised industry, instead displacing smallholder farmers and peasants (Kröger, 2014). In line with neo-extractivist development policies, national governments and international organizations, such as the IMF and World Bank, have supported this expansion of the forestry industry to allegedly making use of countries’ competitive climate advantages for growing trees. They end up serving global export markets that again benefit economic and political elites (Gerber, 2011).

The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas, 2023) currently lists 266 cases of conflict involving tree plantations worldwide, mostly in tropical and sub-tropical climates. The social issues mostly involve land grabbing and evicting land-based communities from hitherto Indigenous or common land. Water scarcity or pollution also features highly on the list of ills created by industrial tree plantations. This directly affects the livelihoods of land-based communities, such as smallholder farmers and peasants (Borras Jr and Franco, 2018). As communities defend their rights to land and water against forestry companies, it is often the state that intervenes by force. Given this overwhelming state-corporation collusion, there is very little, if any, recognition of the rights of land-based communities. This leads some commentators to argue that this form of developmentalism amounts to a modern-day form of genocide of land-based communities, which coincides with the ecocide of vital, natural ecosystems that are being replaced by commodified natural resources, whether they are tree plantations or other monocrops, of the green economy (Crook and Short, 2021).

Civil society organizations, such as social movements and NGOs, from around the world have been resisting this genocide and ecocide. For decades, global organizations such as the World Rainforest Movement, Forest Peoples Programme, Friends of the Earth International, Via Campesina, Rainforest Rescue and Global Forest Coalition have fought for the environmental and social justice of land-based communities, Indigenous people and peasants. There are multiple local and regional social movements, communities and other organizations that resist the state-corporate elite collusions over tree plantations. Often, it is Indigenous people, such as the Mapuche, who take things into their own hands. They learn to help themselves, fighting for their survival, their ancestral rights and recognition.

In February 2023, the area around Purén, which we visited only in November 2022, was engulfed by some of the biggest wildfires Chile has ever seen. Mapuche and other activists have come out to blame the forestry companies as well as the Chilean state for failing to protect the land and livelihood of the people of the Araucanía-Wallmapu region (Aylwin Oyarzún, 2023; Rusca, 2023). While climate change is very quickly blamed for the increase in quantity and intensity of wildfires worldwide, what is often not understood enough is that it is the extant industrial and developmental practices by corporations and state governments that lead to such ecological, economic and human disasters. It has been known for years that tree plantations are more prone to catching fire than traditional, mixed rainforests. Eucalyptus trees in particular are highly flammable (Guerrero et al., 2022). Who bares the responsibility and costs of these wildfires? As Max Reuca told a journalist: ‘This fire has caused irreparable damage to Mapuche communities, damaging Mapuche cultural heritage. Many families have lost everything, their houses, their animals, their food and their crops’. These recent wildfires are just the latest injustices that the Mapuche have had to face, shared by many forest and land-based communities around the world.

The advocates of the green economy should not look away from such disasters. Green economy blueprints are only worth the paper they are written on if they include environmental and social justice dimensions that take proper account of the history, culture and livelihoods of land-based peoples, such as the Mapuche in Chile. While it is easy for organizations based in the Global North to make claims of ‘carbon neutrality’ or ‘net zero’, the reality on the ground often looks different. We need to understand what such claims actually entail, gathering evidence of whether they stack up. This requires travelling to often remote places in the Global South to understand the implications of such ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘net zero’ solutions for land-based communities. So, next time you, dear reader, see an ad for a ‘carbon neutral’ product or read a ‘net zero’ corporate strategy report, I suggest you stop and reflect about how such solutions are actually implemented, understanding their economic, social and environmental consequences in often far-away places in the Global South.

After Araucanía-Wallmapu, we drive further south. Here, the sense of being in a ‘frontier’ region grows stronger. We visit Puerto Varas, which was founded by German immigrants only in the 1850s. The Germans settled in the area following an invitation by the then Chilean government, which wanted to colonize the south, bringing huge territories into ‘production’. Colonization is still ongoing today. After Puerto Varas, Ruta 5 continues onto Chile's largest island, Chiloé, while Ruta 7, which is largely a dirt-track, continues on the mountainous mainland into the deep south. We, however, have to return north. We take Ruta 5 back to Santiago, stopping in one of the many tree plantations along the way, to make a video about the reality of tree monocultures in Chile, which we can show to our students at home.