Chile is Timber Country: Citizenship, Justice and Scale in the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign

9 Chile is Timber Country Citizenship, Justice and Scale in the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign Adam Henne and Teena Gabrielson Quien no conoce el bosque chileno no conoce este planeta. —Pablo Neruda, 1974 Neruda’s famous claim, ‘Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet’, is used widely in Chile by environmentalists, travel agents and chambers of commerce. In its simplicity, the line is appealing, but also deceptive. ‘The Chilean Forest’ is not by any means a single entity, and attempts to cast it in that light are deeply political projects, with serious implications for citizenship and social natures. As Bruce Braun (2002) noted in the context of Canadian forestry, the forest that is an object of forest conflicts is actually an assemblage of shifting discourses and political practices. What piece of landscape can even be considered as ‘forest’ is in part a product of the political activity of variously situated actors. At the same time, different political actors are constituted out of conflicts over forest landscapes. In this way, timber companies, international environmental NGOs and indigenous activists are all part of a larger Chilean social ecology. Moreover, the forest is an assemblage of people, non-human nature, artefacts and technologies within larger ecological, economic, cultural, discursive and political networks. In conceptualizing the Chilean forest as a technonature, we draw on the recent work of Damian White and Chris Wilbert (2009, 6) to examine the diverse social natures of the forest and the extent to which these natures are ‘technologically mediated, produced, enacted, and contested’. By attending to the mediation and production of the forest, we highlight the ways in which specific forms of knowledge are bound to particular scaleframes. Thus, they come to serve as axes of inclusion and exclusion within the discourses of citizenship that are articulated in and through the construction of specific technonatures. In particular, we are concerned with the implications for citizenship and justice that are written into forest conflicts, often elided in nature discourse like that of Neruda’s poem. What version of ‘Chilean’ do we understand when we speak of ‘the Chilean forest’? Somewhat surprisingly, academic – 149 – 150 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce studies of environmental citizenship and environmental justice have not been well integrated (Dobson 2003; Agyeman and Evans 2006), although a number of recent normative and empirical works seek to bridge this gap (Kurtz 2005; Latta 2007a, 2008; Sandler and Pezzullo 2007; Smith and Pangsapa 2008; Sze et al. 2009; see also de Castro, this volume). The concept of scale emerges in these studies as a particularly trenchant means of examining the complex power dynamics of environmental conflict. As Erik Swyngedouw (2007, 24) explains, ‘socio-environmental projects are predicated upon scalar tactics and strategies.’ In what follows, we envision the Chilean forest as a ‘technonature’ open to diverse but unequal constructions of citizenship subjectivity, socio-spatial relations, political economies and environmental value. Using the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign as an example,1 we turn to the concept of scale to illuminate the ways in which discourses of citizenship come to articulate logics of inclusion and exclusion through the construction of ‘environmental formations’ or the ‘historically contingent articulations between environmental imaginaries, natural resource allocations, and political economies’ (Sundberg 2008, 569). In our analysis, both Chilean environmental NGOs and the timber industry construct environmental formations that bind scale and science to legitimate the exclusion of the Mapuche. In contrast, the Mapuche articulate an understanding of citizenship that draws together community self-determination with a traditional concept of territory that includes both humans and non-humans. Our ‘technonatural’ analysis shows the pivotal role of scale in negotiating the claims of justice within competing discourses of citizenship. The Technonatural Assemblage White and Wilbert (2009) propose ‘technonatures’ as a concept that captures the increasing extent to which technologies saturate the everyday experience of socially produced natures. The authors use the term to highlight a growing range of voices ruminating over the claim not only that we are inhabiting diverse social natures but also that knowledges of our worlds are, within such social natures, ever more technologically mediated, produced, enacted, and contested, and, furthermore, that diverse peoples find themselves, or perceive themselves as ever more entangled with things – that is, with technological, ecological, cultural, urban, and ecological networks and diverse hybrid materialities and non-human agencies. (6) Such entanglements are deeply political in that technonatures both articulate and embody social, cultural, economic and political power relations. Thus, C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 151 the construction of any particular technonature relies on the mobilization of power networks or ‘allied group[s] of social elites, together with particular discursive and material enrolments of nature, around a distinct socioenvironmental project’ (Swyngedouw 2007, 10). While ‘technonatures’ can describe the co-constructive action of subalterns as well as social elites, as becomes clear with the case of the Mapuche, elites often dominate the political process. At the time of the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign, the dominant voices in the technonatural construction of the Chilean Forest belonged to the Chilean state and timber industries. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the forest industry to the Chilean economy. Wood products have been a major growth industry for decades; export volume has grown from 2.2 billion dollars in 2002 to 5.5 billion dollars in 2008 (falling to 4.2 billion dollars with the downturn in 2009). This growth puts the forest product industry second only to copper mining in terms of contribution to the Chilean economy (INFOR 2010). Driven by this overwhelming profitability, the plantation sector has expanded rapidly. Chile’s forestry agency calculated that plantations, overwhelmingly made up of exotic Monterey pine (Pinus radiata), covered more than 14 per cent of Chile’s total forested land for a total of more than 2.3 million hectares (INFOR 2010). This marks a staggering increase from fifteen thousand hectares in 1940 and only eighty thousand hectares even into the 1980s (Clapp 1998). Supporters of the plantation model of forestry production describe plantations as replacement forests, taking harvesting pressure off native forests (Hartwig 1994; Sedjo and Botkin 1997); at least in Chile, though, research suggests that the lack of incentive to conserve native forest continues to promote their exploitation and eventual conversion to plantation (Clapp 2001). Most of the remaining native forests in Chile are temperate rainforests, an increasingly threatened ecotype. Chile possesses about a third of the world’s remaining intact temperate rainforest (Wilcox 1996; Neira, Verscheure and Revenga 2002). While not as rich in biodiversity as their tropical cousins due to their geographic isolation, Chilean forests show a very high degree of species endemism (Aagesen 1995). Twenty-eight out of eighty-four plant species are endemic, as well as eleven species of mammals, twenty-four species of amphibians and thirteen species each of birds and fish (Neira, Verscheure and Revenga 2002, 13). In addition to their biodiversity, Chilean forests serve important ecosystemic functions, maintaining hydrological cycles and soil stability, protecting watersheds and even acting as a carbon sink due to their exceptionally large standing biomass (Neira, Verscheure and Revenga 2002). Native forest cover is currently being lost at a rate of 120,000 to 200,000 hectares each year; at this rate, all native forest throughout the central re- 152 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce gion of the country could be gone within twenty-five years (Echeverria et al. 2006; Wilcox 1996). A number of factors are at work in this deforestation process, including agricultural clearing, firewood harvesting and forest fires. The greatest single factor driving the loss of native forest, however, is the growth of the plantation timber industry (Catalán 1999) – an industry deeply indebted to technological innovation, largely through the support of the Chilean state. Dating back to the Pinochet regime, the state has used a variety of mechanisms to support the timber industry. The state funds research into silvicultural chemicals, harvest and management modelling and tree improvement, including quite advanced biotechnology via Chile’s Instituto Forestal and well-funded university forestry departments, which were notably immune to criticism during the dictatorship’s purging of universities. Management research includes social as well as biological technologies: integrative modelling software that can simulate forest growth and harvest patterns alongside labour cycles and transportation costs (Bluth 2002; Camus 2006). The state has also provided and/or protected land for forestry to the extent of confiscating it from indigenous or campesino cooperatives, while providing significant tax incentives to cover land purchases and other start-up costs of timber production (Hartwig 1994; Aylwin 2001; Frias 2003; Quiroga 2003; Camus 2006). Finally, the state has prevented the interference of organized labour or indigenous claims through a variety of union-busting actions, typically framed as ‘anti-terrorist’ police actions (McFall 2001; Frias 2003; Klubock 2004; Ray 2007). Unlike forest conflicts in Southeast Asia or the Amazon, which revolve around multinational timber companies, the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign targeted domestic companies. The owners of Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC) and Arauco (Grupo Matte and the Angelini family, respectively) constitute some of the greatest concentrations of wealth in Chile, with extensive holdings in manufacturing, petrochemicals, mining and hydroelectric generation. These industry leaders make political capital from their dominant position in the Chilean economy, maintaining a great deal of influence in parliamentary politics. While the military dictatorship made this influence most explicit, Matte and Angelini have had a hand in the crafting of state economic policy since their emergence among the small group of families in Chile’s socio-economic elite in the early twentieth century (Fazio 2005). Post-dictatorship governments have grappled with this legacy of interventionist capital, with varying degrees of commitment and limited success at insulating themselves from its influence (Carruthers 2001; Ffrench-Davis 2002; Silva 2002). It is the thorough and persistent intermingling of state and capital that has underwritten the economic and political projects linked to the plantation sector’s dramatic expansion. C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 153 Chile’s environmental movement, as noted, has framed the issue of forest protection and loss primarily around the conversion of native forest to timber plantation. At stake in that conversion is the national patrimony of biodiversity that native forests represent. Biodiversity as a concept in forest conflicts has global resonance and a thorny history (Zerner 1996; Escobar 1998; Braun 2002); some have suggested that the quantitative underpinnings of biodiversity conservation serve as a sort of scientific proxy for fuzzier notions like wilderness or the sublime landscape that drove earlier periods of nature conservation (Song and M’Gonigle 2001; Whitten, Holmes and Mackinnon 2001; Carolan 2006). The Chilean movement does not carry the history of colonial preservationism that characterizes the field in North America and Europe; the birth of the movement is often dated to the founding of the Comité Pro-Defensa de la Fauna y Flora (Fauna and Flora Defence Committee, or CODEFF) in 1968, when many of the current leaders were graduate students in the biological sciences (CODEFF 2005). Current efforts to protect Chile’s forests draw discursively and materially on biodiversity conservation as a global and highly technology-mediated phenomenon: The global significance of Chile’s forests has been recognized by multiple well-known international conservation organizations such as World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and the World Conservation Union. WWF, for example, has catalogued Chile’s temperate forests as one of the top conservation-priority forest ecoregions in the Southern Hemisphere [Global 200], while CI and IUCN have identified Chile’s forests as one of the 25 ‘hot spots’ for biodiversity conservation in the world. (Neira, Verscheure and Revenga 2002, 18) ‘Biodiversity hot spots’ and the ‘Global 200’ are systems developed by the largest international environmental NGOs for setting biodiversity priorities at a global scale. This view from above is accomplished via a complex array of species population algorithms, satellite imaging and GIS modelling. Ecoregional planning as a conservation and management strategy is explicit about its commitment to visualizing and acting upon biodiversity across national borders, despite the political and epistemological problems this entails (Brosius and Russell 2003; Brosius 2004). For Chilean NGOs to cast their national patrimony, the ‘Chilean forest’, in this global technocratic frame is a tense but unambiguous statement about what sort of technonature they aim to defend. Where environmentalists are concerned with the threat plantations pose to biodiverse native forests, the establishment of new plantations on nonforested land is not without controversy. The majority of pine plantations are located in Chile’s VIII, IX and X regions, an area that corresponds closely to the territory recognized by the Spanish crown during the colonial period as belonging to the indigenous Mapuche. While population and land ten- 154 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce ure have of course shifted dramatically in the three hundred years since that recognition, more than 200,000 Mapuche, or nearly a third of those living in Chile, still live in the rural areas of these three regions (INE 2003). With a large and marginalized indigenous population already confined to small reducciones (reservations) and facing population pressure on their lands, the arrival of a land-hungry new industry was bound to lead to conflict. Mapuche activists and community leaders argue that the expansion of the plantation sector comes at the expense of their territorial, environmental and political rights. Many of the properties currently being converted into plantations are located within territory returned to the Mapuche under Spanish ‘títulos de merced’, or claimed by Mapuche cooperatives under the socialist Allende administration and ratified according to the agrarian reform laws. These lands became available to timber companies only after having been taken by force during the military dictatorship’s ‘rollback’ of the land reform (Bengoa 1999; Frias 2003). Even in cases where rights to the lands themselves are not in question, activists claim that the environmental impacts of industrial tree farming on neighbouring properties are threatening the health and livelihoods of indigenous communities. This may take the form of pesticides, erosion, floods, drought, or the lack of access to firewood and wild plants (Catalán 1999; McFall 2001; Rohter 2004). Mapuche concerns overlap with a variety of expert domains and technologies – hydrology and geomorphology in terms of flooding and drought, forest ecology in terms of the extirpation of native food and medicinal species, toxicology in terms of the leaching of pesticides into community water tables and so on. Measuring the extent of these impacts scientifically becomes a challenge to the resources, flexibility and interdisciplinary expertise of researchers and community advocates. As a result, the process of evaluating and documenting impacts and introducing them to public-policy arenas has called for alternative models of doing science, integrating expert research with community monitoring, participatory methods and public activism. Through activist bodies including the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA) and the Institute for Indigenous Studies, Mapuche organizations are attempting to build a network of scientists to document the impact of plantations on their communities by incorporating participatory community research and the first-hand accounts of individuals who have been dislocated or injured (see, for example, Frias 2003; Catalán et al. 2006). This model of ‘citizen science’ (Irwin 1995; Corburn 2005; Leach, Scoones and Wynne 2005) resonates with the network of expertise and activism familiar to environmental justice circles in North America and also with similar kinds of emerging activism in other parts of Latin America (see Merlinsky and Latta, this volume). Significantly, however, citizenship discourse as such does not appear in the repertoire of the Mapuche organizations engaged with this campaign. For C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 155 these activists, as for many contemporary Mapuche, the term Chilean refers specifically to non-Mapuche – to white Chileans, a category from which they are excluded a priori. Rather than appeal to their rights as citizens of Chile, these activists frame the forest conflict in terms of autonomy and territory. In particular, the concept of wallmapu, usually translated as ‘territory’, explicitly refers to all traditional Mapuche territory on both sides of the Chile– Argentina border (Toledo 2006). With equally subversive implications, wallmapu also includes non-human persons: animals, trees, rivers and soils, the spirit world. Contemporary activists invoke traditions of solidarity building through reciprocal exchanges of tobacco, dyes, foodstuffs and sacrificial offerings; these circuits historically extended from Pacific to Atlantic coasts, and incorporated mountains, rivers and animal spirits as well as neighbours and extended kin groups (Coña 1930; Hilger 1966). By renovating a territorial principle outside the Chilean state on so many levels, Mapuche activists critique Chile’s nexus of state and capital, while positioning themselves as historically and culturally privileged environmental subjects. As these rich and differing understandings of the Chilean forest suggest, forest landscapes are neither homogeneous entities nor abstract spaces, but spaces of technonature open to multiple imaginings and discursive constructions that bind together non-human nature, citizen subjectivities, artefacts, socio-spatial relations and technological understandings within larger networks of cultural and material flows. In what follows, we demonstrate the centrality of a politics of scale to the different political fortunes of these alternate technonatures in the context of a conflict over the future of Chile’s forests in the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign. Citizenship, Justice and the Politics of Scale Originating in the fields of political and radical geography, the concept of scale refers to a fragment of landscape that is understood to be socially produced (Agnew 1997). While conceptions of scale may overlap with ontologically defined geographical boundaries, as in the familiar conceptions of local, urban, regional, national and global, scale is the product of social relations and political contestation. The politics of scale, or the ‘production, reconfiguration, or contestation of particular differentiations, orderings and hierarchies among geographical scales’, permeates discussions of environment (Brenner 2001, 600). Questions of scale are critical to understanding the discursive framing of environmental problems and solutions, the mobilization and counter-mobilization of constituencies and the construction and adoption of political strategies by various parties to environmental conflict (Williams 1999; Towers 2000; Kurtz 2003; Bickerstaff and Agyeman 2009; Sze 156 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce et al. 2009). In an effort to identify how activists contend with the ‘social complexity and spatial ambiguity inherent in environmental justice disputes’, Hilda Kurtz (2003, 892, 894) turns to ‘scale frames’ or ‘the discursive practices that construct meaningful (and actionable) linkages between the scale at which a social problem is experienced and the scale(s) at which it could be politically addressed or resolved’. The frame of particular interest here is scale as means of inclusion/exclusion, primarily because of its bearing on questions of citizenship. As critics often note, as much as citizenship defines a community of equals empowered to engage in decision making regarding collective welfare, it also establishes the boundaries of that community and marks those excluded. It should come as no surprise, then, that actors in environmental conflict often draw on discourses of citizenship to articulate scale frames of inclusion and exclusion so as to advance their own interests. Such frames can integrate aggrieved parties into larger social movements, or they may legitimate the exclusion of the aggrieved by marginalizing and circumscribing their claims (Towers 2000; Kurtz 2003, 2005; Sundberg 2008; Sze et al. 2009). The processes by which exclusionary scale frames become legitimized are often deeply intertwined with processes of racialization. It seems wise to approach this point with caution, as Latin America’s racial regimes do not map neatly onto the models of racial discrimination developed by environmental justice scholars in North America. Nonetheless, if we consider race as an historical process rather than a demographic category (Pulido 1996), the relevance to the Chilean context becomes clearer. As Juanita Sundberg (2008, 571) explains, ‘White supremacy and white privilege inform legal systems, and everyday understandings of self and other, as well as the organization of space, place, and, I argue, conceptions of appropriate natural resource management.’ Drawing upon several distinct historical examples from Latin America, Sundberg shows the intertwining of processes of racialization and the construction of environmental formations. In the modern era, such articulations are often central to defining the boundaries of citizenship (see also Sundberg’s contribution to this volume). In the environmental formations that emerge, the ideal citizen is often depicted as one who is positioned to know or imagine, and potentially engage in, a very particular green ‘good life’ that draws heavily on Western conceptions of the non-human natural world and humans’ appropriate relation to it (Gabrielson and Parady 2010). With an intellectual history based in colonialism and industrial urbanization, such green ideals often depend upon a deeply entrenched nature/culture dualism, a vision of the non-human natural world as either ripe for development or as pristine nature to be protected and defended (Latta 2007b). As it travels from Global North to Global South, or from affluent white Chile to marginal indigenous Chile, the dualistic ethics C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 157 resonate with existing hierarchies of value. Across these formations, expert, abstract and scientific forms of knowledge often come to legitimate exclusions rooted in misrecognition (Kurtz 2009). In a discussion of the racialized state, Kurtz (2009) explains how the particular and experiential knowledge of environmental justice activists is often pitted against the more abstract, scientific and expert knowledge of the state that reinforces a ‘liberal universality that does no small disservice to non-white populations’ (693). Exclusionary discourses that privilege expert forms of knowledge are often central to the construction of specific environmental formations and deeply bound up with a politics of scale. Scale is not ontologically given, but constructed through political conflict and articulated discursively, politically and geographically. These articulations are key in constituting the environmental imaginary or discursive ideal that defines a particular environmental formation; from them emerge the networks necessary to mobilize a constituency that can institute and maintain that particular ideal. Further, ‘these relational scalar networks articulate with produced territorial or geographical configurations that also exhibit scalar dimensions’ (Swyngedouw 2007). In the case of the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign, the politics of scale reveal an underlying consensus between the Chilean timber industry and environmental NGOs. On the face of it, the two groups’ environmental formations would seem to pit preservation against development. However, underlying this surface conflict exists a shared reliance on an international scalar dimension that includes networks of transnational environmental NGOs, North American consumers and an international timber market. Attending to the conflicting scalar dimensions at work in this case illuminates the ways in which the geo-political networks binding the Global North and South prompt a construction of Chilean citizenship conducive to the interests of both native forest preservation and plantation development. This underlying consensus develops at the expense of the community autonomy and territorial sovereignty of the Mapuche. The Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign The roots of the campaign lie in earlier attempts to pressure wood retailers in the United States to raise their environmental standards for wood products. Beginning in 1997, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) launched a campaign against Home Depot and other United States retailers of forest products. The campaign consisted of boycotts and letter writing, as well as dramatic street theatre events involving banner hangings, lockdowns, a giant inflatable dinosaur and so on. A number of celebrities, including R.E.M. and the Dave Matthews Band, added to the pressure. In 1999, Home Depot responded to 158 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce the extended campaign by announcing a commitment to stop selling wood from ‘environmentally sensitive areas’. The home improvement megastore denied that they were responding to pressure from environmentalists, and described the policy change as the result of lengthy consideration of their ‘responsibility as a global leader to help protect endangered forests’ (Hagerty 1999). Nonetheless, environmental activists used this victory as a point of leverage to encourage Home Depot to pursue more proactive policies and to pressure other retailers to follow their example. In 2002, Chilean environmental NGOs (Defensores del Bosque Chileno, CODEFF and Fundación Terram, among others) began writing letters to ‘more than 100 forestry businesses speaking of the necessity of putting an end to the replacement of native forests by forest plantations’ (Sanger, in Anderson 2003). Only one responded, in the negative, and indeed there had been precious little dialogue in Chile at that point on the subject of more sustainable logging practices. Another controversial aspect of the campaign at this point was the participation of famed Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, who joined Defensores del Bosque Chileno in encouraging Chilean producers to harvest more sustainably, and called on North American consumers to purchase only sustainable wood products. Allende’s participation was decried as treason (González 2002). On 13 September 2002, North American NGO ForestEthics, cosponsored by a large alliance of environmental groups, placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times asking North American consumers to avoid buying wood products unsustainably harvested in Chile. While the environmentalists were at pains to point out that the ad was calling for educated consumerism rather than an outright boycott of Chilean wood (Anderson 2003), this did little to protect them from criticism. Chilean timber companies were outraged, lambasting the Chilean cosponsors of the advertisement as traitors to Chile. As anthropologist Julia Paley (2001) points out, such attacks are a common strategy used against critics of government or corporate policy in post-dictatorship Chile; any form of dissent is seen as a threat to fragile democratic and development projects. Before the end of 2002, however, the tide began to turn. At the request of Aaron Sanger of ForestEthics, Home Depot officially approached their suppliers in Chile asking them to reconsider their position. After the original RAN Old Growth Campaign against them, the North American corporation had learned its lesson about environmental politics. Newly appointed ‘environmental global project manager’ Ron Jarvis was explicitly tasked with the mission of maintaining the corporation’s credibility as an environmentally sound retailer. He had demonstrated the ability to negotiate complex environmental issues in earlier work with Indonesian suppliers, and led Home Depot to take a principled stand against that country’s unsustainable logging practices (Carlton 2004). C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 159 At Jarvis’s urging, and with the threat of a pullout by Home Depot hanging over them, Chile’s two largest timber companies, CMPC and Arauco, agreed to meet with the coalition behind the market campaign. The first set of meetings took place at Home Depot’s main offices in Atlanta, with Ron Jarvis as mediator. Representatives from United States groups ForestEthics, RAN and American Lands Alliance joined Chilean environmentalists from Defensores del Bosque Chileno, Greenpeace Chile and Instituto del Ecología Política in pressing CMPC and Arauco for dramatic changes in their practices. According to several of the representatives present, the companies surprised the environmentalists with their willingness to discuss sustainable harvesting. The principal of non-substitution (that is, not converting native forest to plantation) became central to the discussion. The companies claimed not to have been engaged in substitution for many years, a claim the environmentalists contested vigorously, but both parties agreed that eliminating substitution was a positive goal. No documents were signed at this point, and all parties seemed to agree that the discussions were tense, productive, but largely preliminary. Towards the end of the meetings, the timber companies proposed that the second round of discussions take place in Chile, along with a visit to their properties to demonstrate their conservation and sustainable harvest practices. Thus in July 2003, North American environmentalists joined their Chilean counterparts on a walking tour of CMPC and Arauco’s forestry operations. Jason Tockman, taking part as a representative of the American Lands Alliance, later described the event as a ‘dog and pony show’. The other environmentalists generally agreed that the event was a careful public relations operation, and that the private parks and selective harvest experiments on display were not representative of the companies’ practices in general. Nonetheless, the discussions established the grounds for compromise. While the content remained uncertain, it was clear that both sectors would at some point sign an agreement putting an end to the campaign and committing the companies to more sustainable practices. Negotiations over the content of the agreement continued by email and teleconference for several months. Significant differences of opinion appeared among interview subjects as far as when and to what extent the interests of Mapuche activists entered into the campaign. Mapuche activists argued that they had lent information and support to the campaign from the beginning. Chilean environmentalists say that from the start, the campaign was based on native forests and never addressed issues of Mapuche territorial rights. As the negotiations towards a final agreement progressed, the contested role of Mapuche activists in the campaign became more salient. In September 2003, ForestEthics and American Lands Alliance invited Alfredo Seguel, of the Mapuche organization Konapewman, to speak about Chilean forest issues at the counterforum outside the WTO ministerial in Cancún. Jason Tockman of American 160 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce Lands Alliance accompanied Seguel and handled his travel arrangements; in the process, the two became friends. Towards the end of the forum, Seguel expressed his concern to Tockman that the environmentalists in the campaign were negotiating with the timber companies. How, he asked, could environmentalists sign deals regarding the sustainable use of territories that by right belonged to the Mapuche, especially when the timber companies at the table were primary actors in the repression of those rights? Tockman took this concern very much to heart, and brought the issue back to his colleagues in the United States. While all agreed that the issue was important, Tockman says he was the only one who felt that it might require calling off negotiations.Towards the end of September, American Lands Alliance invited Pablo Huaiquilao, another member of Konapewman, to take part in a speaking tour of the United States. Huaiquilao travelled the Southeast with Tockman and an indigenous Mexican activist, speaking about the impact of pine plantations on Mapuche communities. He was also concerned about the negotiations still taking place, and asked Tockman to pressure his colleagues to withdraw. So late in the game withdrawal seemed improbable, but Tockman encouraged Huaiquilao and others in Konapewman to put their concerns in writing as soon as possible. The North American environmental activists emphasized that they were anticipating a written intervention from the Mapuche activists and further dialogue from their Chilean NGO counterparts; unfortunately, neither of these written communiqués appeared until after the agreement was signed. In November 2003 the environmentalists and the timber companies (along with Home Depot) signed an agreement. CMPC and Arauco committed to end substitution on their properties, to end the promotion of substitution by other contracted parties and to refuse to purchase timber from lands converted after a given period of time. In return, the environmentalists lent their support to the companies’ harvesting practices and private conservation on their own properties. According to many of the environmentalists interviewed, the content had been agreed on from the early stages of negotiation; the remaining contention revolved around the language of the agreement: ‘It’s just a matter of working out the details, just a few words of disagreement. Of course the companies wanted us to sing praises of them and talk about how wonderful their forest operations were, where environmentalists, their objective was to get as many commitments and statements out of the company, so we both had an agenda. … So the objective was to find common ground.’ The language of the agreement is indeed quite non-specific, including statements such as ‘NGOs recognize the leadership that CMPC and Arauco have in the Chilean forestry industry’ and ‘Companies recognize that collaborating with NGOs on the Conservation Assessments can help them continue their commitment to environmental responsibility.’ Echoing C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 161 the language of Home Depot’s concessions in 1999, the timber companies gave no indication that they were pressured into signing the agreement by the campaign: ‘These initiatives reflect CMPC’s and Arauco’s interest in protecting Chile’s native forests’ (Defensores del Bosque Chileno 2003). The environmental organizations announced the agreement as a victory for Chile’s forests, and put an end to the more visible aspects of their campaign against the timber industry. The signing of the agreement, however, marked a transitional rather than a final phase of the campaign. Defensores del Bosque Chileno began describing the new phase of the campaign as the ‘Chilean Joint Solutions Process’; as their communications director described it, the ‘campaign with the timber companies, together’. The companies are collaborating with university researchers to define maps of conservation targets within their properties, while the environmental organizations prepare local ‘community monitoring’ groups to oversee compliance with the standards of the agreement. As the timber companies and the environmental movement formalized this new stage of their relationship, the Mapuche activists finally went public with their complaints. An open letter to the NGO members of the campaign appeared in a number of print and online venues, in which a Mapuche coalition (the Coordination of Mapuche Organizations and Territorial Identities, CITEM) denounced the agreement and called for a new and more critical wave in the campaign against the timber companies: To establish any negotiation with these companies is to contribute to the washing of their image, to continue consolidation of the international wood export markets, and to continue to ignore the fundamental problems that exist in these territories. … Our spirit and interest is to stop the forestry expansion for the protection of the natural resources in these areas and to transform the current social, political and legislative relationships that the Mapuche communities face with the Chilean State. … We believe in the path that you had shown, involving a campaign of criticism and awareness that you generated in the US. Therefore, we encourage you to continue in that way, and not to negotiate, and we urge you to engage in strategies that can be taken accordingly. (CITEM 2003) Inclusion and Exclusion in the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign In the realm of public discourse, timber companies present themselves as benevolent caretakers of the Chilean landscape, transforming degraded pastures and ‘wasted space’ into productive forests that benefit all citizens. Particularly noteworthy here are the advertising campaigns, including the afore- 162 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce mentioned billboards, ‘Chile: País Forestal’ (Chile: Timber Country) and the more recent campaign, ‘Bosques para Chile’ (Forests for Chile). In a series of TV and radio spots, a child asks her doting father how plants grow in their garden. The father describes how a good gardener nurtures plants and soil, stepping in at just the right time to lend nature a helping hand. A kindly voiceover completes the analogy between forestry and gardening, explaining that timber companies nurture the forests to help nature provide her bounty to all of Chile. In spite of intensive state investment in the industry, timber companies continue to argue that private property is the paramount value of democracy; as in most liberal discourses, the role of the state is to empower individuals. This is best illustrated by the production of Chile’s ‘weak or absent regulation’; as Alex Clapp (1998) notes, there is persistent political pressure against regulating the forest industry in any way that might threaten this critical source of revenue. The 2007 Native Forest Law was the product of fifteen years of bitter debate and backroom dealing; many of Chile’s environmentalists consider it already dangerously compromised (Firmani 2008). In summary, a discourse of benevolent private interests is mobilized to cover the intervention of a cronyist state in support of a high-tech, rationalized industry. The timber industry cultivates natural resources to provide for all Chilean citizens and thereby fulfils both a paternalistic and nationalist role. But, in doing so, we see here that cutting-edge forest technologies are just one part of a citizenship model that Neil Harvey (2001) refers to as neoliberal or market citizenship, ‘in which subjects are created by the extension of individual property rights and capitalist rationality’ (1046; see also Schild 1998; Baldwin and Meltzer, this volume). As the campaign and its outcome suggest, Chilean environmentalists have mostly been willing to engage with the model of market-based citizenship that the timber companies promote. The communications director of Defensores del Bosque told me, when I asked about the organization’s strategies towards government environmental regulation, ‘We believe that the international market generating conscience in the consumers, generating pressures on the distributors of Chilean wood, can serve someday to change the situation within Chile.’ As noted, environmentalists actively rejected any reference to the earlier boycott campaign as a campaign ‘against’ the timber companies: ‘No no, this is a campaign with the timber companies, together.’ The campaign itself cast the fundamental conflict between environmentalists and timber companies in a shared conceptual language with an agreedupon technonatural object – the fate of the Chilean forest – that enabled explicit disagreement, negotiation, agreement and subsequent collaboration. Linked to this shared vision of the forest was a citizenship discourse that made Mapuche claims latent to the negotiation over its future, their place within C h i l e i s Ti m b er C o u n tr y | 163 the campaign marginal and easily erased. Consistent with the Chilean state’s long-standing commitment to an ‘ideology of national homogeneity’ (Latta 2007a, 232), both the timber companies and Chilean environmental NGOs involved in the campaign constructed environmental formations that tied the future of Chile’s forests to the good of all of its citizens. This nationalist environmental imaginary, whether it privileged economic development or the preservation of native forests, became projected into international networks of power in such a way as to discredit the more local and culturally specific claims of the indigenous Mapuche. Thus, while North American consumers are empowered to pressure the Chilean timber industry, the distributional inequities in the treatment of the Mapuche are obscured by removing from discussion the question of timber plantations’ encroachment on Mapuche lands. More pointedly, the Mapuche’s deeply political claims for community, autonomy and territorial sovereignty are bracketed from a negotiation in which the key players share a common understanding of the forest as a technonature to be managed and administered by political elites and technological experts. While environmentalists in Chile and elsewhere described the agreement as a historic breakthrough, it corresponds to a familiar pattern in Chilean politics known as ‘democracia de acuerdos’ (democracy by agreement), also known as ‘gentleman’s democracy’, ‘democracy from above’ or ‘democracy behind closed doors’ (Paley 2001). The irony of these qualified ‘democracies’ is not lost on the Chileans who use the terms. And yet environmental organizations have represented themselves as spokespeople for all of Chile in this sort of negotiation, without seeking to engender a process for broader democratic participation or representation. When asked why the Mapuche did not have an active stake in the campaign, environmental activists frequently replied, ‘We are protecting biodiversity for all Chileans, not just one class.’ This is a complex situation with multiple implications for who counts as Chilean at all; statements like these clearly cast the Mapuche as not part of ‘all Chileans’, while simultaneously promoting negotiations over the protection of biodiversity as a legitimate venue for that decision. The conflicting scalar dimensions at work in this process of marginalization reveal the extent to which neoliberal frameworks, universal conceptions of citizenship and preservationist objectives can become articulated through scientific discourse. Such discourse, in turn, effectively depoliticizes nature, further delegitimizing community claims to autonomy and calls for more participatory democratic process. The story of Mapuche involvement with the Chilean Native Forest Market Campaign demonstrates that while collaborations between indigenous activists and environmentalists can be rhetorically powerful in some settings, they can run aground in a number of ways. Potential problems include not just 164 | En vi ron m e n t a l M a rg i n a l i ty a n d th e S tr u g g l e f o r J u s ti ce the incommensurable views of nature noted by environmental anthropologists (see, for example, Brosius 1997; West 2006) or the structural conflicts of interest debated by conservationists (Redford and Sanderson 2000; Berkes 2004; also compare Chapin 2004). 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