In 2019, I was visiting Bogor near the capital Jakarta in Indonesia to present this book project at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). When I landed in Jakarta, I was struck by the endless expanse of buildings. It was truly a hulking modern metropolis, which had displaced the beauty that could still be found on other Indonesian islands. In addition to being ugly and polluted, the city was sinking, which caused the government to move the capital to Kalimantan, in the middle of Borneo Island. Thus building a new city from scratch in the middle of palm oil plantations that were actively deforesting the unique rainforests. These were sites where commerce had thrived for thousands of years, vessels from China passing Singapore, whose financial districts, refineries, and companies were now pushing for expanding the plantations on top of forests, in an unequal ecological exchange. Without this unequal exchange, the fancy city hotels and neighborhoods could not be built. This experience sparked my interest to read more about world-system expansion and its links to deforestation globally, beyond the Amazon and Finnish contexts I had already studied in detail. I concluded that also here – in the form of oil palm and pulp – there were regionally dominant political economic systems ravaging forests and tightening their grip on power.

The Negative Impact of Wars and Other Epochal Events on Forests

For centuries, the interstate system has been based largely on rivalry. Accumulation of economic capital and development via economic growth has been seen as necessary to secure national supremacy, security, survival, and competitiveness. Evans (Reference Evans1995) explores how states have been able to fund security measures by embedding the key industrial sectors that provide global leadership, markets, and technological advancement. The rivalry-based interstate system has sacrificed forests over and over for the sake of power struggles and the so-called development of cities, infrastructure, and agriculture. This dynamic is especially apparent during what I call epochal moments, which are moments when deforestation activities have peaked. A key characteristic of these epochal moments is the widespread perception that a global crisis is present, which has opened a momentary possibility to accumulate much more than would be possible in times of peace. Wars are an especially impactful type of epochal moment due to the havoc they wreak on forests.

When the Spanish Armada was built so much wood was required that the Iberian Peninsula became depleted of its magnificent oak forests. Yet, what was there to show for the destruction of these forests after the war? Most of these wooden vessels were lost when the fleet was decimated by England in 1588, as were most other ships that were sent to colonial and inter-European wars. In the eighteenth century, an oak vessel lasted on average 12 years, yet needed about 4,000 thick oak trees to be built, which translates to approximately 40 hectares of forest. As the decimation of forests was essentially led by the European navies some scholars have characterized the wars fought by these navies, not only as wars against other colonial powers, but also as wars against trees across the globe (Thorne, Reference Thorne2022). At the time, European powers such as England and France also started major campaigns to plant oak and other trees commonly used in shipbuilding. Increasingly, issues around access to timber became a major problem for countries’ continued world conquest, including timber depletion, taxes and levees on timber resources, and fights over the key commodity routes for importing timber (Braudel, Reference Braudel1992).

Wars also deforest by increasing the demand for wood, directly at battle sites as forests were purposefully eradicated for combat reasons (a well-known modern example of this is what the United States did in Vietnam with the widespread use of the herbicide Agent Orange) (Crouse, Reference Crouse, Clark, Shaul and Lower2015), or to provide fuel (as the Germans did in Lapland during WWII, cutting and burning natural forests on fells to combat the cold. To date, these areas have not returned to forest, but are still tundra).

In fact, a strong military presence in a country’s politics has been linked to increased deforestation (Chakravarty et al., Reference Chakravarty, Ghosh, Suresh, Dey, Shukla and Akais Okia2012), which was visible in Brazil during its military dictatorship (1964–1984) when the deforestation frontiers were advanced over vast areas by infrastructural projects for ill-conceived geopolitical and developmentalist reasoning (e.g. to “secure” the Amazon from would-be invaders, by conquering and deforesting it themselves). The same kind of increased deforestation took place with the Bolsonaro regime, which was composed of even more military officials than the dictatorship governments. Many civil wars have also led militaries to deforest, to sell timber or open mines to fund warmaking; for example, in Myanmar and other parts of Southeast and South Asia (Chakravarty et al., Reference Chakravarty, Ghosh, Suresh, Dey, Shukla and Akais Okia2012). During wars, commodity prices typically jump, which leads many to engage in quickly logging vast areas to reap the windfall gains. After the war is over, wood is needed for construction, which again increases logging.

Wars also create impediments for international trade. For example, the historic moments of Finnish forest degradation are linked to the epochal moments of major wars, including the “tar boom” during the American Civil War in the 1860s and the Korean War in the 1950s. During these two booms, logging was quickly expanded to try and capture profit from the increased prices of tar and logs in global markets. However, this led to an overall depletion of wood. This boosted the massive state support for tree plantation expansion, trenching, mechanization, and the clearcutting that was already ongoing. This system quickly took root in Finland during WWII as clearcutting was forced on many areas because wood was needed to provide fuel since oil was not available in Finland. Currently, the closure of the Finnish border with Russia due to the latter’s invasion of Ukraine has caused a major increase in clearcutting in Finland, as wood no longer flows across the border from Russia. Furthermore, as money is spent on warmaking, forests are cut to provide revenue. While the deforesting impacts caused by war are huge, so are the impacts of other epochal moments.

Another longer-term epochal moment is the broader setting of what I understand to be a new commodity paradigm, where, since 2005, the prices and production costs of most commodities have risen considerably and market volatility has increased. This is pertinent because some of the commodities, including timber, beef, and gold – all of which have seen record highs since 2019 – have a direct effect on deforestation activities. Unfortunately, this correlation has not been noted by most market or natural resource analysts. By building on the world-ecology argument about the end of so-called cheap commodities or “natures” (see Moore, Reference Moore2015), one can see in practice how and why the prices for so many commodities continue to rise, even while volatility increases. This combination leads to more complex, chaotic, and difficult-to-organize supply chains and value webs. The theorists who are making more general claims (too broadly and vaguely in my estimation) have called this the end or demise of the capitalist world system (see e.g. Wallerstein et al., Reference Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian and Calhoun2013), global capitalism, or a more general collapse of complex, industrial societies. I have offered a detailed, empirically grounded take on these broad schemes. This provides the bridge to my argument on the crucial role of RDPEs in world-ecology.

Geopolitics plays a key role in affecting what happens to forests, as geopolitics takes place within the capitalist world-ecology and world system (Moore, Reference Moore2017). An expansion of the tar boom example mentioned is a good illustration of the impact of geopolitics on forests. During the American Civil War, access to the crucial tar of North America was seriously curbed, which led to a dramatic spike in demand and price paid for the tar made from deforesting Finnish pine forests (Toivanen & Kröger, Reference Toivanen and Kröger2018). This expansion of the tar frontier into Northeastern Finnish forests had tremendous socioenvironmental impacts. These forests had been perpetually retained and maintained through a system of rotating swidden commons which allowed most forests to recover naturally, yet still produced food surplus. This system also functioned as a basis for the nonprivate property-based social system with forest commons. However, the war and the world powers needed tar, especially for tarring the ropes and planks of the British Imperial fleet. Thus, tar capitalists living in Finnish coastal ports and European cities such as Amsterdam and London saw great opportunities to take advantage of the peak prices by producing as much as possible as fast as possible. This led to great investments to open rivers and build other infrastructure that otherwise would not have been constructed. Once the epochal moment had installed the infrastructure, trade networks, debt obligations, interpersonal relations between important traders, and the other initial political economic characteristics needed for an extractive system, entire forests were burned in kilns for their tar, leaving a barren and void land, with most people who had lived in such areas turned landless and forestless. This in turn caused huge numbers of people to die during the “hunger years” of the 1860s (Toivanen & Kröger, Reference Toivanen and Kröger2018). After the epochal moment, the established infrastructure, sunk costs, and the relations and obligations between key players ensured that forests continued to be turned into tar. After the tar boom subsided, the same infrastructure and logic of using forests for their tree mass were followed by other types of forestry extractivisms.

Another epochal moment for Finnish and other forests around the world was the Korean War in the 1950s. This led to a dramatic increase in the price of lumber and other wood products. Finnish forestry decision-makers decided to try to maximize profits during the very few years they knew that the war would last, for example by rapidly deforesting remaining old-growth forests in Southern Finland. These imperatives were a rational management of national wealth, the accumulation of capital from and within the international system, and the rebuilding the Finnish nation after WWII. That war had been the midwife for birthing the modern model of clearcutting. A military logic was adopted toward forests – clearcutting huge areas to get wood for running the wood-gas generated (carbon monoxide)-based cars using a domestic raw material. By using wood-based energy, the Finns were able to lessen their dependency on foreign oil, gas, and coal. This logic of ensuring national security amid the existential threats due to the war with the Soviet Union replaced the prior notions of how to relate to a forest, where clearcutting and deforestation were interpreted as raping the forests and clearcut areas were called raped forests. After WWII, new forest practices were quickly imposed that made it impossible to do anything other than clearcutting; this is a policy that continued into the 2010s and still marks the situation, where over 97 percent of all loggings are clearcuts, although forestry studies indicate that at most 25 percent of loggings should follow that logic (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023).

The perception of a global crisis, in epochal moments, opens a momentary possibility for industries to start to accumulate much more at the cost of forests than would be possible without these critical junctures. Even after the crisis is over, the fate of an area is practically already sealed once the infrastructure that supports deforestation has been established. It is all the interconnections and interests that make sure the forests are clearcut even after the epochal moment. However, these epochal moments are just the tip of the iceberg of the underlying characteristics of the interstate system that drives deforestation.

Interstate Rivalry and a World-System History of Deforestation

National security has become the key pursuit of most modern states, surpassing environmental and even economic aims. The pursuit of this development path by nations in the international system has meant the continued devaluation of forests and forest peoples. While especially realists have emphasized the rivalry omnipresent in the international system, some realists such as Hedley Bull (Reference Bull2012) highlight that there is also an “international society” aspect to this rivalry, where states and other actors can and do meet to make (some) positive decisions. Under this realism, the role of international society is emphasized, especially the role of the so-called great powers, whose existence and relations provide order for the international system, according to Bull (Reference Bull2012). This order is comprised of the rules, norms, expectations, and decision-making procedures that create international regimes (Krasner, Reference Krasner1983).

There is an urgency for this international society, especially the G20 countries – due to their key role – to create norms that do not cause humanity to surpass biosystem limits, which could cause biocapacity to collapse globally. Forests are an essential element in this normative goal. The role of the international society regarding conservation has been studied, especially by some branches of international relations. The literature on global environmental governance (GEG) has studied the role of the international system in governing aspects of the environmental regime, for example, the ozone layer. When the Montreal Protocol was established in 1987 to counter ozone layer depletion (which ultimately succeeded), scientific research was unclear and unfinished on the importance of the ozone layer and the causes of its depletion (Morin & Oberthür, Reference Morin, Oberthür, Morin, Orsini and Trudeau2013). Based on this and other cases – where well-established scientific facts do not lead to better policy outcomes – GEG has found that policies do not naturally flow from scientific knowledge, as politics and knowledge are different, often inimical, fields, and sometimes further scientific literacy even increases conflict (Morin & Oberthür, Reference Morin, Oberthür, Morin, Orsini and Trudeau2013). This seems to be especially true in relation to deforestation and climate change – as there are many potential solutions that are known but not yet executed. Certification schemes have been in the limelight of forest-based studies in international relations, such as those from the FSC (Cashore et al., Reference Cashore, Auld and Newsom2004), and other private politics, like informal corporate rules around logging (Dauvergne, Reference Dauvergne, Levy and Newell2004).

The GEG literature lacks a further analysis on the role of and resistance to economic and political powerhouses, such as corporations and economic sectors. This focus is needed to complement the existing GEG studies on global actors and institutions purporting to be for environmental protection (Newell, Reference Newell2008). The RDPE theory addresses this issue as it addresses the interests that these actors become either a part of or a victim to, which helps to explain how bad global governance can continue despite scientific truths. Governments choose to do these things due to the invisible interest groups that manage to persuade them. This also happens due to the competition between states, especially between ecological imperialist, rival cores with competing imperial interests (see Frame, Reference Frame2022).

Based on my findings thus far – although I concur with Hedley Bull (Reference Bull2012) that the interstate system composed of rivalling states is not in decline even today – I challenge the potential optimism of Bull in that “international society” can so easily find solutions to key issues such as deforestation and the climate crisis. This is because of the interpenetrating nature of capital and capitalism, whereby so many states, and the corporations owned or headquartered under their sovereignty via their pension and mutual funds, stand to lose in the short term though increasing regulations and barriers to trade. A clear example of this is the resistance that has been raised to the attempt by the EU to design an anti-deforestation law by restricting imports from high-deforestation risk regions. Key players in the resistance include both European farmers (wanting cheap commodities, especially feed) and those in exporting countries (such as Brazil and Malaysia) (Bounds et al., Reference Bounds, Hancock and Beattie2024). The EU Deforestation Regulation was passed into law in 2023. It became effective in late 2024, divides countries into three categories based on risk, and places 3, 6, or 9 percent of their exports to the EU in the six commodity categories that are under scrutiny. These measures are intended to compel the producers to show by certification and geographic positioning system (GPS) locations that they are deforestation-free. Even these measures have been heavily criticized by countries like Malaysia and Brazil. The interpenetration of capital suggests that the international society of great powers is less likely to be able to reach an agreement on curbing deforestation than solutions implemented at the regional or national level that are based on active local and national resistance. International regulators can play a role, but they do so under the delimitations of the RDPEs that compose the world as we know it. These global dynamics are rooted in the regionally dominant extractive sectors, which are the building blocks of global markets and production.

The hypothesis that the current structure and rules of the international system drive deforestation gains weight with a look at the most recent major deforestation drives happening in the world. While palm oil and acacia plantations ravaged enormous areas of the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests in the 1990s and 2000s, world powers did little to deter these events (Humphreys, Reference Humphreys2006). Instead, companies like the Finnish Neste made new investments, which were widely supported by both the sending and receiving cities and governments, for example in Singapore and Rotterdam investments were made in biorefineries that made biofuels from palm oil and other commodities (Sherrard, Reference Sherrard2019). Another example of this is when the American-based Cargill grain-trading corporation built a soybean export harbor in Brazil’s Santarém city, at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós Rivers in the mid-2000s: No real action was taken by governments to block the port operations (Kröger, Reference Kröger2024). This port greatly accelerated deforestation in the surrounding Amazon forests to make room for soybean plantations.

In both cases, there were private negotiations between leading international environmental organizations and multinational corporations utilizing the commodities, to avert buying soybean or palm oil from deforested areas through voluntary moratorium deals (Cashore et al., Reference Cashore, Gale, Meidinger and Newsom2006; Dauvergne & Lister, Reference Dauvergne and Lister2011; Garrett et al., Reference Garrett, Levy and Carlson2019; Schleifer, Reference Schleifer2023). However, while these measures did slow expansion to some extent, they also resulted in moving a considerable part of the Amazon soybean frontier to the Cerrado forest, which has had catastrophic impacts on the hydrology, climate, and soils. Thus, even though the frontier was moved, the overall impetus remained. Forests were still razed for the seemingly superior goal of producing commodities for the growing global economy and, importantly, for the needs of so-called rising global powers, especially China. This is to be expected, as it is common that modern global powers, during their ascension, typically rely on excessive and destructive extraction of raw materials (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a).

This kind of extraction that happens on multiple frontiers and at multiple levels is referred to as global extractivism. Extractivism is the taking of resources without care or consideration for giving back, that is, without reciprocal and sustainable relations. Instead, the focus is on maximizing the yields from extraction at a very fast pace considering only short-term needs and goals (Chagnon et al., Reference Chagnon, Durante and Gills2022; Ye et al., Reference Ye, Van Der Ploeg, Schneider and Shanin2020). This causes major devastation ecologically, socially, politically, economically, and especially in terms of existences, which are wiped out en masse, leading to ecocides and even genocidal projects of expansion (Kröger, Reference Kröger2022). These extractivisms have been particularly harmful for forests, which have been used wantonly during the past centuries, and even earlier, during longer-term empire building. Wood products, in the form of lumber, mast wood, blanks, paper and pulp, tar, potash, and charcoal, among others, have been essential building materials for erecting new empires throughout centuries and even millennia (Perlin, Reference Perlin2005). The free flow of these commodities has been an imperative for the international system. Its key players, both the older and rising powers, have wanted to retain these dynamics, to ascertain the possibilities for them to remain at the top or for their power to continue to grow, depending on their current situation. The depletion of these resources, or the ignorance of the environmental conditions on top of which all societies are built, has meant that within the 5,000 years of world-system history, the collapse of civilizations has happened repeatedly, according to Chew (Reference Chew2007). The key impetus for these collapses has been the power driven by what Ekholm and Friedman (Reference Ekholm and Friedman1982) called “capital” imperialisms, running from Sumerians 5,000 years ago to today (Ekholm & Friedman, Reference Ekholm and Friedman1982). Frank and Gills (Reference Frank, Gills, Frank and Gills1994) theorize these expansionist dynamics of the world system are an impetus at the root of the system, which goes beyond the Westphalian order or the 550 years of the capitalist world system. Chew (Reference Chew2007) calls these collapses “recurring Dark Ages,” where deforestation ensued due to prior growth of the world system. This deforestation dynamic causes many other problems, such as erosion, floods, extinctions, and climatic havoc. However, now these changes are more rapid and dangerous than in previous periods due to being closer to global climate tipping points.

Theorizing Deforesting World-Ecologies

There is a strong ontological take on forests in so-called Western civilization history which fails to see forests as places important to sustain. This is perhaps because trees do regrow; however, to reach the ecosystem complexity of old-growth forest is something that does not happen within a human lifetime. I have discussed in detail the role of specific extractivist sectors, highlighting how they are locally deforesting, but globally connected. I will now provide a brief historical analysis of the key features of the world-ecology which sustains deforestations.

The central world-systemic argument of the book, based on what has been and is happening to forests, is that the key characteristic of the current international system is rivalry between nation-states and powerful non- or partially statist actors such as corporations, which are partially linked to certain nation-states. The imperatives of these international dynamics have meant that struggles for international hegemony, dominance, security, and maintaining sovereignty have reigned over other kinds of considerations, such as saving forests.

Deforestation is happening due to the low valuing of forests in the world system – illustrated by this chapter – as forests are considered as material sources for building states, empires, and capital. For example, prior research on Brazilian elites and developmental policies has emphasized that these need to be understood within the Global South semiperipheral positioning of Brazil, where the role of the state has been one of intermediating and opening space for capitalist advances by foreign and national elite capital (Evans, Reference Evans1979). Therefore, those who have been the regional or sectorial elites – in this case situated mostly within agribusiness – have depended on the world-systemic linking of Brazil and the given region during the period in question. As Nugent (Reference Nugent, Nugent and Shore2002: 63) elucidates in his study of Amazonian elites, these elites need to be understood as “episodically shaped by the role of the state in the world system.” This can be said to also apply in the Peruvian and Finnish contexts. One cannot distinguish these processes from the expansion of modern states and thus the interstate system, which has been largely capitalist since the fifteenth century. This expansion has happened on top of forest areas and has simultaneously offered these forests as a commodity-producing playground for the elites, who themselves are made elite precisely by these resource and commodity frontier expansions.

In Peru, the deforesting mining system, with its elites, has its roots in the 1537 opening of silver, mercury, and other colonial mines, which served to feed the Spanish and European-led world system at the time. Mining capitalists and linked politicians still define the bulk of Peru’s natural resource and other politics, but they do this within the world-systemic positioning of Peru – both this longstanding positioning and the particularities of the mining elites – which serves to explain the ill-fated policy decisions that have led in the past decades to rampant gold mining in Madre de Dios province in the Amazon. In this sense, Moore (Reference Moore and Chirif2019) argues that it is wrong policy decisions rather than some kind of evil agency by elites that should be seen a key explanation of Peru’s deforestation. The roads the state built in the 1960s and 1970s to Madre de Dios were also a decision to bring in Andean colonizers, who razed valuable forests, ranched for a while, and then abandoned the area. This colonization policy, alongside the decision to feed the loan-based international commodity market by building the Interoceanic Highway (it should be noted that this decision was made in 1983 but was carried out by Brazil’s Odebrecht-led consortium in 2005–2011) explains the world-systemic linking of these Amazon forests (Moore, Reference Moore and Chirif2019). In Finland, the international demand for wood products, especially paper and pulp in the twentieth century, led to the dominant hegemony of the paper and pulp industry, whose leaders are key political economic elites in terms of having the power to define forest usage. In Brazil, the post-2000 spike in demand from China, and other rapidly growing and established economies, for commodities, especially soybean, corn, beef, pulp, metals, and minerals, is the episodic context that explains – at the broader level – why the Brazilian state has brokered in elites for these sectors, enabling and driving their dominance over regional territories. These vary depending on the region and sector, but there is sectoral unity and a large degree of national-level power for the new soybean elites and the older ranching and land-grabbing elites. In this sense, the elites at the helm of RDPEs are shaped by their interstate positionings and the current system’s drives for a developmentalist agenda, quartile profits, security, and competitive advantages.

Summary

I have argued in this chapter that due to a several thousand-year process of rivalry and building of capital for empires to get or grow power, forests have been depleted, converted, and removed in alignment with the expansion of the world system. This process has expanded in both pace and scale during the past 550 years of capitalist world-ecology. The commodity frontier expansions have been truly dramatic for forests especially since the post-WWII expansion of global extractivisms and the consolidation of RDPEs based on or causing deforestation. What I call epochal moments have been especially detrimental in this larger-scale and world-systemic view on global deforestation because during these ruptures deforestation peaks for several reasons. The epochal moments of war in particular have led to major damage to forests, because during and after war the logic, fear, and rage of rival nation heads has turned from the battlefields to the forests. In addition, pandemics, financial crises, and other unexpected market crisis events in the world system have led to increased deforesting commodity demand and prices and deforestation through multiple channels. We are treading a very dangerous path if the interstate system based on rivalry continues to reign supreme, wherein the key goals of states are to secure supposed national security, development, and warmaking capacity without due caution and care for the planetary limits and climatic-ecological tipping points – in which natural forest play a key role. The global, systemic problem persists, but there are natural and planetary limits to how long this interstate rivalry can continue if we want to maintain the possibilities of life on Earth.

One way to begin to counter the problem, as I have explained in other chapters of this book, is to focus attention on the RDPEs as the root, sectorial, and systemic causes of deforestation. The solutions to curbing their power need to include the local and national levels and regional politics, including resistance and good solution suggestions, through which policies are made. Besides this, forests should gain a more protected status and level of importance in the interstate system. The implementation of new rules to curb the trade of deforestation-originating goods is a good first step in this direction. There would be so many more opportunities to craft new kinds of governance tools and understandings and norms wherein retaining forests is taken seriously in the international, regional, interstate systems. However, this means that the political and lobbying power and reach of deforesting sectors and corporations must be curtailed on all scales, from local to national to international. Unless that political economic power is tackled head on, it is difficult to envision how effective plans for global deforestation countering can be crafted, as politically that becomes practically impossible, due to the compound effects of different regionally powerful extractivists lobbying together for multilateral and plurilateral state institutions to allow them to continue their business as usual. In this case, business as usual means that everyone should have the so-called freedom to buy, sell, and consume whatever commodities or goods that are produced wherever on the planet and by whatever means necessary. To counter this tendency, the flow of commodities in the international system should be regulated and curbed. This would also mean that the international system does not finance new infrastructure and extractive projects to tap into new raw material sources. The curbing of finance, support, and deforesting commodity trade would also start to erode the position and power given to current RDPEs and their key actors. That would be a world-systemic-level challenging of the root causes; that is, structures perpetuating deforestation at the international level. However, that alone would not be sufficient across the board as I have discussed in previous chapters, as there are many local and regional causes of deforestation that need to be dealt with by other means.

Being in proximity to the destruction of old-growth forests has been a heavy experience for me over the past few years. Whether I am in the Amazon or in Finland, there are threats to the forests coming from many different angles, yet life continues. On a beach in the Amazon, I see fire and breathe smoke, yet the other people on the beach swirl around me swimming as if the forest were not on fire on the other side of the shore (see Figure 12.1). When I am in the countryside in Finland, I see so many people silently absorb sadness, anger, loss, and futility as they see another remnant of the shattered and fragmented forest being clearcut, trucked away log by log. The pace is astounding as the world walks toward the flames, drought, floods, storms, and unforeseen havoc that most people do not even want to hear about.

Figure 12.1 Swimmers on the Green Lake of Alter do Chão in the Brazilian Amazon, disregarding the burning of the forest on the other side of the lake. November 2023.

Photo by author.

Figure 12.1Long description

A photograph depicting swimmers on the Green Lake of Alter do Chão in the Brazilian Amazon. In the background, a large plume of dark smoke rises into the sky, indicating a fire beyond the visible forested area. See long description.

To connect with nature in the midst of all of this, I have often gone to forests for walks, but nowadays this gets harder and harder to do. I hope someday in the future I can return and see the forests, which at the moment are clearcut, thriving without the fear of also losing them. I know I am not alone in these feelings, I see a new wave of people, around the world, who are gathering the strength to use their skills to improve the situation in myriad ways. Humans can find ways forwards from here. By working together to protect the other beings in the web of life, one can make the world even a tiny bit more habitable for the humans and other-than-humans here now and for generations to come.

Political Economies of Deforestation in Contemporary Brazil, Peru, and Finland

There are several different lessons that can be learned through the study of Brazil, Peru, and Finland, to be able to make remarks on what causes deforestation.

Global Extractivist Sectors

These studies also offered crucial insights on the characteristics of global, financialized extractivist sectors – ranching, mining, forestry – and how they are related to specific contextual deforestations. This is crucial for understanding the dynamics between driving and enabling factors, which can aid in identifying these dynamics in other contexts. This allows one to see how ranching–land speculation, illegal and dispersed gold mining, and tree-based bioeconomy as extractive systems – each with their own logics and economies – can influence deforestation and the political dynamics through which this deforestation happens.

My political ethnographic studies also highlighted regional variations, such as the case of Acre, Brazil, where a supposedly benign and even green PT government not only witnessed but promulgated an increase in deforestation even inside conservation areas, based on the principles of neodevelopmentalism. Nationally, the PT government overruled court orders to discontinue building the destructive Belo Monte Dam, which resulted in opening large parts of the Amazon to further deforestation, downgrading the effectiveness of state’s regulatory and inspection functions. The dam was built largely due to corrupt relationships between construction companies and the government, without real benefits for electricity generation or development. Research has shown that environmental monitoring and law enforcement, which reduce deforestation, are not inimical to local economic development, but stricter monitoring improves economic performance and conditions (Merkus, Reference Merkus2024). Yet, the PT allocated even more public money on expanding deforesting extractivisms in different parts of Brazil, which bolstered the power of extractivist sectors and corporations. These decisions paved the way for the rise of Bolsonaro and his allies. In Acre, a literal cutting away of the forests that had sustained socioenvironmentalist movements before their forest-based existence began to be eroded by the neodevelopmentalist agendas of so-called progressive governments, happened. This yielded an understanding that extractive capitalisms are systems, with their accompanying impacts and territorial reaches.

In all the studied cases there were expressions of extractivist capitalist expansions of different types and degrees, and resistance and other types of responses among the local populations, including internal divisions, conflicts, and enabling participation in the extractivist pressures. Yet I have only included some examples from my rich ethnographic material, which is comprised of hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews. In each case, the lesson learned at the regional and sectorial levels were reflected in the global and international systems; thus, uniting the analyses.

These findings underline the hypothesis that the Peruvian Amazon has an illegal gold-mining RDPE, while in Brazil there are several different deforesting RDPEs, including gold mining, ranching-grabbing, and soybean/corn monocultures in the Amazon. In other parts of Brazil, deforestation is driven by other sectors, which are also RDPEs in their respective regions. A clear example is the eucalyptus monoculture plantations for pulp production that are owned and operated by a few corporations in the Três Lagoas region of Mato Grosso do Sul state, making this Cerrado biome region the largest pulp-producing region. In the Atlantic Rainforest biome, which is in the extreme southern part of the state of Bahia and in the Espírito Santo state, there are also pulping RDPEs that cause deforestation. This said, not all of Brazil – or the other countries discussed herein – are completely covered by deforesting or other kinds of RDPEs.

Changes may be forthcoming as localities start to face the new realities of excessive deforestation. This is especially apparent in those nations whose existence, stability, and strength rely on continued raw material production, such as Brazil with its agroextractivist enclaves for plantations reliant on rainfall and stable climatic conditions. While most of these changes may come too late, due to the dynamics of tipping points, forests may start to become more important. Such a change in the role given to forests would entail altering a very old and established set of dynamics through which forests are treated as nonissues within the current international political economy. The interstate system, with its competition for power and the resulting wars, has been the ultimate driver that explains why forests have been so wantonly destroyed for thousands of years and especially during the past 550 years. This type of analysis challenges prior notions on nation-state centrality, offering regionally dominant and globally tied extractivist sectors as the key units of explanation.

In early November 2019, I traveled to Brazil for another field research trip to study the causes of deforestation in the Amazon. Landing in Rio de Janeiro felt wonderful. Rio was my former hometown where I lived for years and immersed myself in the Brazilian culture and lifestyle. The city surprised me again with its beauty and life: from the lovely beaches and mountains with lush green plant life everywhere, to meeting again old friends and colleagues and having deep and important conservations. Clouds covered the many hills at dusk as I wandered on the shoreline of Flamengo with two friends, looking at the cloud-covered top of the Sugar Loaf and wondering with them what the fate of the world will be.

From Rio’s rather chilly weather I traveled next to the hot furnace of Brasília, the capital city. When I flew into the city, for a long time I could see from the plane’s window soybean fields that had ravaged forest areas: red and yellow fields with red roads that ran between circle-shaped plantations. There were numerous ravines whose edges had been licked bare of trees, sometimes with just a thin line of forest running along the shore of the river. These areas had also been burned, as the Bolsonaro supporters have set fires here as in other places across the country. My colleague living in Brasília came to pick me up and pondered that maybe the fires lit by Bolsonaro supporters – that had grown scandalously large – had caused the delay of rains. I have no proper words to describe how hot it felt when I stepped into the Brasília air. It felt like some god, spirit, or spirits were taking revenge on the capital for setting the fires and the increases in activist murders and rural violence that had skyrocketed in an unforeseen way in 2019. The general atmosphere was one of lawlessness, reflecting the speeches of Bolsonaro urging the populace to deforest. The air and energy were heavy, thirsty. I stayed overnight in the middle of the downtown, between skyscrapers, with concrete walls as my scenery. The atmosphere was negative, completely different from a year ago, when Bolsonaro was not yet in power. Something bad seemed to hang in the air and all I wanted was to get away from downtown. I craved to be in a smaller village – closer to nature and greenery. In this post-apocalyptic, post-nature environment there was only glass, cement, and steel, as if highlighting the direction in which we were headed.

I went to Brazil’s Congress house to do interviews with politicians and was greeted after the scanners by men who looked like soldiers, wearing military pants, and distributing tracts of God to everyone passing by. My colleague explained to me that these evangelists, including politicians who were part of the phenomenon, used Christianity as a smokescreen for unscrupulous businesses and to increase power, with the aim being to forbid critical thinking and collect money for the leaders of these new churches. Their speeches on television echoed and felt full of hate, lies and slander, fearmongering, and revenge, misleading the people and trying to root out independent thinking and education. This was a big, fast-moving cultural change and it was not only taking place in Brazil. The whole experience of arriving in this city of money and devastation, the visit to Congress, and the Bible, bullet, and bull-touting evangelists’ presence set the mood for the forthcoming trip from Cuiaba to Santarém by car.

When leaving Brasília, I had gotten food poisoning and stayed in bed for two days with a high fever; however, after fasting I was feeling better – calmer. Perhaps the food poisoning was a way of expelling all the bad energy that had collected in the city. A storm wind was rising, even though the rains were also late here and coming more feebly. The drought was even worse down south in Pantanal, with massive fires. Still, farmers were waiting for the situation to somehow normalize – as if climate change did not exist and their nature-ravaging actions would not have any impacts. The wind buffeted the trees so that they were bending and sighing, the air was filled with all sorts of loose debris, the sky was cloudy and pink, and there was a rainbow in the distance although there had not been rain. It was 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Amid this scene, I observed a line of cars, studded with the flags of Brazil, which drove past honking, playing Brazil’s national anthem loudly. Some cars were also playing a parody of “YMCA” by The Village People, whose lyrics mocked the Supreme Court and the left. The message of this car cavalcade made up of rich soybean farmers was that the Supreme Court judges should be removed and the court dismantled. After the long line had passed, night was setting in Cuiaba, but despite the strong winds, no rain came. It had been like that for weeks I heard and heavy rain should have already come. Outside, it constantly looked as if it would rain, but then it did not rain, at most just a little sprinkling.

I pondered if this was what the beginning of the end looks like. The areas north and south of here had been poisoned by large amounts of agrotoxics, which were found even in mothers’ milk. The water was depleted, as springs and the beginnings of rivers had been destroyed. Toward the south the destruction was even worse, as before they could get rain it needed to rain here. Yet, a full 24 hours a day television channels were screening videos and commercials on soybean cultivation and ranching, an endless message of continued growth. Canal de Boi, the Channel of Bull, was showing a live auction of bulls, advertising Ruminar, a powder to make cattle grow better. I thought that there is not much space for the Amazon or other forests and life-worlds within that space.

On our way north to visit soybean farmers in Nova Mutum, we drove past endless soybean fields (see Figure EP.1). The lines of soybean trucks we passed on the highway were like trains, carrying away the Amazon and Cerrado to be fed to animals to support meat production in distant places. The landscape was soybean plantations, huge silo complexes, large agribusiness storage facilities, sales points for Bayer agrotoxics, large machinery shops – one after another in seemingly endless succession. The whole BR-163 was filled with this monotonous, repeatitive landscape for hundreds of kilometers in northern Mato Grosso. Like carbon copies, there were corn ethanol plants, soybean silos, tractor sales points on roadsides. It seemed almost as if they were reproducing themselves; as if it was an artificial intelligence that had become blind to its own productivity. I thought that this system is so powerful that it is the real reason behind deforestation and will drag down all that tries to stand against it: As long as there is growth in the demand of feed for meat production genetically modified soy and poisons will travel from these fields of death to a useless protein overload.

Figure EP.1 A soybean farmholder eyeing his crop at dusk in the endless fields that used to have tall forests. Nova Mutum, Mato Grosso. November 2019.

Photo by author.

In Sinop, the town with the most sawmills in Brazil, over 400 running at any given time, we visited huge piles of logs. Dust hung in the air at sawmills, as fresh tropical wood was cut into blanks. Large machines moved loads back and forth. We talked for a long time to the municipal environmental director, who told how heartbreaking it was to see the illegal logging of large trees, but also that further away in the Amazon there was still a tree that took 20 people holding hands to fully circle. As I listened, the sun scorched the ground and sweat pearled on my forehead. In the muddy yard of the sawmill the owner told me his story, of how he had arrived at a forest and it was just gone, every last tree. Shortly after this encounter, we visited a protected city forest, which was our first contact with an Amazon forest on this trip. In contrast to the sunblasted sawmill yard, here the air was cooler – the surroundings were green, there were still thick, old trees, and here the forest spirit was still alive.

After several visits to gold-mining areas and burning forests, we also visited an Indigenous village of the Munduruku by the Tapajós River. We drove on the Transamazônica until Bubure port and from there took a boat driven by a young Munduruku man. We stopped after some rapids and gorgeous tall trees on the riversides to the place where the Munduruku had recently marked the borders of their territory by signs and cutting a patrolling route. To walk the length of the route through the forest took three days (see Figure EP.2). The sign showed a Munduruku holding a human head, with the text in Munduruku and Portuguese saying, “Mother Earth we have respect [for],” which sent a clear message to trespassers. Our Munduruku guide was standing attentively and silently, being present, in the woods. It was a distinct sight of another time-space, after the business of the city of Itaituba and gold-diggers’ hastiness. He pointed to a large bird in the canopy that I had not seen before. We continued the boat ride. A heavy rain and thunderstorm followed us, leaving us completely soaked. The skipper was excellent; I do not know how he managed with the boat, as I could not see much at all. The rain was pouring so hard that it felt like being in a hailstorm. This was a dramatic arrival to the Sawré Muybu village, which rose up on a steep hill among vegetation. I was happy, the rain felt purifying, and it was energizing to walk up the hill carrying our gear amid the thunder strikes and heavy rain.

Figure EP.2 A Munduruku man looking at a bird on a tree at the perimeter they created around their territory in Sawré Muybu, Pará, Brazil. November 2019.

Photo by author.

We stayed for two nights in hammocks in the village. I walked into the forest alone at the end of each day. It was magical, hearing monkeys and feeling the presence of something even bigger than the big trees next to the swidden cultivation areas. The sunset was beautiful and the villagers were playing football, with kids running and playing on the field. Earlier we had swum in the Igarapé, a serene, tranquil stream down in a gorge in the middle of the trees. The Cacique and other villagers gave beautiful interviews on what the Amazon and its forests mean to them, revealing how different their way of relating with and being in the world is in comparison to most people. The Cacique explained that they are the trees, the animals, and the food because everything needs everything else to continue to exist. Visiting this home of the original people of the Amazon was a striking contrast to the scenes of colonization on all the roadsides on the way here. Luckily, there are still many places in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world where reciprocal, respectful ways of living in the web of life are upheld and perpetuated, offering a good life not only for those safeguarding these lifeways by their daily acts, but to all around the planet enjoying of the benefits of forests near and far.