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communities do it best

managing rainforests and woodlands sustainably

hildebrando vélez galeano, foe columbia

Whenever we talk about sustainable community management of woodlands and rainforests (officially termed SCMWR) we invoke the name of a great human being to whom we owe so much: Amazon rubber tapper and grassroots leader Chico Méndez. Murdered in 1988 at the hands of ranchers, his name lives on in the fight to preserve the harmony between rainforests and forest peoples.

true sustainability
We want to distance ourselves somewhat from the official message about sustainability, which merely reshapes the exploitation of nature and humanity into an eco-capitalist mould. True sustainability is about achieving harmony between various cultures and ecosystems. We say “community management” to emphasize that we mean more than appropriate technology. We are talking about new social relationships based on environmental and social justice.

eroded sovereignty
Despite continuous talk of “the environmental crisis” and “the measures needed to avoid catastrophe,” new regulatory frameworks work mainly to simplify life for forestry and logging corporations. Meanwhile, in every nation around the world, the state is reducing its social functions as its control is eroded. In this vacuum of state power, the appropriateness of forest projects and compensation for accompanying risks and damage receive less and less consideration. As citizens and states lose control over the cycle of forestry products, we also lose sovereignty over our territories, genetic heritage, diverse cultures and traditional knowledge.

What's more, this general uncertainty is worsened by decisions of the World Bank, WTO, UN Council on Sustainable Development, and the treaties on climate change, desertification and biodiversity. It's obvious that the economic priorities that totally dominate political and social policymaking are behind these worsening conditions.

it's about life, not profits
SCMWR is a proposal to build new economic relations that include nature and human effort. This challenge rises from the recognition that the world economy has lost its ethical foundation. It is dominated by a reductionistic scientific vision and guided by TNCs, the financial sector, a wealthy elite, and the multilateral agencies that serve them. Greed governs the economy. What should be its main goal – the well being of society and environmental preservation – has been exchanged for the private accumulation of wealth.

Despite claims to be based in science, this global economy is poor in its econometric calculations. It doesn't factor in the cost of forest growth and restoration. It doesn't tabulate wages for traditional cultures for their centuries of forest stewardship. It doesn't consider the happiness quotient of children when they climb trees and swing on lianas. This economy only calculates in coins: it's a metallic science, cold and rigid.

creditors, debtors reversed
The huge investments made by forestry companies are said to generate employment when, in reality, it is they that require manpower to reproduce their profits. These forestry companies destroy forms of livelihood based on the forests. The global economy invites us to exploit mangroves areas, where local communities have made good use of the ocean's ebb and flow for centuries. This system reduces the relationships between woodland and rainforest communities to market or monetary relations, and invites us to believe in carbon sinks and other market fantasies. In this economy, the providers of biomass, of rainforests and of geological materials are considered to have nothing, or are the debtors. The creditors are the banks which have gradually appropriated everything. This is simply outrageous!!

This global economy confuses society's real needs with the desire to accumulate wealth and assume the ostentatious lifestyles of northern societies. This is not merely a problem of production but of an appetite for excess, while the basic needs of the majority remain unfulfilled. Some people believe this problem will be solved by consuming “certified” products. But we believe that consuming less is what matters, so those unable to consume receive a chance to acquire essentials.

the right transformations needed
Businessmen disguised as ecologists want to transform centuries-old productive ties between peoples and communities into capital-producing ventures. Traditional wisdom, fishing, the gathering of fruits, agriculture and handicrafts are being torn from their local cultural contexts and introduced into world markets. It's one thing to go to the village market where everybody sells on equal terms, and quite another to go to the capitalist market where you just get swallowed up.

The global economy talks about development policies, but people really want to talk about strategies for sustainable societies and communities. The global economy creates mechanisms for accumulating capital and for concentrating property, when what people really want is equal access to ecosystems and a fair and equitable distribution of economic surpluses.

avoiding the traps
I also think – and this may sound like heresy – that the whole biodiversity issue is beginning to sound more like economics than biology. As science begins to penetrate the gene structure, the equatorial rainforests enter into the valuation process. Science serves the economy, and both of them serve capital. Today, rainforest communities are evicted and their territories appropriated along with their traditional knowledge, which is given a market value. All of this lies at the heart of the new environmental conflicts; this also explains the war the US and its allies are waging in the Andean region.

Community management of rainforests cannot be considered a true alternative if it fails to question the foundations of the prevailing economic model. As in the old proverb “let's change everything without changing a thing”, some people change the official discourse, but their aim is still profit. Greenwash cannot be allowed to take over new initiatives.

The sustainable economic relations advocated so strongly by multilateral institutions are not sufficient to create sustainable societies. We need an economy that ensures the welfare all of society, that guarantees not only monetary income, but also food sovereignty and equality, ecological conservation and cultural sovereignty. Societies need to regain control of political and social structures in order to ensure control over the profound transformations required.

ethics needed, not more laws
This is also true of community management of rainforests. Building sustainable societies is not just a matter of clean technologies, the use of non-timber forest products, or energy efficient transportation. What is required is a simultaneous transformation of all the different spheres within which humanity operates. There is direct link between rainforest sustainability and the construction of moral and ethical values. In our countries we have plenty of laws. What are missing are ethical values.

Beware, community participation in forest management should not conjugate the verb “to participate” in the usual way: “I participate, you participate, we participate, and they decide”. Unfortunately, participation is usually restricted to the local stage of the economic cycle where a community's production has the lowest value, where people are deemed necessary or redundant at the whim of multinationals. This is typical of the forestry or agro-forestry productive cycle; communities may be led to believe they are participating but the profits flow into the same old coffers.

The transformation of the economic, social, political and cultural spheres can include new productive and administrative technologies. It can include codes of conduct and social responsibility for corporations. But it must also go beyond this.

wef: carnival of hope
Chico Méndez was once told by a rancher that "You, against us, is like a mosquito against an elephant." The rancher who said this has been long forgotten, but at the World Social Forum, marching through the streets of Porto Alegre, we threw Chico's name up into the air like brightly coloured streamers of hope. Forest communities and we, the peoples reduced to poverty, must take our future in our hands. We must do this not to ensure a place for ourselves in the global market, but to build alternatives with which to confront the crisis of western civilization.