The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 147

Box 10.4 (continued)

Motivated by concerns over loss of biodiversity from unregulated timber
extraction and gold mining, in 1993 Colombia passed Law 70, which granted
land rights to Afro-Colombian communities living in the tropical rainforests
of the Pacifi c coast lowlands. With this law, some fi ve million hectares of
lands were to be passed into communal land ownership, an acknowledgement
of the communities' role in preserving this fragile ecosystem for hundreds of
years. Social activism in these communities was decisive to this landmark
achievement.
Today, however, this conservationist rationale has been all but abandoned.
As Oslender ( 2008 ) shows in his research, powerful oil palm and gold mining
multi-national corporations are colluding with illegal armed groups to dis-
place local residents from their lands in order to gain access to the rich
resource base. Targeted killings of activists and massacres of entire communi-
ties have led hundreds of thousands of campesinos to fl ee their lands since the
mid-1990s.
Palm oil production has been aided by national and international organiza-
tions, such as the United Nations, who credit Colombia's oil palm industry for
playing an important role in climate change mitigation. Its principal prod-
uct—palm oil—is converted into biodiesel, considered an important resource
for reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. As Oslender's work
shows, palm oil companies mobilize environmental discourses to expand oil
palm cultivation, while Afro-Colombian peasant farmers and fi sherfolk (who
are considered “guardians” of the region's rich biodiversity) continue to be
displaced by the thousands. In the battle of these competing environmental
interests, community resilience and conservation continue to be jeopardized
(Oslender 2008 ).

As we have briefl y described, the Anthropocene is characterized by unequal
processes of global connection and governance (economic, political, social, and
technological), as well as patterns of uneven development. Moreover, conceptual
apparatus, such as the global assemblage, provides a multi-scalar approach to exam-
ining these new forms of socio-ecological governance in ways that our traditional
attention to the local (community or ecosystem) only partially reveals.

10.4 Repoliticizing the Anthropocene

While national governments and supra-national organizations, such as the United
Nations, have shown an increasing interest in sustainability and socio-ecological
resiliency, grassroots groups have tended to be the most vocal proponents of pro-
tecting the environment and promoting local autonomy in the process. What is very