The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 148

clear: these social movements emerge out of global networks of activists and offer
important insights into alternative forms of socio-ecological governance in the
Anthropocene. An example from Ogden's research site in Tierra del Fuego, Chile,
serves to illustrate the ways in which social movements can contest global assem-
blages to foster environmental conservation. In 1993, the Trillium Corporation, out
of Bellingham, Washington, purchased 400,000 ha of sub-Antarctic rain forest at
the southern end of Isla Grande, the largest island in the archipelago. Trillium's Rio
Condor project, as they named the operation, was considered a model of sustainable
forestry and corporate responsibility (Ginn 2005 ). Though the company had all the
necessary legal permits and funding to move forward on Rio Condor , Chilean envi-
ronmental activists were able to use the media to cast considerable doubt about the
true environmental impacts of the project and, ultimately, use the Chilean courts to
slow the project's implementation and drain the project's fi nancial resources
(Klepeis and Laris 2006 ). These environmental activists, as Ogden's fi eldwork
reveals, organized against the Rio Condor project by collaborating with anti-
Trillium activists in Bellingham, Washington. This international alliance was effec-
tive in defending the forests of Tierra del Fuego, in part, because supporters of Rio
Condor were less effective in engaging relevant communities and organizations.
Despite the sound science published in extensive reports that were delivered to the
regional government and published in peer-reviewed journals (Arroyo et al. 1996 ),
project supporters did not suffi ciently involve the regional government and
community in the design or decision-making process (Rozzi et al. 2006 ). 4 Ultimately,
Rio Condor went bankrupt and, in the process of debt liquidation, the Goldman,
Sachs, & Co. investment fi rm acquired the forests and transferred them to the
New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society for protection.
In another example, Colin McFarlane describes the global reach of the “Slum/
Shack Dwellers International” (SDI), an urban housing rights organization based in
Mumbai, India ( 2009 , p. 563). SDI, unlike a traditional development organization,
does not have a centralized, hierarchical structure. Instead, as McFarlane demon-
strates, SDI-modeled housing rights organizations have emerged in 20 different
countries, from Cape Town to Phnom Penh, through global networks of social activ-
ists. While modeled on SDI's activities in Mumbai, which entail demonstrating
home building in the city's informal settlements, each node of the SDI global net-
work is highly localized in terms of aesthetics, knowledge, materials, and the
organizational infrastructure of the groups.
Transnational activist networks of this kind are increasingly important in the
struggle to protect local environments from unsustainable extraction and exploita-
tion practices—for example, in the case of gold mining and agro-industrial mono-
culture in Colombia's tropical rainforests, as shown by Arturo Escobar ( 2008 ) and
Ulrich Oslender ( 2008 ). Some of these struggles have led to remarkable achieve-
ments and a signifi cant rethinking of humankind's relationship with nature. In 2008,
4 The outcome of this large-scale project involving the Chilean National Academy of Science and
nearly 100 researchers who attempted to establish sustainable forestry and biological reserves in
Tierra del Fuego was unexpected, and shows the limitations of purely technical scientifi c
approaches in conservation.