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contributing to the escalating demands that are
being placed on the world's forests to supply
timber to the market place.
The second set of environmental concerns
relates both to where big box retailers are sourcing
their timber and the conditions under which
it is being produced. In their reflections on con-
temporary timber sourcing strategies, Dauvergne
and Lister (2011: 49) observe that:
Find out more about the work of the
Environmental Investigation Agency at its
forest loss site:
were sourced in the Brazilian Amazon. It is,
however, encouraging to note that following media
coverage of such controversial sourcing practices
that many big retailers are trying to take greater
responsibility for precisely where their wood is
coming from. In the case of IKEA, for example, the
company now has an environmental programme
that, among others things, commits it to sourcing
its timber from sustainable sources. In order to
support such corporate greening activities, there
are now official forest certification processes. These
initiatives are often led by environmental NGOs
such as the Forest Stewardship Council, and
provide an official labelling system for timber
products that have been produced in socially and
environmentally just ways (see Eden and Bear,
2010).
Manufacturers and timber producers find
creative - and sometimes illegal - ways to
lower prices for big buyers . . . this has meant
lowering employee wages and health-and-
safety measures, purchasing more illegal
timber, and adopting destructive forest
practices.
In a report on the timber sourcing strategies of
Walmart in China and Russia, the Environmental
Investigation Agency (EIA, 2007) noted a lack of
concern within the corporation with precisely
where the wood that went in their products was
coming from. To use one specific example, the
Environmental Investigation Agency noted how
the baby cribs that Walmart sold were made from
wood that was sourced in areas of Russia that had
very high rates of illegal logging, which is often
carried out during the tiger breeding season.
On this basis, the Environmental Investigation
Agency concluded that it was likely that Walmart
products contained illegally sourced timber
whose harvesting was having a detrimental effect
on forest ecosystems and associated levels of
biodiversity. While Walmart may itself be oblivious
to the presence of illegal timber within its products,
it is clear that its economic practices and associ-
ated global supply chains create the incentives
and opportunities that lead to the exploitation of
protected woodlands.
Of course, Walmart is not alone in its con-
nections to illegal sources of timber. Carrefour has
been criticized for selling wood furniture from
protected forests in Vietnam and Malaysia, while
Home Depot has sold mahogany products that
5.6 CONCLUSIONS
In his book
In Amazonia
the anthropologist Hugh
Raffles (2002) describes nineteenth-century
attempts to cut artificial canals that would extend
the Amazonia waterway and enable a renewed
wave of settlement and exploitation in Amazonia.
Raffles describes the ultimately lost battle of these
early canal engineers and their attempts to tame
the vastness of Amazonian nature. In Raffles's
account we find humans confronting nature on
an epic scale. This is a form of nature that could
easily swallow up and reoccupy ground works
that humans had spent years constructing. I men-
tion Raffles's account of Amazonia here because
it reminds us of the enduring capacity of forests to
push back against the best efforts of humankind.
The point is that within our accounts of the
