This month we are delighted to be joined by Prof. Bruno Ramamonjisoa from the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. Bruno is the Director of the PhD School on Natural Resources Management and Development and coordinator of the Applied Research Laboratory at the School of Agronomy. Bruno is one of our key collaborators in Madagascar and an expert on sustainable management of natural resources. In this interesting and wide-ranging conversation, Bruno gave us insight into some of the issues on the ground facing tree planting initiatives.

Interested to learn more about Bruno’s research? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruno-Ramamonjisoa

Interested to learn more about the TreesForDev project? www.treesfordev.fi 

This month we are happy to be joined by Markus Kröger and Peter Dewees. Markus is a professor of Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki and one of the co-PIs of the TreesForDev Project. Peter is retired from a 30 plus year career with the World Bank. During his time with the World Bank Peter worked on many different projects, with a focus on why rural people cultivate and plant trees, wood fuel use, and the management of the Miombo woodlands. While his focus was on Eastern Africa, he also has done work in Eastern Europe and Asia. He shares with us his insights into the role of rural peoples’ agency in tree planting and how historical factors have influenced the land use practices. Top-down processes are not always the best path to get trees into the rural landscape; if a farmer needs a tree, they will figure out how to grow it. He shares with us some of the innovations that have been brought to the field that have been successful. We also discuss the question of ecological restoration and whether it is possible through tree planting schemes. We talk about some of the mismatches between the goals of funding agencies and the on-the-ground realities of the people living in place. And while he worked at the Bank for a long time, the views he expressed in this podcast are his own, and should not be ascribed to the World Bank.

Want to learn more about Peter’s work? https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-HD6w24AAAAJ&hl=en

Want to learn more about Markus’ research? https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/markus-kr%C3%B6ger

Want to revisit the TreesForDev episodes about carbon?

Steffen Böhm https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/treesfordev-maria-ehrnstr%C3%B6m-fuentes-and-steffen-boehm/id1499621252?i=1000666744435

Forrest Fleischman https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/treesfordev-maria-ehrnstr%C3%B6m-fuentes-and-forrest/id1499621252?i=1000663758730

Want to learn more about the TreesForDev Project? www.treesfordev.fi

This month we are honored to be joined by Jojo Mehta from Stop Ecocide International, which is an international advocacy organization with the goal of making ecocide a crime. Jojo gives us insight into the continuous thread throughout her life that led her to this work. Her “outrage” moment was when she learned about fracking. Her work in the anti-fracking community introduced her to the late Polly Higgins, with whom she co-founded Stop Ecocide International. Jojo gives us insight into what kind of gross environmental harms which fall under the umbrella of ecocide. The Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide describes it as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts". This definition focuses on the potential results of the activity in question which creates a kind of reality check. It is not exactly what you do but how you do it, how much you do it, and where you do. It is any instance where the net results of what ones does results in gross damage to the environment. This would force this companies to look at their activities on the ground to assess their activities and whether they are at risk of committing ecocide through their activities. This conversation goes deep and takes us to so many different angles of criminalizing environmental destruction. 

Want to learn more about Jojo? https://www.stopecocide.earth/jojo-mehta-profile

Want to learn more about Stop Ecocide International and the work they are undertaking? https://www.stopecocide.earth/

This month we are delighted to be joined by Mario Blaser. Mario is a cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Geography and Archaeology at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Mario has engaged in ethnographic work with communities in many different parts of the world, including in Paraguay and Canada. His fascination with how people lived in other places is rooted in his early experiences living in a small town in Southern Argentina and interacting with visitors passing through. Mario gives us insight into what ethnography is in practice and how it extends beyond just conducting interviews in place. Mario introduces us to the idea of “deep hanging out” and shares how this approach helps the researcher to create a more nuanced and subtle understanding of relations in place. Mario uses this base to unpack for us his insights into the pluriversal world and ways of worlding or how the world is made through practices. In short, the world is not something that is already there, but it produced and reproduced through human and non-human relations in place. This just scratches the surface of this rich conversation. His latest book is For Emplacement: Political Ontology in Two Acts , and its Spanish language twin (is not exactly the same but shares the same “genetic make up”) Incomún: Un ensayo de ontología política para el fin del mundo (único), which is available for free download.  

Want to learn more about the duck-rabbit illusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%E2%80%93duck_illusion 

Want to learn more about Mario’s work? https://www.mun.ca/archaeology/people/faculty/mario-blaser/

In this episode we are joined by Marketta Vuola and Matthieu Pierre. Marketta is a project researcher from the TreesForDev project leading the work package on Madagascar. Matthieu Pierre is starting his PhD at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, focusing on protected areas and restoration in Madagascar. In this conversation we talk about the general context of Madagascar, including its high biodiversity, and the role that conservation and ecological restoration play in Madagascar. Marketta and Mattieu have been in collaboration for several years, even predating the start of the TreesForDev project. 

We talk about the two areas where fieldwork is being undertaken in the TreesForDev project, Mahajanga and Andapa. Mahajanga is on the West Coast while Andapa is in the northern part of the country. At the time of recording, Matthieu had just returned from doing fieldwork and gives us some of his impressions from these on the ground experiences. 

This month we are delighted to be joined by Andrea Brock, who is a political ecologist at University of Sussex. Andrea works with forest defenders and environmental movements looking at the responses from state and corporate actors to ecological dissent. Andrea shares with us the trajectory of her research career which was influenced by being brought up in the German Rhineland in proximity to the world’s largest open-cast lignite mine. She shares with us her insights into the actions of the mining company and the greenwashing acrobatics that are put in place to distract from the ecological destruction that is taking place as a result of these mining projects. She gives insight into the repression that had been levied against land defenders in the ancient Hambach Forest which has been under threat from mine operator RWE. In addition, the relationships between different types policing and ecocide are explored and how this influences the domination of non-human and human species. 

Her research is based in the European context and examines how the logics of repression play out and ecological defenders are criminalized in Europe. 

Want to learn more about Andrea Brock’s work? https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p322495-andrea-brock 

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Brock, A., & Dunlap, A. (2018). Normalising corporate counterinsurgency: Engineering consent, managing resistance and greening destruction around the Hambach coal mine and beyond. Political geography, 62, 33-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.018. 

Dunlap, A., & Brock, A. (Eds.). (2022). Enforcing ecocide: Power, policing & planetary militarization. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99646-8 

In this episode we are joined by Professor Steffen Böhm from University of Exeter School of Business and project PI and Associate Professor Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes from Hanken School of Economics. In this conversation we explore carbon markets and how they work (or do not work) and what their connection is to so-called green development. We talk about compliance markets and voluntary markets. In the voluntary carbon markets, anyone can develop a project that plants trees in exchange for carbon credits. There are mechanisms and logics that are not well understood by the general populace that allow highly polluting companies to make themselves look carbon neutral or green through their participation in carbon offsetting. This myopic focus on carbon has developed into a more or less fetishist relationship with carbon and overly simplified measurements that obfuscate the wider social environmental impacts of companies. 

Interested to learn more about Steffen’s work? https://business-school.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=Steffen_Boehm 

Interested to learn more about the TreesForDev Project? www.treesfordev.fi 

Resources mentioned in the episode: 

Böhm, S., Misoczky, M. C., & Moog, S. (2012). Greening capitalism? A Marxist critique of carbon markets. Organization Studies, 33(11), 1617-1638. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840612463326

Ehrnström-Fuentes, M., & Kröger, M. (2018). Birthing extractivism: The role of the state in forestry politics and development in Uruguay. Journal of Rural Studies, 57, 197-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.022 

Ramirez, J., & Böhm, S. (2021). Transactional colonialism in wind energy investments: Energy injustices against vulnerable people in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Energy Research & Social Science, 78, 102135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102135 

In this episode we are joined by Forrest Fleischman from the University of Minnesota and the project principal investigator, Maria Ehrnstöm-Fuentes from Hanken School of Economics. 

Forrest gives us insight into the work he has done in the Indian context in relation to tree planting and the long-term outcomes of tree planting schemes. India has had a long history of tree planting programs, but are they always successful? In the western Himalaya, where Forrest is working about half the planting takes place in areas where trees are already growing and about half takes place in areas where trees are not currently growing and most probably will not successfully grow due to environmental or land use reasons. There is sometimes a disconnect between what the government programs want to accomplish (or what looks good on paper) and the experience on the ground of the best land use—both geographically and for the community living in place. One key in indicator of success is the inclusion of the community and getting their buy-in and participation in the tree planting program. However, more research is needed to figure out how to generate that local participation and where it roots from. 

Forrest gives us insight into the mythology of the modern concept that trees everywhere are a good thing. As more people are divorced from earning their living from the land this concept become more and more common. However, this lionization of the forest landscapes devalues the natural and vital landscapes that naturally do not have trees or have only scattered trees. These landscapes are currently being destroyed in support of tree planting to match this prominent environmental narrative. 

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Veldman, J.W. et al., Tyranny of trees in grassy biomes. Science 347,484-485(2015). DOI:10.1126/science.347.6221.484-c

Bai, Y., & Cotrufo, M. F. (2022). Grassland soil carbon sequestration: Current understanding, challenges, and solutions. Science, 377(6606), 603-608.

Forget Tree Planting, Start Tree Growing a Q & A with Lalisa Duguma https://forestsnews.cifor.org/61174/forget-tree-planting-start-tree-growing?fnl=en 

This month we are delighted to welcome Maija Lassila back to the EXALT podcast for our second conversation. Maija is post-doctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and recently received her doctorate from Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki. Maija takes to the North and gives us an overview of the work she did during her doctorate. We talk about reindeer herding and the impacts of resource extractivism (and the threat of future resource extractivism) on reindeer herding in Sápmi and Finnish Lapland. Maija “examines the contestations arising from the early stages of mining expansion in Utsjoki and Sodankylä.” Maija looks at the contestations the local community has to mining projects and traces out how this plays out in practice. Join us for this thought-provoking and wide-ranging conversation that gives deep insight into this world. Maija also reminds us how important it is to engage with post-extractivist alternatives as a way to reduce our dependence on the consumption. 

In this month’s episode we are delighted to be joined by Brazilian agroecologist, Karen Nobre Krull, who has worked on projects in federal environmental and research institutions in Brazil, such as EMBRAPA and ICMBio, and in the last year with the NGO Imaflora. Her work focuses on developing strategies and implementing actions with rural communities for the agroecological transition of productive systems, regenerative agriculture, and rural development, incorporating environmental, social, and economic aspects. Over the past four years, her work has been concentrated in the Brazilian Amazon, particularly in the state of Pará. 

In this conversation Karen gives us insight into how she first became interested in the topic of family farming and how it supports the spread of agroecological practices. Agroecological farming in Brazil stands as an alternative to the industrial agricultural practices associated with the dominant food system. Creating space for these small farmers is increasingly important in the face of the agroextractivist spread of monoculture agriculture like soybeans and corn. 

If you are interested in these topics, Karen recommends the book, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Ailton Krenak

Interested to hear more about Karen’s research? https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-nobre-krull-24420118b/ 

Check out the presentation Karen gave in connection with the EXALT Initiative and the TreesForDev Project https://youtu.be/gKzH0xWFcCM?si=XyWzO4YVAn9db-ng