Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions

Front matter

EXTRACTIVISMS, EXISTENCES, AND EXTINCTIONS

MONOCULTURE PLANTATIONS AND AMAZON DEFORESTATION

“With Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions, Markus Kréger has given us a searing critique of capitalist extractivism and its destruction of human and other webs of life. Arguing that we must embrace ‘more than human’ ways of seeing today’s crisis, Króger makes a signal contribution to ongoing struggles for planetary justice.”

Contents

List of figures and tables X Acknowledgments xi Prologue xiii Introduction 1 ] Extractivisms, existences, and extinctions 27

2 The political economy of existences and extractivisms 46

3 Four key questions for the study of existences: The agroextractivist monocultures in Mato Grosso 65

Prologue

I first arrived in 2005 to the city of Belém at the estuary of the great Amazon rivers. I was to spend the next several months helping the Brazilian rubber tappers and other traditional forest-dwelling populations through development cooperation projects, which sought to preserve and improve the quality of life in the forests they inhabited. A large development cooperation project funded by Finland was ending. This project had promoted the creation and improvement of multiple-use conservation areas in the Amazon. My task was to help look for and develop projects so similar work could continue.

During my first night in the Amazon, I had a profound experience. I woke with a start in the middle of the night, horrified. I had a vivid dream that I was in a boat traveling upriver. We went deeper and deeper looking for the heart of the Amazon, propelled forward as if called by someone in the rainforest. When we finally arrived at the headwaters of the river, to my deep horror, I saw that all the huge, ancient trees had been recently cut, and all that remained were the stumps. These majestic trees had been killed; they were no more. The grief was deep and heart-felt. When I woke up in the middle of that moist night in Belém, I wondered if the forest, the ancient trees, had been communicating with me. Was there someone trying to call for help, asking me to arrive as soon as possible to some place that had to be found?

In the coming days, I visited the verdant Rodrigues Alves botanical garden in the middle of the buzz of the Belém metropolis area, where the offices of forest-dwellers’ organizations were located. The air in the garden, which resembled an Amazonian forest, was cool and refreshing to breathe. There, I was briefed about my impending journey upriver to the Santarém region at the confluence of the Tapajós and Arapiuns rivers. The boat ride takes about three days, but this first time I took a plane. Meandering rivers and green forests spread xiv Prologue all around during the journey west from Belém, showcasing from the air the beauty of this magnificent forest.

Upon arriving to Santarém’s Alter do Chao, the picturesque, unique riverside village, and lake beach paradise, I started to look for a place to stay. First, I was offered a temporary lodging in a large house with tall walls, and a big German shepherd, who hunted and ate lizards, and guarded the house. After a couple of weeks, a man selling his artisanal works at the village center square approached me while I was passing and said to me in Portuguese, “The entity inside of me has been communicating with the entity inside of you already for a long while. I know that you are looking for a place to stay, and I know of a house for us to rent together.” Although I was surprised by this frank approach and out-of-the-blue encounter, it felt completely natural, and we went to look at this house and we rented it. The man I moved into the house with was called Leopardo; he goes by many names, but I will use this, the first nickname he had when I met him in 2005. While living with him, I learned that he was a unique kind of person, as he mixed being an Indigenous “shaman,” an afro-spiritual Umbanda “bishop,” and a capoeira teacher. He was very stable and peaceful, and always walked with good posture and confidence, with power. The next months were an immersion into another kind of world, or more accurately a multitude of different parallel existences, a world of worlds. For me, this time brought a personal understanding and up-close experience of how there can be multiple, overlapping existences and worlds within the same apparent space, all with their own logics and energies of operation, of which one knows very little of without personally feeling them through the experience of living through them and being immersed in them.

On one night, while spending time in the village central square, I said to my friend Leopardo that it would be fantastic to re-live how the Indigenous people had lived in that same spot, hundreds of years ago, before the arrival of Europeans. He asked me to step closer to the riverside bank, which overlooked an island of white sand and forests, with a holy hill behind. He then asked me to close my eyes, take off my shoes, step onto the sand, and then open my eyes and look across to the island. I saw the thatched roofs of the buildings on top of the sand, and looked at the slowly flowing shallow river that softly bent where we stood. If one could suspend their disbelief by ignoring the two streetlights in view, they could be transported to a different time. This was the same view as had been there for a long time. It was a vision of peace and tranquility that went beyond time. It was suddenly easy to imagine how life had been in that spot before our time.

Prologue xv

Figure P.1 The view across the river to the peninsula Ilha do Amor (Island of Love), in Alter do Chao.

Source: Photo taken by the author.

Little by little I became immersed in a new way of sensing things in this wonderful place, observing events and feelings that were novel to me. I came to understand how little I had known or understood before about the world. I was 25 years old, and had passed a couple of years studying and traveling around South America and Asia, and had lived through quite a bit, but this experience was something quite different, and was felt on a deeper level. At times there were very pressing sensations, which vanished when we had figured out what the exact reason was for the imbalance, and we were able to do something about it. For example, once we both experienced a pressing, negative feeling for several days and we could not pinpoint where or why it had come. We started to discuss what might be behind these feelings, and decided we need to go out to explore the town to see what was happening. While we walked around the town, we learned that a young boy, who had become homeless, was being kicked at the beach as he had possibly tried to take something from a restaurant to sustain himself. Leopardo knew him. In this town, there were not street kids, but rather beach kids, living on the sandy stretches and sleeping in hammocks. We took xvi Prologue the boy to the house we were renting, and allowed him to stay there until his issues got sorted out. This immediately eased the feelings, and made the pressure vanish. Leopardo explained that the negative energies sent by that boy were very strong, and made the emotions change in the village. Whatever the reason for the change in sensations, be it that or the fact that we had simply directed our attention toward trying to help someone, I do not know, but we were relieved by the change, feeling again at ease. The next time I saw the boy on a visit 14 years later, by then he had his own family and a boat, and gave me and Leopardo a ride on the river.

Leopardo passed many lessons to me that stemmed from his Afro- Brazilian and Amazonian Indigenous roots, by living through similar strong experiences where one immerses into omnipresent and pressing emotions. I observed things that some could call mystical, but whose presence anyone who has stayed longer in the Amazon forests might know, feel, or at least have heard of. There was something curious to Leopardo and the world we were inhabiting. At night, he lit candles in the house garden while talking to spirits and ancestors. Dogs barked ten meters behind him seemingly at someone, as if someone would be walking there, although I could not see anyone. He said that an entity followed him around, and the dogs barked at that entity, but he did not mind.

There is so much to this world that people who have lived mostly within the modern, virtual, and imagined spaces of Western societies know little about. It is at the frontiers, like in Alter do Chao, or more precisely, when living with others who are in distinct yet simultaneously present realities and worlds, where one can get a glimpse into a receding, but still present multitude of worlds. During this time, I was made clearly aware that multiple and often contradictory worlds can and do co-exist. This was not simply an intellectual understanding, but a personal experience.

I returned to the region and the same town many times after 2005, and each time the town was more modernized and further developed for tourists. I was sad to see that the riverbanks were fortified with concrete, and several of the huge, ancient mango trees that had given us fruit, were cut down to make space for a concrete pavilion. There was a shift from the older world, which before could still be envisioned by merely overlooking a streetlamp. The new scenery made it increasingly hard, if not impossible to make the same wholesale journey back to a different time of being. The space, which once had such potential for this overlapping of times, was being transformed. Interestingly enough, in addition to the change in the look of the place, there was

Prologue xvii also a marked change in the time. By this I mean the time, which ran before without notice or worry, was no longer. Time itself had shifted toward a faster-paced, more linear rhythm, organized by the growing number of restaurants, hotels, tours, and other commercial endeavors that catered to the increasing number of tourists. In the intervening years the town had been named as the number one beach destination in Brazil by the Guardian, so it was no wonder that it was attracting a new kind of global and national attention (McOwan 2009).

Not only was the town changing, but, perhaps even more importantly, the forests that surround the Santarém region were also changing. In 2005, my friend said he saw Blairo Maggi, the soy emperor of Brazil, stepping out of a riverside restaurant in Santarém. He swept the air with his hands, and said to the gathered crowd of local decision makers that soon this whole region will be covered with soybeans. And so, it was ...

In subsequent years, enormous swaths of rainforests were deforested, huge trees were razed to the ground, and replaced by soybean plantations, promulgated by the newly built Cargill port in the city by the Amazon river. Local activists and environmental organizations denounced the port construction as illegal, as the port was built on top of an ancient Indigenous cemetery—in a parallel to earlier times when the Christian central square of Alter do Chao had been built on top of the existing Indigenous village center. Those trying to denounce the illegalities of the soybean craze, the violence, and rural exodus, were either threatened by the pistoleiros, who were the hired guns of the large land grabbers, murdered, or placed under police protection. Some were mugged and threatened, and had to move away for their safety. Some were even driven out of the town at gunpoint. Friends of mine were caught up in the fray. The soy barons erected mansions with tall stone walls at all the best spots along the riverside in the growing town. No longer a fishing village of a few thousand people, the area had grown rapidly into a conglomeration ten times larger, complete with shantytowns, and all the rising problems typical to urban destitution in Brazil.

Returning to the village in 2007, 2011, 2018, and 2019, I never again had the same kinds of experiences as in 2005. The magical, otherworldly sensations and experiences were just not there anymore with the same intensity or force. It felt as if the spirits, energies, entities, or whatever one would like to call such forces, had moved along, looking for more peaceful, less disturbed areas. There is so much to this world, and its laws and existences, that we know very little of, and in many cases, we are not even aware of how little we know. This ignorance or lack of recognition of what we do not know leads to the loss of countless lives, webs, and spectrums of life. Even the existences that xviii Prologue are not visibly obliterated can be lost as the places they are tied to are transformed into something else. Places are burned down, cut, built over, and changed so drastically that it is difficult to even see the place as it was before, even when observing an area of hundreds of square kilometers from an airplane, or for days on end from a bus window. This is a profound loss, and yet, the pace of destruction continues to accelerate around the world. Even the Amazon is not immune from being destroyed, with its rich and wide spectrum of trillions of lives.

I try to make sense of these changes, based primarily on my personal experiences of living, traveling, doing research, and feeling in different parts of South America, Finland, and India, but especially in the Amazon. This book is based on these personal experiences and understandings, not simply on more typical participant observation and field research.

Since 2005, as I traveled by road across the Amazon, I saw how areas that had been covered by thick forests were transformed in just a matter of years to endless horizons of soybeans, other plantations, and pastures. What are the vocabularies by which these events could and should be described? How can one adequately tell of the magnitude of losses—real, tangible losses of uncountable lives of the myriad life forms that lived in those forests? Many of us have borne witness to this destruction, but from afar, for example, through the news. This distance coupled with an inadequate vocabulary sterilizes these events. Is this destruction better understood as the losses of beings—sentient beings—or of energies and forces? Or should these losses be described and captured by something altogether different? Whatever the answer to this question may be, it is less important than being able to see and understand that these are events that have led to drastic changes in what exists, and what can exist, in different spaces and places. These transformations take place at many levels, including the social and symbolic level. They are also taking place in physical, tangible, and territorial spaces, which are interlinked with the social and symbolic levels. Places are transformed that are homes with their own worlds, which cannot be compensated as they are unique places with their own specific histories and presences. In this book, I explore how these changes are linked to expanding extractivisms, that is, how extractivisms extinguish and redistribute existences. Extractivism has been defined as “a particular way of thinking and the properties and practices organized towards the goal of maximizing benefit through extraction, which brings in its wake violence and destruction” (Durante, Kröger, and LaFleur 2021). I will start this book from this premise. In Chapter 2, there will be a further characterization of the different types of extractivisms and their degrees, and also examples of what

Prologue xix kind of activities should not be called extractivist. This book explores what impacts and dynamics extractivisms have with existences.

There are changes, where not only a life is lost, but where the possibilities are lost for entire species, populations, entities, webs, and spectrums of life. These losses ravage particular places and territories. These changes affect the whole world because when particular places are lost, or radically altered by extractivist damages, even when they are on the other side of the globe, the outcomes affect everyone via global climate and ecological crises. These global level changes even affect those making the decisions and pushing extractivisms.

One may see that this is a change promulgated by shifts in forces. A shift in the mental, vocal, and physical actions of people, especially of certain, powerful people, located at key junctures in modern webs of value-creation, markets, and politics. During my field research trips since 2005, traveling across the region called MATOPIBA (referring to the first two letters of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia), and the Cerrado-Amazon arc of deforestation running from Acre to Belém, I met people whose job it was to arrive first to a region slated to be colonized by the soybean, and their Southern Brazilian patrons. These people worked to organize the region through the land markets, by parceling the forest lands, creating the legal documents, arranging the sale of slots, and contacting would-be buyers. At the same time, they organized the production, logistics, and trade. They saw themselves as developers, and do-gooders, heralds of modernity and prosperity. While the Indigenous people were portrayed as ill-doers and obstructive as they sometimes blocked the "developers" access to forests. I met soybean farmers, who saw themselves as “producers,” as benefactors to a world in need of food and feed. From a critical analytical perspective (Dowbor 2019), they could also be called “unproducers,” as their extraction destroyed soils, by just extracting the nutrients, and leaving behind toxic dirt—the so-called production was just a short-lived mirage. Real production being work that results in improvements to the places, guided by agroecological and other soil enriching practices— giving back to land, while producing, and not simply extracting in a destructive manner.

There is much to be unpacked about the labels that people take on and give to themselves. These labels need to be dismantled and transformed when building the post-extractivist world. Even if these agrarian extractivists recognized that they had themselves razed down thousands of hectares of forests to make space for plantations, this was characterized as unfortunate but necessary. They made the excuse that there was still a lot of forest left untouched by their activities. I visited the fields with these soy and corn extractors, and I noticed that even in their own field, they were constantly looking at their mobile xx Prologue phones—observing the price of soybean, and other market news. Their lived worlds were not the same, even though they were at the same physical spots where just a few years or decades ago Indigenous people and forest animals roamed. They were not living or experiencing the same world as had been there before, there had been a fundamental shift in the use and intention of the territory. Their world was more abstract, virtual, not-there, not in the present—unless it was directly related to how well their crops were growing, for example, checking to see if there was need for fertilizer, a new kind of pesticide, or looking at the upcoming rains. There was a lot of time and attention given to planning for future expansions, and observing the land markets further away at the frontier, where good deals could still sometimes be found. These agrarian extractivists were focused on building larger silos to store the feed, while waiting for the best prices to sell the grains, and installing new corn ethanol facilities to make more use of and profits from the corn cover crop. They lived in the markets, whereas the Indigenous people lived in and with the forests—this description itself is a modern conceptualization of separating humans and nature, which Amazon Indigenous people do not even have.

In the northern parts of Mato Grosso state in Brazil, south of the Santarém region, there had been mostly nomadic gatherers, hunters, and fishers present until the 1970s. I spoke to the remnants of the Panara and other Indigenous peoples in an attempt to try and make sense of the genocidal policies that made the Panara almost extinct. I attempt to document what I heard from people living in the place. I spent several years in total in South America, meeting with forest and rural communities sometimes briefly and sometimes for more prolonged interactions. I will try to connect my experiences with the experiences and insights of others, especially in South America, regarding different types of highly destructive “natural resource” extractions and extractivisms. I will explore the existential transformations, redistributions, annihilations, and changes to existences that are created by different extractivisms, for example, the redistributions that the agroextractivist soybean plantations create in the Amazon and Cerrado forests. How should these transformations be understood and conceptualized? What concepts can be used, in parallel with political economic analyses of power relations in agrarian markets, to do justice to the full sphere of existences and lives at stake and being lost in these processes? This book is an exploratory journey into these questions, offering an existential take on political economies.