International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations. Source: wrm.org.uy
Note: Joám supports the Campaign to STOP GE Trees through translating the Campaign’s international calls. The Campaign also has a sign on letter and other action items regarding the September 21st Day of Struggle.
On September 19, 2023, Undisciplined Environments posted Forest Sovereignty Against The Expansion Of Tree Monocultures by Marien Gonzalez Hidalgo, in conversation with Joám Evans Pim and Pablo Reyes Huenchumán. This was done in solidarity with the daily resistance of local communities facing the expansion of tree monocultures .
Marien González-Hidalgo is a researcher associated to the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Joám Evans Pim is an activist leading a de-eucalyptisation movement in the Galician communal forests. Joám’s interview was published September 19, 2023.
Pablo Reyes Huenchumán is a Mapuche activist and leader recovering territory occupied by a large forestry company in the Mapuche territory in Chile. Pablo’s interview will be published on September 21, 2023.
The article discusses why the two interviewees were chosen:
Despite the huge differences among the territories and movements, both are connected by the imposition of a capitalist and colonial model based on forestry extraction, over the rights and needs of human and non-human communities. And, also, the two territories are connected by the presence of grassroots communities that, like many others, seek to exercise forest sovereignty: where territory, communitarian decisions, history and dignity have space beyond the advance of green capitalism.
The following is taken from the interview with Joám Evans Pim, which can be read in full on Undisciplined Environments‘ website (also available in Spanish).
In Galicia, eucalyptus monocultures already occupy half a million hectares, a third of the country’s woodland, a figure that is constantly increasing. These plantations, intended to produce low-cost wood for the paper industry, displace native forests, illegally occupy agricultural land for cultivation or extensive livestock farming, and threaten the integrity and well-being of communities by increasing the risk of fires, affecting springs and destroying our identity, which is intimately linked to our ancestral landscape. For a long time, eucalyptus monocultures applied chemical weedkillers, creating toxic wastelands in which soils have practically disappeared due to the dragging and which, in the face of climate change, represent a first step towards desertification.
Forest sovereignty means throwing off the yoke of productivism, which only benefits big capital at the cost of compromising the security, well-being, life and dignity of communities. The management of the territory by and for the communities must be at the service of their wellbeing and encourage the return of the population to the rural areas. Tree monocultures have never and will never facilitate this because they are based on the creation and expansion of their sacrifice zones.