“You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed, and call it life. You haven’t created life, you have polluted it.”
~ Vandana Shiva.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's definition of 'forest' includes commercial plantations of fast growing trees - often replacing biodiverse native forests relied on by local communities.
Perhaps this shonky description of a forest is really to accommodate industry, carbon sinks for emissions trading, and making money from climate change.
Forest conservation has been thought to be the simplest way to fight climate change, particularly in New Zealand, where cars and cows are incredibly effective carbon producers.
Have we now reduced the description of forests to ‘any area covered by trees’, discarding the structural, functional and biological diversity of non-tree elements that make up a forest, as well as the cultural importance of the interaction between forests and communities?
Drawing parallels between the treatment of workers and the treatment of natural systems, Gary Cranston talks about how the privatisation and the commodification of natural systems is being dressed up by polluters as a solution to climate change, and how these solutions must be replaced by solutions designed and implemented by and for those most threatened and least responsible for causing climate change itself if we are to realise an effective response to today's crisis of climate change and capitalism itself.