Settler-colonialism shapes practices of resource exploitation, implying the violent subjugation and development of “unproductive” forests and their populations. Contrary to that, globally circulating ideas about ecological conservation and sustainability in the Anthropocene represent forests as in need of human protection from other humans. Centring the forest in a negotiation process of multiple species, laws, and policies, this presentation attempts a transcultural reading of conflicting ethical stances on how tropical forests can serve different purposes for different actors.
The research region which I think through and with forests are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal: the archipelago is densely covered with partly restored tropical forest, indicative of an extractive, settler-colonial past, with British and Indian rule leaving long-lasting traces. My presentation focusses on two intersecting ethical discourses centring on forests: First, I seek to critically analyse how the discourse on climate change impacted debates about conflicting vulnerabilities – of both humans and forests. The Tsunami 2004/2005 and rising weather irregularities affected both mangrove and semi-deciduous forests as well as forest-dwelling Indigenous Peoples and settlers. Here, government policies that place the demand to conserve in opposition to everyday subaltern subsistence rather exacerbated existing vulnerabilities.
Second, two decades after the Tsunami, the authoritarian Indian government has started to develop a container shipment port in Great Nicobar Island, cutting around a million trees of primary forest, and putting many endemic and endangered species at risk. Beyond, this project is also directly affecting two indigenous communities: the forest-dwelling, hunting-gathering Shompen and the horticulturalist coastal-dwelling Nicobarese. This project juxtaposes environmental ethics, articulated by national and international conservationists and indigenous rights activists, with an ethics of extractive capitalism in parts of the Global South, in which capitalist development is given priority with the justification that historical emissions have been caused by the North.