Infrastructures of Incursions: Deregulated Extraction in Rainforest Frontiers (INFRACURSIONS)

This project maps out the emergence and endurance of clandestine economic activities - 'incursion economies' - that invade the global margins and invariably result in environmental degradation. Over the past fifty years, between 17 and 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed, with some regions fast approaching the tipping point for dieback (Silva Junior et al 2020). Yet, environmental degradation of forests is not restricted to the clearcutting of trees; it is a multi-scalar process that builds over time. It starts with small areas of habitat fragmentation in which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches due to a multiplication in low-intensive enterprises such as selective logging, small ranches, and surface fires (Skole et al 1993). The resulting edge effects - ecological changes associated with forest fragments - penetrate deep into Amazon forests (Laurance et al. 2002; Lovejoy et al. 1986) and render them far less resilient to future environmental pressures. This description demonstrates how small-scale activities have large-scale effects. Incursions into remote and resource rich regions of the world, for purposes of illegal land grabbing, logging, and mining, have immense cumulative impact on forest environments, pushing them towards an ecological threshold. But why is this small-scale invasive destruction so difficult to regulate? The first reason is that knowledge is limited because research has been dominated by macro-economic approaches (Hilson 2012; Szablowski 2007); second, those involved are vilified and inaccessible, resulting in their motivations and activities being poorly understood; and third, new analytical tools are required to understand a phenomenon that is notoriously obscure and that operates beyond the reach of the state. How, then, do we make sense of this evasive phenomenon? This project endeavours to provide this clarity by placing people at the centre of the analysis, and by framing the phenomenon beyond binary modes of understanding that categorize those on the frontline as immoral perpetrators by media outlets, organisations and state entities; instead, it acknowledges that incursions are marked by multiple layers of interests and motivations. INFRACURSIONS seeks to develop new tools that facilitate deeper insights by shifting the lens to the hidden infrastructures that facilitate the emergence and endurance of incursions. Gaining clarity on complex forest degradation dynamics and their drivers in this way is crucial to mitigating environmental deterioration, biodiversity decline within the world's forests, and even climate change for the entire globe. Drawing on empirical data collected in the rainforests of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, the project offers a comparative study of what will be referred to as 'incursion economies' that form the main contributors of degradation in South America. This timely and urgent research will not only be the first large-scale integrative transboundary study on deregulated extractive activities, but it will also reconfigure anthropological approaches to environmental destruction in the Global South and beyond. The ground-breaking interdisciplinary methodology combines ethnography and supply chain analysis with remote sensing data sets and Policy Labs, building a multi-modal study on the locally produced knowledges, expertise, and innovations of incursion economies and in so doing aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of small-scale extractive activities that have hidden but extensive impacts on the environment.