Epistemological Spaces, Carbon Credits, and Environmental Modernity: the Suruí Forest Carbon Project

Abstract

This study analyzes the experience of the Indigenous Paiter-Suruí in Brazil with the Fifty-Year Plan and the Forest Carbon project implemented inside the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Land (SSIL) with the support of distinct political players such as United States-based Google Earth engine, Metareilá, Ministry of Culture, Ecosystem Marketplace/Forest Trends, among others. Brazil has a long history of complex relations with Indigenous rights, including long-due discussions on identity, land recognition and demarcation. The concern with environmental issues brings in a different layer of political interests to the scene. There is very little dialogue on the acceptance of their forms of knowledge by mainstream society, and, as this study highlights, this relation to nature is being pressured to be commercialized and quantified in a Western-style system. The essay concludes that the Suruí pact to sell its Carbon Credits to multinationals such as Natura is a good example of this strategy of paradoxical post-modernity: the traditional local values and culture of the Indigenous society can be represented through new technology, but it is through those machines that the groups can be observed and appropriated as non-threatening to a global audience.