Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Carbon nullius and racial rule: race, nature and the cultural politics of forest carbon in Canada

Baldwin, W.A.

Authors



Abstract

Critical geographers have paid remarkably scant attention to issues of climate change, even less so to forest carbon management policy. Building on geographic debate concerning the ontological production of nature and race, this paper argues that at stake in the climate change debate are not simply questions of energy geopolitics or green production. Also at issue in the climate debate are powerful questions of identity, the national form and race. This paper considers how a particular slice of the climate debate – forest carbon management discourse pertaining to Canada's boreal forest – enacts a political geography of racial difference, one that seeks to accommodate an imagined mode of traditional aboriginal life to the exigencies of global climate change mitigation and, importantly, to a logic of global capital now well into its ecological phase.

Citation

Baldwin, W. (2009). Carbon nullius and racial rule: race, nature and the cultural politics of forest carbon in Canada. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 41(2), 231-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00671.x

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 1, 2009
Deposit Date Feb 10, 2010
Journal Antipode
Print ISSN 0066-4812
Electronic ISSN 1467-8330
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 41
Issue 2
Pages 231-255
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00671.x
Keywords Race, Nature, Forest carbon management, Boreal forest, Aboriginal peoples.