This past September the World Forestry Center sponsored an annual conference called “Who Will Own the Forests,” attended by the most notorious representatives in the Wall Street timber industry. There they schemed on perfecting the financialization of forest ecosystems, expanding greenwashing, carbon trading, biomass, and land grabs in Cascadia and around the globe. For years this conference was a well-kept for the corporate class, but this year a coalition of community-based organizations from across the region held a well-attended rally outside the conference and the next day followed up with an alternative “Who Should Own The Forest” conference, to protest the industry’s polluting practices and point to a positive vision for just and sustainable land ownership and management models.
On this episode of Locus Focus we listen to a recording of one of the workshops at that conference featuring Thomas Joseph, Carbon Pricing Educator with the Indigenous Environmental Network and three research assistants who attended Who Will Own the Forests incognito.
- KBOO