Adam Henne

Adam is a student associate of the Center for Integrative Conservation Research, and a PhD candidate in University of Georgia’s program in environmental anthropology.

At the moment Adam is in Chile conducting fieldwork with environmentalists, foresters, scientists, loggers, and labor and indigenous activists. This is research towards his dissertation, currently titled something like "The Social Life of Wood.” His 'tribe,' so to speak, is the Forest Stewardship Council, an international NGO that supports sustainable forestry through third-party certification. In other words, they provide the green seal of approval for 'good wood.' It’s a values-based market incentive system, not unlike organic food or Fair Trade coffee. The question is, how do they decide what makes 'good' forestry? That standard is negotiated by people with competing interests and unequal access to resources, who also come to the table with very different ideas about what kinds of knowledge are appropriate for managing forests - or even what a 'forest' is.

More than many institutions, the Forest Stewardship Council puts a lot of energy into ensuring their decision-making processes are transparent and democratic. As they put it, they “bring people together to find solutions to the problems created by bad forestry practices and to reward good forest management.” As an anthropologist, Adam is interested in the subtle forces at play when people come together like that. Who gets to set the agenda for a meeting, who gets invited, and whose ideas are taken most seriously in discussion? Hidden amongst these group dynamics are important assumptions about forests, conservation, science, economics and politics.

To uncover and explain some of these assumptions, Adam has tried to put himself in the middle of everything. He is volunteering with an FSC member environmental organization, preparing a manual of forestry laws for small property owners. He has attended meetings and conferences, interviewed dozens of participants from timber executives to environmental activists, and analyzed thousands of pages of activist literature, policy documents, corporate records, and meeting minutes. To get an idea of how the new standards will be implemented in the field, he has toured (sometimes on horseback) native forests in the Andean foothills run by peasant cooperatives, and pine plantations owned by enormous timber companies. Adam has also brought his studies into his tiny cabin in Valdivia (where he lives with his partner, poet Danielle Pafunda, and their daughter Hazel), in the form of certified sustainably-grown firewood – protects the forests, and it burns better, too.

The whole FSC process is something new for Chile, and so they make a great case study. For years Chile has been considered a model for successful – even miraculous – neoliberal reforms. If a market-based strategy for forest protection catches on here, it is likely to be adopted widely. In the long run, Adam hopes to track FSC certification worldwide, to see if the patterns and assumptions he has observed in Chile reproduce themselves elsewhere, or if new ones emerge at new scales and locations. In practical terms, he hopes his work can help the FSC live up to its potential as a transparent, democratic tool for effective and socially just conservation. In theoretical terms, he thinks that the FSC and systems like it have a lot to teach us about how global markets, nature conservation, and the natural sciences shape each other and our world.