Expanded Documentary v.01

Towards SCALE as an design axis in an expanded documentary

Last week I wrote about neocolonial conservations and scale and value issues as they affect small things and small persons in landscapes on the Amazonian agricultural frontier. Specifically, this expanded documentary project will expose, tread, allow for trans-positioning of scale and trans-positioning of dominant or “authoritative” tropes in visual and geographical representation.

Let me try to say that again. An expanded documentary might allow the audience to traverse between scales – and to experience how scalar change affects vision, representation, knowledge.

At the same time that an expanded documentary might allow, for alternative representations – maps, visuals, audio – to accompany scalar traverse. OR, that several representations would be present at each scale.

What are the scales. 100 square meters. 10,000 square meters. 1,000,000 square meters. I remember seeing as a boy a famous film "Powers of Ten" shown at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in the early 1980s in which the viewer accompanied a logarithmic transposition of scale from the interior of an atom to the scale of the universe.

I do not mean to suggest that I would do anything so spectacular. But this is an example of a documentary designed as a scalar traverse. An expanded documentary could use this same type of traverse to explore issues of social and ecological justice in the context of conservation and land use planning in the Amazon.

Lets start at a somewhat high level scale. What are the modes of representation of the environment and its people? What is the specific geographical and visual representation? Here I offer three representations.

First, a high level view of northwest Mato Grosso, which is an area roughly equal in size with Panama.

Second, the mathematical equations that represent forest deforestation and forest degradation.

Then, here is a carbon baseline map for the state of Mato Grosso.

The equation and baseline above, are formulas and calculations tied to biomass-proxy accounting for carbon stocks, which are tied to financial projects that produce carbon quantities in terms that can be put onto an international market for carbon. While today’s European carbon market is faltering and almost dysfunctional, the carbon market in California is very operational. California, under governor Schwarzenegger, also entered in memorandum of understanding with the states of Acre and Mato Grosso in Brazil.

The agribusiness dominated Mato Grosso, with the assistance of a non-governmental organization, Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) , wrote a law that would essentially justify carbon financing for the reduction of forest related emissions.

But, when we aren’t viewing the landscape from such a mechanistically determined level, what does all this translate into, in social and ecological terms?

The medium scale. Technological and data management systems are implicated. At the medium scale, using google earth, it is possible to view the landscape with some precision. But satellites cannot detect species composition or the details of land use. In the image below, google earth hovers above an individual family farm of 100ha in the municipality of Cotriguaçu. This is the lot of the farmer who is leading us through the trees in the twilight at the end of the video in the earlier blog post. In this view, the areas in the lower half of the image appears as forest, but this is actually an agricultural-forest system, or agroforestry system, including açai, heart of palm, coffee, cacao/chocolate, teak wood, Brazil nuts.

Second, a GIS generated map made by Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV)  that illustrates their carbon project plan to attend to land tenure and environmental institutional needs on small family farms in federally administered agrarian reform settlements (INCRA settlements).

The fine or person scale. We interviewed “Luisão” (full name excluded here), a small farmer in the agrarian reform settlement instanced in the ICV map above. who comments on his relationship with federal and state agencies. This interview is not subtitled. But he describes how, given significant coordination and competence problems with state agencies, including their fights, squabbles and inability to attend to the livelihoods of people living on the land, that he would rather remain invisible. He would rather not have a land tenure document.

For the sake of expanded documentary, whatever Luisão's experience is not represented in financial models for conservation. Climate change "solutions" and carbon financed landscapes lack the technical mechanisms for including this experience.

In the specific case of the PA Nova Cotriguaçu agrarian reform settlement, in which Luisão lives, ICV drew up project plans to regularize land tenure and establish land use registries for agrarian reform settlements in 2009. The settlement in which Luisão lives is approximately three hours from the municipal county seat.

A 2 million dollar project was funded by a private foundation (Fundo Vale) and was recognized in international forest organizations as a technically legitimate carbon emissions reductions project. 

However, the project has never attempted to regularize land tenure or establish land use registries for these small farmers, because ICV found that working with farmers lacking land tenure documents in agrarian reform settlements would require difficult inter-institutional collaboration. ICV did not want to collaborate with the federal agrarian reform agency INCRA. Even though, due to the fact that PA Nova Cotriguaçu was one of the largest settlements in Mato Grosso,  and even though at the scale of the municipality (not at the regional scale) most of the deforestation affecting Cotriguaçu was in the agrarian reform settlement areas, ICV determined not to devote resources (money) to working with the settlement. ICV instead determined to try to build up friendly political relations with municipality itself, with big ranches and with logging operations. The livelihood and institutional situation of small farmers was given minimal attention.

The above suggests how small/local institutions and relations are imagined, abstracted or ignored in the rush to utilize financial models for conservation, and how nature is "produced" from a financial perspective or high level scale.

In later blog posts, I will point out how financial scale imposed ignorance also affects non-humans, for example, the lives of tree species, insects, soil microorganisms, the local hydrological cycle and local climate. In fact, the latter has experienced significant changes, in terms of rainfall pattern and intensity. Before it was said that soft falling rains lasted for 8 months and there was 4 months of dry season. Now, it is said that hard, driving rains last for 4 months and there is an 8 month dry season. This has seriously affected coffee cultivation in the region. What allows respected scientific and technical organizations to simply wash over these details?

media interventions

countercamera (and now counterGIS?) projects

I have had an ongoing documentary project oriented toward co-opting and re-framing certain narratives and models involved in international capitalist development and ecological conservation.  

These are critiques of the media and technology employed by development and conservation agencies and NGOs, which, in the rush to fundraise and promote projects, campaigns and actions, sometimes risk overlooking the details of social and environmental justice. 
  
This has involved looking at perceptions of scale and value used in dominant media and communications tropes. What do narratives and models of development and conservation  do in representing, and thereby, making the very world to which we relate? What methods and what audience interactions can reclaim (or satirize) the views posited by these representations of the world?

• in representing identity?
• in media campaigns focused ostensibly on sustainability?
• in databases and maps focusing on ecological conservation? 

Example 1: USAID sponsored reality TV project focused on ex youth gang members





Example 2: Oxfam scams environmentalists





Example 3: Yes Men Fix the World



 

Example 4: Beating Chevron to the Punch



  
And now...

Scale, Invisibility, and the Arrogance of Conservation

Even Al Jazeera got the story wrong when publishing content about the Amazon in Brazil. I'm referring to a film documentary released last year: "Raids in the Rainforest" which follows a format or formula common to nonfiction TV narrative. That formula: find a story that involves a journey, danger, high risk, and, most importantly, a subject - a protagonist or hero for the camera who is willing to be filmed and can lead the audience where the producer wants to go. It of course helps if that subject is young and "attractive." Thomas Wartman, the director of this film, seems to have found all the ingredients - a drama about the destruction of the rainforest, and the young heroine making risky journeys into the forest to apprehend environmental criminals.

As the film carries forward this standard formula - it succeeds. It tells an interesting story. But it is made to satisfy knowledge that already exists, knowledge based in a somewhat neo-colonial idea about nature. Intentionally or not, the film is structured to reinforce a myth about what conservation is and should be, and it perpetuates a stereotype about poor, uneducated people being the scourge of the Amazon rain forest. In fact, the English subtitles misrepresent what is being said, ignoring phrases that would confuse the moral coherence of the story. 

Only in Brazil would I expect Al Jazeera to stumble like this. Brazil is the land of misinformation - the only monarchy that existed in the new world - the last country in the world to abolish slavery - a land that touts racial democracy but where the only people of color on the national Globo network are seen running from the police in favelas. 

The myth perpetuated by this film is not just a neo-colonial narrative. It is a scientific and technological neo-colonialism, tied to satellite based remote sensing, geographic information systems, and the idea that nature is separate from society. Biodiversity can be financed, and valued as natural capital. In Brazil's Amazon, satellites are helping to build legal models of the landscape, but these legal models and their official interlocutors are not the primary consideration for the humans who actually reside in these landscapes.But the value of the Amazon for conservationists or carbon financiers is not the value that the land holds for people who actually try to eek out a living on the land. 

My project for Expanded Documentary is about trying to feel past the models - to try to identify what neocolonial attitudes and technology do in terms of scale and in terms of value. Scale is a geographical concept, which takes account of the issue of visibility or invisibility of phenomenon. Maps of the Amazon can see deforestation and land use change. But can they see the reality of alternative small farmers with a passion for forest gardens? Can they see the political economic hegemony of cattle and and how ranching dominates rural finance and state governments in frontier states like Mato Grosso and Rondonia? Can they see how people from São Paolo, like the protagonist of the film above, have no idea of what poor settlers lives are like?

If you believe in the neo-colonial narrative, then "Raids in the Rainforest" is a sanguine tale that offers hope. But if you dissolve the cartography of neo-colonialism, this is a trumped up story of environmental police rendering poor, vulnerable people into life-sentence environmental criminals. The people encountered by these police will never be able to pay the astronomical fines levied by IBAMA (the federal environmental agency), at the same time that their civil and financial liberties will be severely and permanently curtailed. Meanwhile, those who are actually driving deforestation and creatively wasting the landscape, are invisible in this film - as powerful people and interests with impunity.

Below, I take a 3 minute video gander, contrasting global environmentalism with sounds and things encountered in a similar landscape as that of the film above – northwest Mato Grosso on the southern agricultural frontier of the Amazon. The video is a simple string of clips, where I start with a a glimpse of an economics conference at the Rio+20 global environmental conference, then shift to the sounds and things of the rural landscape: Brazil nut trees both living and dead, coffee plants, the smokestack of a slaughterhouse, a federal government agrarian reform settlement, and a small farm in this settlement, where a small farmer harvests pupunha (heart of palm) and walks us through his forest garden in the twilight.

This is obviously just an initial video sketch. But as it is not standard documentary narrative, I found that the audio was especially compelling, even if just background audio of insects. And with a good camera sensibility, one can be technologically intimate with humans, non-humans and things. How will I work out a critique or a satire of the neo-colonial narrative above? Or, push this technological immediacy and explore how video could be parsed through an alternative cartographic frame?