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?