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On the merits of examining regional forest transformations in South-western France with a ‘plantationocene’ lens
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Edité par CCSD -
International audience. In her opus about the interrelated fates of Matsutake mushrooms, tree companions and human foragers in contrasted settings such as Japan and Oregon, Anna Tsing devotes several chapters to Pine forests. “How the lines have blurred!” she reckons, when comparing the inexistent undergrowth of an allegedly natural plot in Finland with neighbouring unruly abandoned plantations. The purpose of this proposal is to examine the relevance of temperate forests plantations as an object to further discuss the plantationocene concept. We wish here to share our experiences with past and present plantation logics around the largest cultivated forest in Europe, the ‘Landes de Gascogne’ massif (SW France). The history of this region is devoid of racial undertone but not of social violence, as its authoritarian afforestation was entangled in internal colonization, land grabbing, privatization and accumulation. Now mostly privately-owned, its continuous reproduction relies on an industrial production of Pinus pinaster. It entails a narrow technical-silvicultural package, funnelled by technical advisers and forest cooperatives: soil tilling, stump harvesting, planting, tree-felling machines. This acceleration, legitimated by economic competiveness constraints and genetic improvement promises, shares two salient features with the plantationocene thought: accrued reliance on (mechanized) labour, heightened vulnerability to pests and pathogens. The talk will further expose the specificities and paradoxes of the trajectories of P. pinaster Gascony forests in this regard. We will also investigate how the plantation model may experience inertia or permutations, identifying various -and potentially ambiguous- vehicles for forest transformations : dynamics of broadleaf species, figures of the peasant forest, mobilizations against malforestation, framing of marroonage narratives as forests-as-spaces-of-dissent ... Doing so, we underscore the conditions of emergence (and the power relationships) of technologies and imaginaries that have contributed to the plantation system, and their alternatives that may -or not- lead to the unfolding of multi-species worlds.
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