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Abstract

Patricia Marchak
Professor and Dean Emerita of Arts
Sr. Fellow, Centre International Relations, Liu Institute for Global Issues
University of British Columbia

The immense Congo basin has been a magnet for private armies, state armies, mining and other corporations, gangs, war-lords, thugs and just ordinary thieves ever since King Leopold II of Belgium determined to own it. It is not the only region in Africa that suffered from European colonialism and it is not alone in its current predicament. If the UN- brokered peace prevails, an election this year might begin to change its fate. But it will be a long time before its citizens can enjoy both peace and benefits from the natural resources that attracted so many exploiters. Everything will depend on whether external groups and corporations can be persuaded to respect the borders of the state and the elected government, and whether the internal population can be reined in under a constitution and the rule of law.

I begin with reference to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the DRC) to show in sharpest form the relationship between natural resources and the political organization of territory and populations. Fortunate are the people who established the boundaries of their state and created a constitution and the rule of law before discovering resource wealth. But these same people have rather often in history moved on to other territories in Africa, Asia, Central and South America where non-state political organizations were not capable of rejecting them. There they appropriated resources while maintaining a cordon of protection around their own territories.

This may strike the good foresters, botanists, and soil scientists in this audience as unrelated to their work and listeners or readers may ask “what does this have to do with trees?” I will answer in this lecture that this is, in fact, contemporary history not only in the Congo but throughout the world. I will argue that our relationship to the state of nature, and thus the work of professional foresters and their colleagues, is intimately related to the kind of political organizations we establish.

By way of further examples, I propose to discuss the differences between Indonesia and Brazil as states with potential to establish massive pulp and possibly paper industries based on plantation fibres, to show that how the state is organized and how government deals with industrial development significantly affects the outcomes for both nature and people. I will also briefly describe current logging practices in Cambodia where government is either too corrupt or too weak to protect remaining tropical forests, and the heavy role of government in Japan where conservation of the forest is viewed as a top priority. Time permitting, I will also discuss the impacts of changes in forestry legislation and regulation in British Columbia under a committed market-oriented government.