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Hepburn, Michelle Lianne Hak

University of British Columbia

By “thinking with trees” – a theoretical and methodological orientation – this dissertation explores which kinds of social relations with land, timber, trees, seeds and forests are enabled and enacted through environmental governance in San Martín, Peru. Based on ethnographic research carried out in 2019 and 2021, this dissertation foregrounds the implications of unequal knowledge-making and decision-making practices in forest governance and in environmental development initiatives. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, and scholarly approaches to the nonhuman, this thesis offers a nuanced analysis of the complexities of Amazonian Indigenous Kichwa and Amazonian non-Indigenous mestizo approaches to tree and forest relations, including how people cause, monitor, and mitigate tropical deforestation. This thesis contributes to growing plant scholarship in the social sciences, bringing it into conversation with critical development theories to foreground the politics of how people relate with plants in Amazonia.

Text

2024-10-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89406

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/