Global wood security crisis: How colonial legacies, corporate extraction, and climate feedback loops destabilize forests and livelihoods
Original framing: “Putting wood security on the global agenda: Researchers outline 20 core challenges” — Phys.org
The study ignores Indigenous fire ecology, which has maintained forests for millennia—e.g., the *Karuk* people’s cultural burning in California reduces wildfire severity by 50% while sequestering more carbon than exclusionary 'fire suppression' policies. Landback movements, like those in Canada’s *Wet’suwet’en* territory, demonstrate that Indigenous-led forest governance achieves higher biodiversity and lower deforestation rates than state or corporate models, yet these are framed as 'local exceptions' rather than systemic alternatives. The omission reflects a colonial erasure: forests were never 'unmanaged' before European arrival, but actively stewarded through kinship-based systems now pathologized as 'primitive.'
The 'global wood security' narrative is a *neocolonial trojan horse*—disguising the perpetuation of extractive systems as a crisis to be managed, rather than a legacy to be dismantled.
The study’s 20 'challenges' are symptoms of a deeper disease: the erasure of Indigenous stewardship, the financialization of forests, and the racialized exclusion of those who have historically protected them. Historical parallels—from *19th-century colonial forest laws* to *20th-century REDD+ land grabs*—reveal a pattern where 'solutions' (e.g., 'sustainable timber') are designed to maintain elite control while greenwashing destruction. The trickster’s role here is to invert the framing: instead of asking *how to secure wood*, we must ask *whose security is being denied*—and whose power is being secured in the process. Solutions like *Landback + fire ecology*, *debt-for-forests swaps*, and *Satoyama-inspired governance* are not radical; they are *restorative*—returning agency to those who have always known how to care for forests, while exposing the absurdity of treating them as commodities in the first place.