Shades of Green

Speaking of global ecosystems, Indonesia recently announced that about half of Kalimantan will be protected as "lungs of the world". This ambitious move has been viewed with (not unjustified) scepticism and uncertainty, as the following articles show:

SBY Sees Kalimantan as the 'Lungs of the World' (The Jakarta Globe)
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/sby-sees-kalimantan-as-the-lungs-of-the-world/492525

Indonesia sets aside 45% of forest-rich Kalimantan to be world's lungs (CIFOR Forests Blog)
http://blog.cifor.org/7144/indonesia-sets-aside-45-of-forest-rich-kalimantan-to-be-worlds-lungs/

Questions of state rhetoric aside, it is interesting how this move is taking place under the UN's REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degredation) programme. Since the rest of the world benefits from 'green lungs' such as Kalimantan's, should they pay for its preservation through schemes like REDD+? This does take into consideration the needs of developing states, though one wonders whether trading green for green will eventually result in short-term, monetised approaches to the environment. Is economics the solution, or really another problem in the making?

Demise of the Local?

Environmentalism today largely pivots around globalisation discourse; there are ostensibly no local issues - they are global. Just try performing a Google search with the keywords "environment" and "globalisation": one gets 35,800,000 hits (and counting). This is not simply about global ecosystems. Environmental/globalisation discourse is also now very much about the identities and voices of those affected by environmental change.

Thomas Friedman has suggested that globalisation is not all homogenisation. Through what he has termed "the globalisation of the local", we could thus understand globalisation as providing a means for local actors to draw attention to environmental issues and assert their cultural identities. In this sense then, perhaps nothing is really 'local' anymore.

To me, the crux of the matter is how different key actors construct different representations of those affected by environmental issues - the local actors themselves, the state, and international organisations / NGOs. These contesting representations have implications on the outcomes of attempts to solve environmental problems, and also demonstrate how the 'local' is now inextricably intertwined with discursive strategies beyond the local.