Paper short abstract:

A model of potential deforestation of the Amazon by 2050 published in the journal Nature demonstrates the hope of a Brazilian NGO to protect the largest forest on Earth. This paper analyses the NGO’s affective appeals to scientific legitimacy, traditional heritage, and the global common good.

Paper long abstract:

What does it take for an appeal for the improved management of large-scale ecosystems to work? Governance strategies require a type of persuasion that involves all stakeholders in decision-making processes. They imply affective appeals that tap into vernacular ontologies and epistemologies. Rhetoric is influential not because of its message, but because of all that is not said. It is not the only tool used, however, as new media and other forms of engagement allow for a variety of ceremonial presentations of problems and potential solutions. All these means are used to induce stakeholders to incorporate particular views of environmental problems into their everyday actions, or their being-in-the-world. They are thus affective strategies with interconnected scales of application, from a local understanding to an idea of a global common good.

This paper examines one NGO's efforts to establish governance schemes in the Brazilian Amazon. It analyses the uses of one of its publications in the journal Nature, containing two contrasting models of potential deforestation by 2050. The maps and information included were used in all scales where the NGO works: from small farmers to international climate conferences. Such uses reflect the recent convergence between social movements, indigenous groups, NGOs, state governments, and other stakeholders in environmental campaigns. In managing a differential use of information, NGO advocates have negotiated the idea of dwelling as relational, as a collective aggregation of emotive notions of space and place. The political practice of these advocates thus mirrors its aim as a concerted form of becoming.