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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Argentina’s Chaco, this paper shows how the native forest securitization redistributes risk, prioritizes certain forms of being and becoming, and normalizes trade-off frameworks through which present losses are rendered acceptable in the name of projected futures.

Paper long abstract

As climate change is increasingly framed as a planetary concern, global attention has turned toward the Gran Chaco Americano, South America’s second-largest terrestrial ecosystem spanning Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Long rendered peripheral within global economic, political, and environmental imaginaries, this vast mosaic of grasslands, thorny forests, and wetlands sustains dense yet fragile webs of human and more-than-human life. In recent decades, however, the Chaco has come to be known less for this abundance than for the rapid disappearance of its native forests.

Global responses to deforestation are increasingly organized through securitizing frameworks that recast the forest as both a threatened object and a strategic asset to be safeguarded for planetary well-being. Thus, deforestation is produced as an imminent global risk, narrowing the range of acceptable practices to those aligned with dominant technocratic and managerial climate discourses. In the process, other ways of relating with the forest—grounded in sociality, reciprocity, and long-standing practices of care—are rendered illegible or reframed as incompatible with protection.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Chaco Province, Argentina, this paper argues that the securitization of the forest reorganizes relations among Indigenous communities, settlers, corporate actors, and the state by unevenly distributing risk, shaping which forms of being and becoming are prioritized, and leaving others to bear the social and ecological costs of climate change. In doing so, it calls into question the logic of trade-offs so dominant in climate advocacy, through which certain losses in the present are rendered acceptable in order to secure projected futures.