Paper long abstract:

In the Puerto Carreño region, on the Eastside savannas of Colombia, everyone seems to be engaging in some form of carbon accounting. Agro-industrial firms, forestry investors, and bioenergy entrepreneurs are resorting to carbon accounting to justify offsetting schemes that bring additional revenues to their enterprises. Some of the carbon accounting methodologies used to analyze how much carbon is sequestered by some products like cashews, native trees, and biomass for bioenergy generation are still in the making. Agronomists, forestry engineers, and energy technicians are studying how local environmental and climatic conditions shape how much carbon is sequestered by these nature-based commodities. But carbon accounting prospects in this region take place after years of technoscientific efforts to adapt these commodities and turn them into industrial-scale profitable businesses. This paper analyzes how previous histories of forestry and agro-industrial development influence current carbon accounting efforts. I follow carbon practitioners as they try to make sense of environmental conditions that challenge, contest, and adapt to the carbon economy, evidencing the uncooperative nature (Bakker, 2003) of commodities to be entirely subsumed by novel forms of market-based carbon schemes (Carton, 2017). I show how, despite carbon practitioners’ and scientists’ assumptions, carbon accounting is not solely an ahistorical technoscientific practice, but it absorbs previous social histories of land use, community place-making, and stories of land-grabbing and displacement. Understanding previous environmental histories of agro-industrial development reveals how novel carbon accounting efforts deliver nature to new carbon economy flows, but it also evidences the potential shortcomings of these aspirations.