The choreography of sacrifice: Market environmentalism, biopolitics and environmental damage

Abstract

Market environmentalism, and, arguably its exemplar carbon forestry, has been engaged within human and economic geography by drawing from the Marxist tradition, and to a lesser extent, utilising post-structuralist lines of enquiry. A direct focus on how practices and transformations related to carbon forestry could be construed as ‘sacrifical’, however, is lacking. This article seeks to remedy this by attending to the biopolitics of climate security discourse and interventions as they localise in an ‘assemblage of market environmentalism’ in Uganda. It charts a choreography of sacrifice that emerges under a neoliberal environmentality within this entity, namely, where the activities and ‘moves’ of both state and non-state actors constitute the grounds for forms of both direct and circuitous bio-cultural sacrifice. Here both surplus populations of people, the non-commercial component of Ugandan forestry, and those forest areas which are not amenable to having ‘nature pay for itself’ through carbon sequestration, are written off through direct violence and degradation, on the one hand, and through the naturalisation of broader processes of deforestation, on the other.