Organizer: The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University

Description:

This lecture by Jenny Goldstein (Global Development, Cornell) argues that Indonesia’s peatlands are experiments with land at a scale that states, scientists, and the planet’s inhabitants are just beginning to grapple with—yet are becoming increasingly common in a warming world.

Over the past several decades these peatlands—deep deposits of decaying, carbon-dense vegetation—have been transformed from forested wetlands to flammable landscapes that emit copious amounts of carbon dioxide. The reasons for such extensive destruction are often described in terms of failure: failed state development projects and failed attempts at land repair.  Goldstein argues, however, that these novel landscapes are better understood as laboratories for living with earth system volatility than as failures.

The talk draws on conceptual frameworks from geography and STS and a political ecology of peat soil to unpack the story of the Mega Rice Project, a one-million hectare site of degraded peatland in Indonesian Borneo.

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