FlyBal- The Flying timber: A global political ethnography of balsa extractivism in the Ecuadorean Amazonia.
Welcome to FlyBal (MSCA Individual Fellowship/Grant Agreement 101067490), Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Balsa (ochroma pyramidale), is a type of timber that is mostly produced in Ecuadorian Amazonia. In fact, Ecuador is the world’s largest balsa producer and it has been so for decades. Balsa is not the world’s lightest timber, yet it is the most resistant among the light, and it is used in aero-modelism. Planes’ wings usually have a skeleton made of balsa. Yet, that’s not the only enterprise in which it is used, nor is aero-modelling what inspired this research project.
Apparently the demand for balsa has skyrocketed over the past few years, and illegal balsa trade is -indirectly – responsible for some of the Amazon’s illegal deforestation.
The – unlikely – reason is green energy: balsa is the core material used in the construction of wind turbin-blades, and since wind-farms have multiplied impressively all over the globe in the quest for green energy solutions, so has the demand for balsa, which is -ironically – bringing about deforestation in the Amazonia. In fact the deforestation is indirect: balsa itself is not an endangered type of timber right now, but since logging in the Amazonia is generally non regulated, other types of trees are also being logged together with balsa in an uncontrolled manner.
Of course, extractivism is not a new phenomenon in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. Ever since the Conquest, the region has been the source of imaginary or non-imaginary precious resources for western capitalist exploitation: from the utopian gold of El Dorado, to the rubber boom, the oil boom, and later the timber, soya, and agribusiness boom. Empires and, later, nation-states and multinationals have always been competing for access to those precious resources. As they gradually become extinct the extractive frontier has been moving closer and closer to the “refuge regions” of the Amazonia’s indigenous populations, which become the theatre of competition over land and resources. Today it is the turn of balsa to become the “brown gold” of Amazonia’s eternal El Dorado in order to produce the West’s green energy. At the same time, local communities all over the globe also increasingly oppose the installation of wind-farms, the “final product” of the global balsa supply chain.
Drawing from already existing literature on the windmills’ installation, I intend to move ‘backwards’ to see the process of extraction, combine findings with previous research on windfarms and thus overall provide a more thorough and complete understanding of the issue, contributing to the literature on green energy, its contradictions, and its lived experience; adding to the genealogy of extractivism, in the Amazonia exploring how this case study adds/ challenges/ contradicts/ furthers what we already know.
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Last modified: November 1, 2024