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Jesús Valdivia planned to get his cows high. This, he explained, would calm them, and guard them against the frantic despair that animals in close quarters feel when they collectively sense their impending death. We were seated on the third floor of a sprawling mall on the outskirts of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Over vegetarian quiche, Jesús described “Paradise Farm,” his nascent ethical meat business. The farm was inspired by the work of André Marcel Voisin, a French biochemist, farmer, and author known for developing a “rational grazing” method.
In January 2020, I carried out preliminary research in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, where rampant wildfires had engulfed wide swaths of the country each year since August 2010. The fires of 2019 and 2020 were especially devastating, with NASA’s Earth Observatory showing plumes of smoke covering the region. Unlike earlier discrete fires that could be controlled, these megafires (incendios) blanketed the Pantanal wetlands in the eastern part of the country, the dry Chiquitania forest in the southeast, and the Beni savanna and Amazon rainforest areas in the north. In 2021, these megafires earned Bolivia third position among countries suffering intense forest losses from fire.
But to my surprise Jesús had little interest in talking about the fires. He felt that recent media coverage had vastly overplayed their destructive force. Reaching for his cellphone, he scrolled through images of green shoots and buds that appeared on lands razed by the megafires just weeks before. Given that capacity for resilience, he felt that narratives of fire’s destructibility were overly pessimistic, ignoring the potentials for landscapes and people alike to make life in and with fire.
This reorientation to fire led Jesús, along with several university professors, agricultural engineers, and permaculture organizations, to develop a new meat farming method calibrated to the seasonal regularity of lowland burning. Drawing from his experience at Paradise Farm, in February 2020 Jesús hosted a three-day workshop: “First Course on Rational Grazing: More than PRV [Pastoreo Racional Voison].”
As a self-proclaimed animal lover, Jesús wanted to apply André Marcel Voison’s rational grazing method and combine it with his own experimental approaches, like giving cows marijuana. The farm would house “native cows”—a phrase he used to denote mixed Bolivian breeds of Saavedreño, Chaqueño, and Yacumeño rather than European taurine breeds—who can weather hotter, drier climates and can pasture on forested terrain. Clear-cutting would become unnecessary, thereby slowing the dramatic burning of the Amazon river basin caused by deforestation, and making the farm less vulnerable to seasonal megafires.
Over the subsequent two years, I got updates on the farm from Jesús and his Facebook feed, where he frequently posts Bible verse, celebrating His ability to listen to what we ask for (I John 5:14-15), pledging to uphold his promises to Him (Johah 2:91 from John 5:14-15), and identifying elements of the surrounding world as the “work of His hands” (Psalm 19:1). El Señor is implicitly positioned as one who aids the success of Jesús’s agricultural pursuits, which apply Voison’s method for climate change adaption. When I visited in 2022, Jesús brushed aside my question of whether his business was shaped by his evangelical Christian faith, but the name of his farm and his Facebook posting of Bible verse suggested otherwise.
Narratives of climate apocalypse and Anthropocene dystopia often evoke Christian narratives of the end-times, with environmental change as a symptom of insufficient human piety. Against this gloom and doom narrative, Jesús carried an optimistic faith in new technofutures like rational grazing. In this way, he hoped to anticipate, and even profit from, fire’s recursivity. Hence, for people like Jesús, climate change became something to master: a scene of self-transformation that could make you rich, and more pious.
Jesús’s Paradise Farm and its place in Bolivian efforts to counteract climate change raise several questions: As megafires in the Amazon and the world over promise to accelerate a planetary slip toward the end-times, what becomes of older narratives of racialized deservingness over property, with their presumptions of land’s disposability to capital and to profit? Have they been swallowed up by ostensibly secular distributions of climate and capital? Or do they persist, the humming motor that underwrites lasting imaginaries of (green) futurity and (settler) benefit, but only to the chosen few?
Jesús belongs to Bolivia’s Criollo middle-class, and the land he bought up for Paradise Farm is located upon the traditional homelands of several Indigenous Guaraní, Ayoreo, and Chiquitanos communities. Chiquitanos peoples were unified and required to speak a shared language by Jesuit missionaries who settled the region in 1692, after nearly two centuries of indigenous armed resistance to evangelicalization and forced labor. In this landscape, Jesús assumed the place of a white or Criollo settler.
His opposition to the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party and its Indigenous and peasant supporters solidified this position. In one Facebook post, he shared a photograph of a cloud formation resembling two soldiers with rifles raised accompanied by the text, “When God gives a symbol, what do we do to the MASistas?” A short year earlier, anti-MAS political and military forces opened gunfire on Indigenous MAS supporters, killing 37 people and injuring more than 800. Such bellicose cloud formations and the profits to be crafted from blanketed smoke across the Amazon basin highlight how climate change is racialized. Who lives, and who must perish, for green(er) futures to take root?
In Bolivia widespread images of suffering animals circulated in ways that produced new awakening to ecology, evident in a nascent class of environmental Instagram stars and online influencers who seized that moment to decry the MAS government’s failure to sufficiently protect them, the animals, and the forests from destruction in the megafires. The fate of Indigenous and migrant groups in Bolivia, including villages displaced by the incendio fires and highland Quechua and Aymara migrants blamed for causing them, was hereby erased, replaced by the image of the hapless animal victim.
Kathryn Yusoff, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, Kyle Whyte, and Max Libioron critique narratives of exceptional climate apocalypse. Such narratives erroneously cast environmental dystopia and forms of suffering elicited by ecological change and collapse as new, and somehow borne equally. As Davis and Todd write, the “fleshy, violent loss of 50 million Indigenous peoples in the Americas” belongs to the quickening and compression of the repeated seismic shifts in space-time elicited by colonialism, which include “laying waste to legal orders, languages, place-story in quick succession.”
In the face of egregious environmental and relational devastation, positioning climate crisis as the outcome of “human” development since the Holocene, rather than of the evils of European colonial expansion and industrialization, requires a “temporal sleight of hand.” By way of this maneuver, (settler) environmentalists attempt to claim innocence vis-à-vis an ongoing history of land expropriation, enslavement, and profit-driven growth from which they continue to benefit. In this way, fantasies of climate solidarity evoke “universal human frailty” in ways that problematically circumvent issues of uneven yet “specific culpability.”
Read alongside these critiques, Jesús’s Paradise Farm indicates how fire’s “alter-lives”—efforts to counter fire and climate crisis through departures from a capitalist status quo—can entrench rather than interrupt racialized political and economic orders. Such orders perpetuate a derisive, exclusionary category of the human whose forms of life (and sources of meat) must be protected. Ethical meat production, in this context, emerges as a way for settlers to inhabit climate apocalypse without “giving anything up.”
Jesús’s farm, despite its well-meaning attunement to animal welfare, discounts the climate violence suffered by the many lowland residents, farmers, and squatter communities who cannot make fire into profit, who cannot master transformed climates as new entrepreneurial openings. Instead, they suffer from bronchitis and must weather losses of crops and livestock, timber and homes. Such climate change mitigation efforts proclaim a departure from the status quo, but they follow the well-worn footprints of Indigenous land dispossession in the Chaco region and the Amazon more broadly. In this context, fire’s alter-lives—those climate mitigation efforts that might superficially appear as alternatives to neoliberal capital and self-devouring growth—can reproduce the hubris of terra nullius, erasing Indigenous inhabitations of landscape and enduring experiences of racial dispossession in ways that recover the settler as the pious cultivator of a more vibrant future.
The broader project I am involved in highlights fire’s potency for Indigenous Chiquitanos and migrant communities who strive to unseat the racialized property monopolies to which new techno-agriculturalist utopias like Paradise Farm belong. Ongoing collaborative research with Indigenous (Chiquitano, Guarani, Ayoreo, and Quechua) and migrant communities through the Centro de Comunidades Chiquitanos Turubó examines to what degree efforts at climate change mitigation through Criollo expertise and Indigenous erasure capture the political lives of changing climates. In present-day Bolivia, it seems, fire’s mercuriality has also made it especially powerful for efforts to reclaim ongoing histories of Indigenous inhabitation against dispossession.
Technocratic approaches to climate change frequently detach it from considerations of Indigenous sovereignty, re-entrenching non-Indigenous and settler claims to land, Nature, and the nation’s future. Instead, Indigenous Turubó organizers are nurturing community-based environmental projects that unite questions of racialized vulnerability and climate justice. They do so through a set of re-emplacements that reclaim distinct Indigenous histories of inhabitation and struggle against the racial fantasies of universal vulnerability and solidarity at play in efforts to conserve a generalizable Nature. Doing so unsteadies settler narratives of climate, whose green futures require making land disposable by violently sundering worthy from unworthy life.
Taras Fedirko and Whitney Russell are section contributing editors for the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.