As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

A new theoretical framework is required to expose how the underlying political economic systems function and drive deforestation. The hypotheses and case studies are presented while situating deforesting processes in the international system and its many subsystems, which are composed of partially interlinked sectors that often compete for the same land areas. This is a detailed political economic analysis, based on regionally situated world-ecological analyses, which consider the power that different sectors have in causing the loss of forests, such as Brazilian ranching speculation, Amazonian gold mining, and Finnish pulp and energywood forestry. The chapter contends that there is a need to cultivate a deeper, comparative, and global crises-situated understanding of the role these forces have in driving deforesting. One must also understand the local-level enabling factors and the role of resistance. Insights are woven together from several disciplines and approaches such as political ecology and world-ecology into a new conceptual framework that can be widely applied to explain global development dynamics, beyond the specific application to deforestation.

This chapter discusses the relation of global extractivisms to global deforestation, making novel claims about the role of forests in the international system. This is a global, world-ecological analysis of why forests seem to have not mattered in the interstate system and how they are still overlooked in favor of a free flow of commodity trade and interstate competition. The impacts of the world system on forests are explored over the past 5,000 years, focusing especially on the past 550 years. “Epochal moments,” for example, wars or events like the COVID-19 pandemic, are particularly detrimental to retaining the world’s old-growth forests. One should avoid overgeneralizations of how global capitalism or humanity (as the “Anthropocene”) drive deforestation. Thus, the chapter utilizes a long-term, world-system perspective, focusing on how the current structures of the world-system drive deforestation. The chapter uncovers how the nature of the interstate system affects the efforts by global environmental governance and other means to try to curb or control deforestation. This curbing is fundamentally restricted by the lobbying and political power of RDPEs.

Peru’s Amazon is the site of a violent and fast-moving gold-mining rush, which has caused divides within Indigenous communities and devastating environmental impacts from the mercury used in gold extractivism. There has been a massive increase in illegal or informal gold mining, especially in Peru’s Madre de Dios province. Tens of thousands of miners operate on rafts in the rivers or dig for gold by increasingly mechanized means. In Madre de Dios there is a gold-mining RDPE that explains the bulk of land and forest use. In addition to an exploration of the dynamics of gold extractivism, this chapter also assesses the conflicts and resistance at play in this context. Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon, are currently facing huge extractivist pressures, which has started to polarize many communities and change their relationship with the extractivist phenomena. Some community members have started to extract gold illegally and destructively, while most resist these temptations, invoking nonmodernist cosmologies and understandings that place barriers to extractivist expansions.

Finnish clearcutting is driven by a historically consolidated political economy that includes the large paper and pulp companies, energywood users, and state and regional forestry expert organizations. The Finnish case highlights how boreal forest clearcutting is a key issue that receives less global attention than tropical forest deforestation. Historically, clearcutting was a story of economic growth, framed as a national success story of boosting national welfare in the aftermath of the Second World War (WWII). This approach to forestry management was a top-down model, which severed the traditional relations Finns had to forests. Since WWII, clearcutting has become an institution that is supported and protected by both industry and the Finnish state. This reflects the persistent hegemonic situation, although the role and importance of the forest industry has declined in society and economy. Even though the forestry industry is losing ground, it is still important in the cultural mindset of several forestholders. This chapter explains the crucial role played by a hegemonic and dominant system, which includes corporations, key state actors, and many private forestholders.

This chapter is a novel intersectorial analysis of deforesting industries in Brazil linked to illegal land grabbing/land value speculation, including ranching, monoculture plantation expansion, logging, and infrastructure development. The driving and pulling causes of deforestation in the Amazon are explored through a deeper analysis of the ranching-grabbing regionally dominant political economy (RDPE). Ranching speculating is by far the most prominent key driver and dominant political-economic sector in explaining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Counterintuitively, politically enabled illegal land grabbing/speculation have become more lucrative in many places than the actual ranching activities on the deforested land. Drawing on field research and expert interviews in the Brazilian Amazon, this chapter explains how ranching opens lands for other forms of extractivism, especially the expansion of monoculture plantations. The relations and distinct yet interlinked business logics within ranching and soybean plantation sectors yield an analysis of “modern” and “primitive” forms of agribusiness. The particularities of Amazonian cattle capitalisms are explored via regional comparisons.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

The conclusion unites the key empirical, theoretical, and methodological lessons, showcasing findings on the causes of deforestation relevant for several scholarly fields. The book’s original contribution and approach highlight the importance of RDPEs as the ultimate cause of deforestation. These RDPEs are also building blocks of global capitalism and regional drivers of deforestation, enabled by state actions, yet simultaneously resisted by progressive state and civil society actors. Ranching-grabbing in Brazil and gold mining–organized crime in the Amazon are explored as particularly important extractivist systems that help to explain deforestation in the Amazon at a deeper level. The book also discusses clearcutting and how it is driven by the aims of the pulping, papermaking, and wood energy sectors in Finland. Finland is a Nordic welfare state in the EU, which provides a novel comparison of how regionally dominant extractivist systems can vary yet still cause loss of forests across the North–South divide in the world-system. The lessons are related to broader discussions around global forests and deforestation.

The Finnish pulp sector is the key actor responsible for the preference for a homogenous clearcut forest economy. This chapter examines the historic roots and global connections related to Finland’s post-2015 so-called bioeconomy boom. This boom prompted the construction of large “bioproduct” mills, which in practice produce export-oriented pulp that will be turned into cardboard and tissue. Finland is transforming from being the core of global paper production to being a semi-commodity producer. Fiber mass production and its accompanying energy production are key in delineating how forests are used, what kind of trees are grown, where, for how long, and based on what logic. The reasons why the pulp-driven forestry strategy and clearcutting model have continued against all logic are explored. This chapter uncovers how the pulp sector became dominant and the effects of the new contentious forest politics in the context of the “bioeconomy” and European Union (EU) legislation.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.