Environmental Justice Is Not Possible Without Women's Voices

Environmental justice cannot occur without engaging those who are the most affected. This includes women, who act as leaders in the community to support change.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Planners Need to Address the Needs of Diverse Communities in Toronto

City planners need to learn to work with increasingly diverse communities. Planners need to accept the fact that they cannot know the answer to a planning problem in advance.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Caring for Xate, caring for Xateros: NGO monitoring, livelihoods, and plant-human relations in Uaxactún, Guatemala

In Uaxactún, a community forest concession inside Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, three species of xate palm, a non-timber forest product, are at the heart of quickly evolving webs of knowledge, identity, institutional alliances, and livelihoods. Xate palms are simultaneously the "daily beans" for the majority of Uaxactún residents, the object of intense study and regulation, a commodity marketable to international floral markets, a marker of local identity, and a ubiquitous part of the forest landscape. Now, as the result of a series of projects instituted by the conservation NGO, the Wildlife Conservation Society and other institutions, xate in Uaxactún is being transformed from a "natural", exploited part of the landscape to something to actively cuidar, or care for. NGO-driven dynamics of monitoring, study, and other external knowledge-making about the village are central to these ongoing shifts in xate-human relations, and to broader changes in local senses of place and identity. "Care" describes both material and affective relations, including practices and values that strive for a more liveable world without assuming an ultimate goal or a best solution. NGO projects that foster relations of care between villagers and xate palms are also a form of caring for villagers themselves, working as they do towards sustainable shared human/non-human futures. At the same time, however, these projects are "necessary but not sufficient" – caught in the problematic local scale, and failing to address deeper structural problems that keep Uaxactún residents dependent on precarious sources of income. Keywords: Guatemala, Maya Biosphere Reserve, NTFPs, NGOs, environmental knowledge, car

Celebrating Economies of Change: Brave Visions for Inclusive Futures

This issue has been inspired by a path-breaking conference held by the Canadian Society for Ecologi-cal Economics (CANSEE), which took place this past May 2019 in Waterloo, Ontario. Entitled Engaging Economies of Change, the conference aimed to ex-pand existing research networks in the economy-environment nexus by building connections beyond the academy in order to meaningfully engage with the practicalities of building and implementing change. This issue captures the rich content shared during the event, as well as descriptions of the pro-cesses and efforts made to create a welcoming and respectful space where academics and community activists could build alliances and discuss common challenges. The conference organizers – all graduate students and activists themselves -- called this ‘building a brave space’.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

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Satellites and Senses of Place: Remote Monitoring of Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve

Remote sensing technologies, such as satellite imagery, along with geographic information systems (GIS) computer programs, which can analyze complex spatial data, are emerging as key instruments in the global conservation toolbox. These rapidly developing technologies allow for new visions of forested landscapes and new forms of social and ecological analysis, and my research investigates both the production of scientific knowledge enabled by remote sensing and GIS, and how this knowledge is used and transformed in application by conservationists. Drawing on over 14 months of field research in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve -- widely recognized as one of the most difficult places in the world to do forest conservation -- I analyze how Guatemala's continued history of violence and inequality intersect with technoscience, environmental knowledge, and governance. I present ethnographic accounts of the work of remote monitoring, information processing, and map-making in a joint state-NGO computer lab; the use, interpretation, and transformation of maps and reports by conservationists; and the intersections of this official knowledge with daily lives and livelihoods inside the reserve. I analyze diffractively across these sites and sources, bringing together mundane data processing, images and reports, conservation decisions, local subsistence practices, and both ordinary and exceptional violence. This research reveals the unexpected movements of meaning and politics across scales, the co-construction of official, centralized knowledge with multiple senses of place, space, time, and identity, and the ways in which science and technology are embroiled with deeply felt desires for clarity in a reserve characterized by uncertainty and rapid change. I argue that the violence and political paranoia that characterize post-civil war Guatemala are deeply entangled with the production and interpretation of scientific knowledge about its landscapes and people. Finally, I analyze how this knowledge can facilitate collaboration across social and political difference, while also reinforcing those differences and their embedded power dynamics. This research draws together and contributes to science and technology studies (STS) and environmental anthropology, and also contributes to broad interdisciplinary and applied discussions on the politics of conservation and development practice by examining the dynamics of authority, technology, and knowledge in environmental governance on a troubled landscape