From Wilderness Appropriations to Fluid Forest Edges

The Maya Forest Eco-Borderlands and -Frontiers

Abstract

Frontier refers to an advancing front and a peripheral area subject to resource conquests that transform power relations. Again, borderlands was born to rethink the frontier’s colonial, binary divisions from within the edges of empires. Both notions explore outermost regions. Recently the peripheral, biodiversity rich regions have become subject to ecological concerns and actions, interpreted as advancing eco-frontiers. This article sheds light to the antagonistic but entangled frontiers and borderlands – and their relationship to nature – by exploring the ways in which conservation shapes forests in these kinds of fringes. The article builds on the case of the Maya Forest (Selva Maya), a notion developed by conservationists and scientists to conserve the humid, tropical rainforests in the borderlands of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. The Maya Forest case suggests that the eco-frontier pre-assumption of wilderness appropriation reproduces problematic frontier binary categories. In lieu, the article conceptualizes ecological borderlands (eco-borderlands) as fluid edges subject to ecological actions and concerns, yet also as crossroads and places of encounters, where power relations evade authentic, purist definitions and create symbiotic, uncertain and human/nature entanglements.