Biodiversity and Sustainability as Objects of Governance

Although we now live in a world where the term biodiversity seems ubiquitous, critical scholarship has underscored its contingent historical emergence as a distinctive kind of nature coterminous with neoliberal forms of transnational governance. Since the mid-1980s, biodiversity emerged in interdisciplinary policy circles as a model of nature docile to economic management and industrial entrepreneurship (Hayden 2003: 61; Vadrot 2014: 21). In contrast to past visions where nature was to be encircled and defended from economic intervention in order to be preserved, biodiversity was to be embraced in the opposite sense: by creating a virtuous circuit between nature and the economy where putting a value on the diversity of life became a condition for its sustainability (Büscher et al. 2012; Hayden 2003). In this sense, the consolidation of the term can be seen as symptomatic of the growing neoliberalization of environmental conservation and management in the late-twentieth century (Büscher et al. 2012; Castree 2008; Igoe and Brockington 2007; West 2006). As biodiversity has expanded across the world, however, so have myriad controversies over its study and definition, with at least 80 different definitions of the term circulating today in policy circles (Jones and Solomon 2013: 672; Vadrot 2014: 6). Further, the unsettled definition of biodiversity directly relates to its inescapable political nature. In this context, anthropologists have extensively documented how the market-based logics associated to biodiversity conservation and sustainability have triggered various forms of resistance, contention, and refusal where people dispute the terms over which nature is to be understood and protected (Escobar 1998; Fletcher 2010; Peterson et al. 2010; West 2006).

In this context, biodiversity has emerged as a crucial object of global environmental governance. Today, many international treaties and initiatives, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar), the Global Biodiversity Assessment, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the recently created Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), set the global conditions by which states and multilateral institutions are to monitor, protect, and exploit biodiversity sustainably (Borie and Hulme 2015: 487; Smith et al. 2020: 2). In this sense, biodiversity discourse articulates (or, rather, resuscitates) an intense taxonomic impetus to catalog the diversity of life as a condition for its use and preservation. Comprehensive biodiversity inventories have thus emerged as fundamental infrastructures for the conservation of nature at various scales, with many international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Environmental Programme regularly using them as technologies of monitoring and enforcement (Hayden 2003: 162). Against the global threat of mass extinction, taxonomic inventories have been understood as a necessary condition for ecological care, with the absence of systematic knowledge amounting to the loss of untapped economic value and, accordingly, to the loss of richness in nature (Ellis et al. 2010; Hayden 2003: 57; Waterton et al. 2013). A growing anxiety with endangerment and anticipated loss is thus deeply engrained in the fibers of biodiversity discourse, which positions the ever-expanding urge to catalog and monitor species as a way to circumvent the threat of death and extinction (Hayden 2003; Sodikoff 2012; Yusoff 2010).

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) can be seen as an early comer in this wider ecosystem of transnational biodiversity governance. Established in 1975 following discussions at the IUCN, CITES is an international convention ratified today by more than 184 countries from every continent, which makes it one of the largest and most widely sanctioned environmental agreements in the world. The goal of CITES is to ensure that international wildlife trade does not lead to the extinction of endangered species that, if unchecked, might become overexploited as they enter a variety of transnational supply chains. In order to do so, the Convention demands that adhering countries accommodate their domestic legislation so that exports of endangered species proceed according to strict principles of sustainability. In this sense, CITES is a precursor to the contentious science-policy interface that saturates global environmental governance today (Jasanoff 2007; Miller and Edwards 2001), to the extent that it seeks to ground regulations upon the international wildlife trade in an expanding technoscientific knowledge about species populations, regeneration rates, geographic ranges, export levels, et cetera. (CITES 1973: art. IV).

Importantly, CITES defines its objects of regulation not in terms of specific ecosystems, landscapes, or industrial sectors, but by virtue of three appendices that organize hundreds of species according to various degrees of current endangerment. The logic of the taxonomic catalog, therefore, heavily permeates CITES's particular approach to biodiversity conservation and sustainability. Whereas Appendix III includes all species that at least one country has decided to unilaterally protect, and Appendix I includes all species currently threatened with extinction (and thus banned from regular international trade), Appendix II establish a middle ground of protection that allows for trade within the bounds of particular criteria of sustainability. In this Appendix, one finds all species that, while not presently threatened with extinction, “may become so unless trade in specimens of such species is subject to strict regulation in order to avoid utilization incompatible with their survival” (CITES 1973: art. II). Each subscribing country, therefore, becomes responsible to carry out studies, set export quotas and issue export permits that secure the sustainable exploitation of species under Appendix II. In turn, all information pertaining to the international trade of these species is reported back to the CITES Secretariat, which periodically “reviews the progress made by countries toward the restoration and conservation of species”. This includes moving species across appendices or, importantly for our purposes, including previously unlisted species in Appendix I, II, or III (see CITES 1973: art. XI, c).

The periodic revision of CITES appendices inaugurates a tension between individual nation-states and multilateral platforms where endangerment and sustainability emerge from rather contentious processes of political, epistemic, and ethical negotiation (see Sollund 2022; Thompson 2004). Granted, national sovereignty over the determination of sustainability is recognized as nation-states are responsible for conducting their own non-detrimental national studies, setting their own export quotas, and issuing their own export permits (see CITES 2013). But despite the recognition of such sovereign determinations, states are simultaneously bound to their obligation to report information, accept the oversight of the CITES Secretariat, and abide by decisions periodically taken in the meetings of the CITES Conference of the Parties (COP). In CITES, biodiversity thus emerges as a space of governance with distinctive temporalities and geographies. Contrary to the immutability classically associated to the Linnean taxonomy (see Stamos 2007), the CITES Appendix is a dynamic space of observation where the endangerment of species is determined through the combined labor of scrutiny pursued by nation-states, multilateral platforms and civil society networks over transnational supply chains. But importantly, it is also a space of future-oriented redemption, where present endangerment can give way to future restoration through the enforcement of principles of sustainability based on reliable technoscientific knowledge.

For countries like Peru, such demands for reliable technoscientific knowledge have resulted in a growing international pressure to regulate transnational supply chains affecting the biodiversity of Amazonian rainforests. If multilateral agreements like CITES demand the intensive production of technoscientific knowledge in order to ensure the sustainability of international trade, pressures to restore endangered species via rigorous monitoring and oversight have, however, confronted the historical uncertainties associated to Amazonian rainforests as internal frontiers of the Peruvian state. The recent history of Shihuahuaco in Peru thus shows how debates over endangerment and sustainability unfold against the backdrop of long and recalcitrant histories of intractable extraction that complicate contemporary aspirations of global environmental governance.

Endangering Shihuahuaco

To understand how Shihuahuaco became increasingly recognized as an endangered species in the early twenty-first century, we must first consider the particular temporalities and geographies that have historically informed the extraction of various lifeforms in Peruvian Amazonia. A robust scholarship has shown how Amazonian rainforests have consistently been portrayed as internal frontiers of the Peruvian state since at least the late-nineteenth century (see Tsing 2005: 28, for a discussion of tropical rainforests as frontiers). In such depictions, Amazonia has been enduringly imagined as a space where tropical exuberance, racialized fear and mystical intrigue persistently interrupt the expansion of modern industry, technological innovation and sovereign rule (see Slater 2002; Walker 1987). Such status as a fantastic frontier resonates with Amazonia's historical development as the locus of various extractive cycles in the last 150 years. Since the onset of the infamous rubber boom in the nineteenth century, when Amazonian trees were articulated for the first time to transnational supply chains, Amazonia has been the scenario of various cycles of intensive extraction responding to shifting variations in national and transnational demand (Barclay and Santos Granero 2000; Coomes and Barham 1994). Each of these so-called booms precariously articulated national and international capitals with vast networks of Indigenous and rural workers operating in remote areas of the rainforest. And as each of these booms receded, each has left tangible ecological imprints in the distribution and abundance of various species in the region.

Tropical logging has not been an exception to the temporalities and geographies associated to such abrupt cycles of transnational demand. In the late-twentieth century, Peru's tropical logging industry was mostly focused on the extraction of valuable timber varieties such as mahogany and cedar, whose extraction was oriented toward the fabrication of fine doors, furniture and windows for premium international markets (Dourojeanni 2009: 611; Urrunaga et al. 2012: 7). Importantly, both mahogany and cedar have relatively low densities, which makes them buoyant upon water. This meant that as legions of loggers would scout the rainforest in order to find such valuable trees, they could use rivers and streams to transport their timber consignments across a region largely devoid of highways or roads. The temporalities of logging labor were thus heavily marked by the temporalities of Amazonia's rain cycle. Once loggers harvested and chopped down trees during the dry season, they waited for rains to fill the watercourses by which logs could slowly be brought to the centers were timber was to be piled and processed.

The indiscriminate extraction of mahogany and cedar at the turn of the century came to be regionally known as el boom de la caoba, the mahogany boom, and eventually led to a rising national and international recognition of the endangerment of both kinds of trees in the country (Lombardi et al. 2014). As a result, mahogany and cedar were subject to an increasing political and ecological pressure during the first decade of the twenty-first century. One the one hand, both varieties of trees became increasingly difficult to find, with loggers venturing to ever more remote or dangerous areas of the rainforest in order to harvest them. On the other hand, both became objects of new national and international regulations, with CITES listing the genus Cedrela (cedar) in 2001 and the species Swietenia macrophylla (mahogany) in 2002. From the standpoint of loggers, such conditions made the harvesting of both kinds of timber increasingly expensive and risky. This eventually led to a gradual diversification of Peru's tropical logging industry (Dourojeanni 2009: 364). And so, by 2004 about 38 different kinds of timber were being harvested in Peru (Fernández et al.: 25), including currently well-known tropical timber varieties such as Lupuna, Cumala, Tornillo, and Capirona (Dourojeanni 2009: 599; Urrunaga et al. 2012: 7).

In this context, Shihuahuaco gradually emerged as an increasingly attractive variety of timber for legions of loggers looking for new tradeable species in the rainforest. Traditionally, Shihuahuaco had been used in Peruvian Amazonia as a source of premium charcoal. But its distinctive physical characteristics had so far impeded its circulation across Peru's tropical timber supply chains. At the turn of the century, tropical logging was still predominantly structured through exploitative (and mostly illegal) patronage relations working through minimal investments in equipment, personnel, and security. As brigades of Indigenous and rural loggers would confront the magnitude of old Shihuahuaco trees and strive to chop them down to carry their timber through the rainforest, their voluminosity would impose significant logistical and financial constraints upon their trade. Further, Shihuahuaco's extreme density and weight meant that its timber could not float over water. Accordingly, while small-scale loggers could use rivers and streams as low-technology solutions to spur cedar and mahogany logs out of the rainforest, Shihuahuaco could not be transported this way. This made its extraction significantly pricier, particularly in areas not connected to major navigable riverways.

Around the turn of the century, however, new infrastructural conditions in Peru's tropical logging industry made the harvesting of Shihuahuaco (and other weighty tropical hardwoods) increasingly possible. If loggers traditionally depended on their bare physical strength and the buoyancy of timber to move logs out of the rainforest, it was not until the widespread dissemination of heavier industrial equipment that Shihuahuaco began to be massively harvested across Peru's Amazonian rainforests. As forestry winches, tractors, and barges gradually displaced the use of manual levers and lografts, this infrastructural transformation decisively altered the temporalities and geographies of tropical logging in Amazonia. On the one hand, new areas of the rainforest, previously inaccessible to industrial intervention, were suddenly open for extraction. On the other hand, new kinds of tropical hardwoods, including Shihuahuaco, were now movable with the help of mechanical pulls and river vessels. As heavy machinery opened broad paths through the rainforest and expanded the range of action of loggers, such new infrastructural conditions also led to an even more dramatic disruption of tropical rainforests, which led to an unprecedented circulation of many varieties of timber across Peru's tropical timber supply chains.

Crucially, just as the harvesting of cedar and mahogany was fueled by Euroatlantic desires for fine furniture and decoration, the harvesting of Shihuahuaco was triggered by a rising transnational demand for fine wood floors and construction materials, particularly in China. Between 2012 and 2020, about 71 percent of all Shihuahuaco exported from Peru flowed to China, with Europe (13 percent), the United States (7.5 percent), and other countries accounting for the rest (Castro et al. 2022). To the extent that China enforces comparatively less stringent environmental regulations upon its international trade than its Euroatlantic peers, the dominance of China in the trade of Peruvian Shihuahuaco has also brought less transparency upon its transnational supply chains. It is fair to assume, however, that the intensive harvest of Shihuahuaco in Peru is at least partially connected to the economic rise of China, the expansion of its middle class, and the intensification of Chinese investments in Peru's tropical logging industry in the first two decades of the twenty-first century (see EIA 2018).

Fueled by this rising transnational demand, the hard and heavy timber of Shihuahuaco has thus become distinctively ingrained in the industrial and political landscape of contemporary Peruvian Amazonia. Although Shihuahuaco is also harvested in other South American countries like Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia, in Peru it amounts to at least half of all timber exports in the country (Castro et al. 2022) and accounted for 80 percent of all timber exports in one recent year (CITES 2022: 3). The overwhelming gravitation toward Shihuahuaco in Peru's tropical logging industry has also led to its imbrication in vast networks of political influence and corruption. For not only have several criminal mafias flourished around its unauthorized harvest (Bargent 2020; Castro 2021), but securing its continuous exploitation and trade has also become the main priority for a powerful guild of exporting timber companies with significant lobbying capacity in Peru's feeble state administration (Castro et al. 2022). As international demand rose and money flowed in, such corporate sector has also fueled the development of a hardwood processing industry that has become a significant pole of employment in many Amazonian localities.

Over the last 20 years, Shihuahuaco has thus emerged as the privileged substance constituting Peru's tropical timber supply chains. Only between 2000 and 2013, volumes of harvested Shihuahuaco multiplied at least 22 times (Alvira et al. 2016). And in the last decade, Peru's international trade of Shihuahuaco has represented over half a billion dollars (Castro et al. 2022). While such numbers intend to summarize the aggregated facts and figures of Peru's national commerce, they simultaneously suggest the very tangible and extraordinary mobilization of at least 353,310 trees across vast stretches of the Amazon rainforest (Montaño 2022; see also CITES 2022: 15). As tropical timber grown over hundreds or even thousands of years has been massively mobilized in order to satisfy middle-class appetites in China, the United States, and the European Union, Shihuahuaco has joined the ranks of rubber trees, cedar, mahogany, and many other Amazonian lifeforms whose extraction has historically transformed the composition of tropical rainforests and led to the depletion of many species in the country.

Importantly, none of these cycles of transnational demand has been informed by the development of robust infrastructures of technoscientific knowledge. Quite to the contrary, they have relied on the enduring (and, in many ways, intentional) production of opacity and uncertainty. If James Scott and others have shown how temperate forests in Europe became sites for some of the most ambitious projects of technoscientific legibility in the European Enlightenment (Lowood 1990; Scott 1998), the enduring status of Amazonian rainforests as internal frontiers of the Peruvian state have historically cast them as spaces saturated by technoscientific uncertainty. In the case of Shihuahuaco, this can be observed, for instance, in the discrepancy between official numbers of reported harvesting and reported exports, where the flows of Shihuahuaco moving out of the country largely surpass the harvest that has been officially declared by loggers (Alvira et al. 2016; Tarazona and Castro 2015: 8). Some specialists even suggest that some shipments of Shihuahuaco might be deceptively exported under other denominations, thus casting even more doubts upon the actual numbers of Shihuahuaco being harvested in Peru. After 20 years of intensive extraction, it is noticeable how little is agreed upon in Peru's political and technocratic circles not only about Shihuahuaco's harvest and trade but also about its overall population size, associated risks of depletion and even species composition. As the rise of Shihuahuaco in Peru's tropical logging industry has led to an increasingly vigorous conversation about the need of its protection and restoration, debates over its endangerment have unfolded against the backdrop of longstanding uncertainties about the state of tropical rainforests in the country.

In this sense, the recent history of Shihuahuaco can be seen as a new iteration of the shifting cycles of transnational demand that, over the last 150 years, have come and gone in Peruvian Amazonia (see Barclay and Santos Granero 2000). As was the case in such cycles, the expansive harvesting of Shihuahuaco has not been mediated by technoscientific knowledge and planning, but by intractable processes by which its peculiar physical characteristics have historically interacted with novel infrastructural conditions, expanding logistical accessibility, and shifting transnational dynamics of supply and demand. This process inscribes Shihuahuaco in the particular geographies and temporalities of capital accumulation, extraction and ecological depletion that have enduringly haunted Peru's Amazonian rainforests. As Shihuahuaco becomes increasingly hard to find, as millenary trees are chopped down and industrially processed, and as tons of fine wood flooring pieces are exported every year from Peru, a future of extinction insinuates itself amidst the uncertainties of the present.

But contrary to prior cycles of international demand, the endangerment of Shihuahuaco has taken place amidst wider transformations in global environmental governance. Over the last 20 years, rising international anxieties around climate change and biodiversity loss have led to novel diplomatic pressures, environmental trade regulations, and technical infrastructures of monitoring and verification that have radically transformed the governance of biodiversity in Peru and elsewhere. In such processes, the international trade of tropical timber has become a growing object of environmental concern, with many national and international policy initiatives seeking to trace and register its deleterious effects upon the biodiversity of Peru's Amazonian rainforests. Debates over the fate of Shihuahuaco have thus mounted at a time of increasing concern with information-driven sustainability and biodiversity protection and restoration. As export volumes, population sizes, and regeneration rates have become objects of increasing scrutiny and dispute, such debates have unfolded, however, amidst significant uncertainties, conflicting temporalities, and disparate visions about the future of tropical rainforests in Peru.

Rendering Shihuahuaco Sustainable

If Amazonian rainforests were enduringly understood as internal frontiers of the Peruvian state for most of the country's history, the rise of biodiversity discourse and environmental sustainability in the late-twentieth century gradually changed how the region came to be envisioned, both nationally and internationally. Since the late 1980s, widespread international concerns over the future of tropical rainforests started to permeate various international policy circles, political campaigns, and consumer sensibilities around the world (Brosius 1999; Tsing 2005; West 2010). In the 1990s, new environmental publics made of NGO advocates, Indigenous leaders, policy-makers and concerned citizens increasingly demanded that governments and corporations took action for the protection of tropical rainforests against the imminence of ecological destruction. The most technocratic threads of such international momentum heavily pushed for the implementation of new mechanisms of monitoring and oversight in transnational supply chains. And so, the last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the development of an international market of certification labels championing sustainability in a variety of industries affecting the integrity of tropical rainforests (see FAO 2016).

In this context, the sustainability of the international tropical timber trade became a growing matter of concern in the rising transnational discussion over the future of tropical rainforests. In the early twenty-first century, a series of new regulations in the United States and the European Union criminalized the trade of illegally sourced tropical timber shipments in their domestic markets. Further, novel diplomatic agreements and foreign aid cooperation mechanisms were driven at reforming state governance institutions and compliance procedures in exporting countries like Peru, with the goal of securing the legality of tropical timber supply chains. In time, this new international context led to the gradual and convoluted transformation of Peru's tropical logging industry. If until the 1990s illegality had been the tacit rule in tropical logging, with the fragile compliance mechanisms enforced by the Peruvian state widely known to be utterly unreliable, after the turn of the century, new domestic laws and institutional reforms significantly increased the state's oversight and monitoring of loggers and their activities.

This wider set of reforms led to a shift in the way the depletion and extinction of timber species was discussed in the country, particularly in the case of mahogany and cedar. By the early twenty-first century, several media scandals, judicial decisions and NGO advocacy programs increasingly led to the implementation of new regulations aiming to prevent the overexploitation of mahogany and cedar in Peruvian Amazonia (Caillaux and Chirinos 2003; Urrunaga et al. 2012). At the international level, both varieties of timber were included in CITES, which brought stringent regulations upon their harvesting and international trade. And by 2006, the Peruvian state created its first national list of endangered species, which introduced additional domestic regulations over the exploitation of mahogany, cedar, and other varieties of intensively harvested tropical timber varieties (Epiquien 2016). By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, these series of initiatives had succeeded in significantly reducing the harvesting and trade of mahogany and cedar, which led, for the first time in history, to mounting hopes about the possibility of actively restoring the depleted populations of both varieties of trees in the country (see Lombardi et al. 2014).

Retrospectively, the early years of the twenty-first century can thus be recognized as an historically unprecedented moment where, for the first time, novel legal and technical infrastructures arose in Peru to contend with the question of sustainability in the context of the tropical logging industry. If the levels of harvest and trade of various lifeforms in Amazonian rainforests had traditionally been dictated by the whims of shifting cycles of transnational demand, sustainability now arose as the idiom through which political demands and policy reforms could be sustained in the hopes of preserving and restoring depleting populations of intensively harvested varieties of timber. As regulations were enforced, studies conducted, and field interventions pursued, sustainability discussions inscribed mahogany and cedar in a future-oriented temporality where their present endangerment could be successfully managed toward restoration or irresponsibly brought to ultimate extinction.

While Shihuahuaco was not part of these early conversations on the sustainability of the tropical logging industry, rising concerns about its overexploitation in subsequent years would heavily draw upon these prior restorative efforts and hopes. Over the next decade, as the harvesting and international trade of Shihuahuaco mounted, international NGO and advocacy groups started to draw attention to its increasing (albeit intractable) endangerment. In the 2010s, several institutions and investigative platforms operating in Peru published investigations denouncing the unsustainable harvesting practices surrounding Shihuahuaco (Castro et al. 2022; Putzel et al. 2011; Urrunaga et al. 2012). Similarly, a rising network of initiatives arose around its conservation, with at least one important conservation project taking the protection of old Shihuahuaco trees as its flagship mission (Arbio Perú 2023).

These rising concerns over the endangerment of Shihuahuaco also translated into contentious policy discussions. In 2015, the Peruvian state constituted a working group to update the national list of endangered species that had been first created in 2006. When a final proposal of the updated list—which included Shihuahuaco—was delivered by the working group to the state, timber exporters rapidly opposed the classification of Shihuahuaco as an endangered species. Their opposition ultimately resulted in the state rejecting the working group's proposal because of an alleged lack of information about Shihuahuaco in the country (Castro et al. 2022). In response, scientists and specialists from the working group sent a letter demanding the classification of Shihuahuaco as an endangered species, and alerting of its imminent extinction if new regulations were not imposed upon its harvesting and trade (Alvira et al 2016). The contentious development of such policy discussions exemplifies the outstanding capacity of timber exporting companies to impede the actions of Peru's forestry administration. But, even more prominently, it illustrates how such discussions unfolded amidst significant technoscientific uncertainties, with various parties strategically mobilizing arguments and casting doubts over scattered pieces of evidence depending on their particular interests and visions of the Amazonian rainforest.

Despite the significant lobbying capacity of timber exporting companies in Peru, by late 2010, growing anxieties over the endangerment of Shihuahuaco had nurtured a vigorous transnational discussion over the pertinence of bringing its international trade under CITES. As arrangements were being made for the 2022 CITES COP, such discussions concretized in a formal proposal by the governments of Panama, Colombia and the European Union to list Shihuahuaco in Appendix II of the Convention. If conversations in Peru over the sustainability of Shihuahuaco had so far been inflected by the overwhelming influence of timber exporting companies in the government, the gravitation of the European Union in CITES vastly exceeded all diplomatic attempts of the Peruvian diplomatic mission to interrupt the advancement of such proposal. And so, in November 2022, Shihuahuaco was formally included in Appendix II of CITES. Notably, while the inclusion of new species under CITES typically enters into force 90 days after a decision is made, Peru's declaration of utter unpreparedness to comply with the decision led the Convention to grant two full years to prepare for the new regulations.

Back in Peru, the CITES decision ignited an already ongoing domestic debate over the sustainability of Shihuahuaco. But even more importantly, it forced the Peruvian state to articulate an information-driven definition of sustainability in the context of the tropical logging industry. This new transnational context led to a growing political pressure to stabilize Shihuahuaco as an object of technoscientific knowledge in the country. If the exploitation of Shihuahuaco had so far unfolded amidst widespread uncertainties surrounding its levels of harvesting and trade, the CITES decision implied that now the Peruvian state would be legally bound to enforce strict controls at every stage of Shihuahuaco's domestic supply chains. This meant that every single Shihuahuaco tree that was to be legally harvested in the country would now need to be previously verified by a state supervisor. Further, all exports of Shihuahuaco timber would now need to be properly declared as such, thus avoiding the possibility of misdeclarations in export documentation. Finally, the Peruvian state would now need to establish export quotas based on detailed studies of trade, population sizes, regeneration rates and population ranges. By knowing how much Shihuahuaco existed in the country and how much was harvested and traded, the Peruvian state would then be able to enforce a truly information-driven model of sustainability across the country's tropical timber supply chains.

The problem, however, was that such technoscientific knowledge had been historically unavailable in Peruvian Amazonia. Large-scale forest inventories of Peru's Amazonian rainforests had been traditionally inexistent or methodologically flawed, whereas most recent state attempts to map forest resources remained vastly incomplete by the time the CITES decision was made on Shihuahuaco (see Moreno Custodio 2018; SERFOR 2020). Notably, this general absence of technoscientific knowledge about tropical rainforests had led the Peruvian state to grant logging rights upon areas that could not (or should not) be commercially logged, such as swamps, white sand forests, or Indigenous territories. As CITES and other instances of global environmental governance came to demand increasingly granular forms of technoscientific knowledge about tropical rainforests, discussions over the sustainability of Shihuahuaco were thus confronted with the enduring status of Amazonian rainforests as inscrutable internal frontiers of the Peruvian state.

Importantly, many of these uncertainties emerge from the complex temporalities of the tree, both in the way sustainability would relate to Shihuahuaco's extremely extended life cycle and to the future possibility of its eventual extinction. Given Shihuahuaco's extremely low growth rates and extraordinary longevity, with many old specimens taking about 700 years to reach a one-meter diameter, many scientists and conservationists have argued that Shihuahuaco's life cycle is utterly incompatible with tropical logging (Montaño 2022). In contrast, some voices in the industry and academia have depicted such positions as simplifications, claiming (without evidence) that growth rates might in fact prove faster for younger trees, and (with evidence) that many industrial uses of Shihuahuaco might not require for trees to grow too old. At the core of such discussions, the larger-than-human temporalities of Shihuahuaco trees opened a contentious space of veridiction where different interests grappled with the uncertainties of their complex nonhuman existence in the tropical rainforest.

Such uncertainties about the embodied pasts of Shihuahuaco also yielded uncertainties about its futures, with calculations around its extinction becoming a powerful trope to mobilize (or refute) political decisions. While no population studies exist for any species of Shihuahuaco in Peru (CITES 2022, 8), during the 2010s the growing concerns with its endangerment led several specialists to offer calculations of the number of years that would take Shihuahuaco to go extinct or depleted at current rates of exploitation. But different sources of evidence and extrapolation methods have yielded very different results about the fate of Shihuahuaco. One recent study, for instance, argued that by 2036 populations of Shihuahuaco could diminish by 66 percent (CITES 2022: 10), whereas another study, drawing on very similar sources of information, suggested that by 2025 populations of Shihuahuaco could be reduced by 88 percent or go totally extinct in many regions of the country (Romo 2018). Such alarming forecasts have not, however, been shared by all parties in the conversation. The official study conducted by the Peruvian state (in consultation with representatives from the industry and academia) maintained, for instance, that the extinction of Shihuahuaco is of minor concern given its current rates of exploitation (Revilla et al. 2022). Notably, whereas prior assessments have estimated that Shihuahuaco could soon go extinct in the Madre de Dios region (where the industry is currently concentrated), such official assessment calculates a mild 15 percent population reduction in the next hundred years. In this vein, some foresters have even suggested that populations of Shihuahuaco remain extremely abundant in most of the country.

More broadly, divergent positions over the sustainability of Shihuahuaco can be seen as ways of mobilizing larger visions about the future of Amazonian rainforests. On the one hand, supporters of the CITES decision generally agreed that justifications for the defense of Shihuahuaco trees must go beyond their reductive understanding as mere amalgamations of timber volumes and regeneration rates. Instead, Shihuahuaco trees must be appreciated because of the important ecological functions they carry and for the intimate relations they entertain with other lifeforms in the tropical rainforest. Some voices championing this vision also recognize Shihuahuaco trees as important carbon sinks, with many mature trees fixing up to a third of all carbon captured in one hectare of tropical rainforest. Consequently, the protection of Shihuahuaco becomes not only an aesthetic and moral issue, but an important component for climate change mitigation strategies in Amazonia, as well as of the principles of equity and justice that underlie contemporary discourses of sustainability (CITES 2022: 7; Thompson 2004: 79). Ultimately, such vision states a fundamental incompatibility between the growth and regeneration rates of Shihuahuaco and the demands of the tropical logging industry, which makes their harvest fundamentally unsustainable. Here, a temporal dissonance emerges between the larger-than-human temporalities of Shihuahuaco and the all-too-human temporalities of the international trade (Espinosa and Valle 2020; Lay and Tweddle 2022a).

On the other hand, critics of the CITES decision have not only defended the compatibility between trade and tree but actually argued that careful forest management could in fact be a key ingredient in securing the survival of Shihuahuaco in the long-term. According to one prominent forestry consultant, for instance, Shihuahuaco populations tend to naturally decrease in non-managed forests given their very low regeneration rates. In contrast, evidence from managed forests suggests that the recovery of Shihuahuaco populations can be guaranteed via the implementation of various forestry techniques. The logger emerges, in this vision, as a gardener whose intervention in the rainforest does not threaten, but rather prevents, the possibility of future extinction. Further, such vision defends the need to go beyond immediate ecological concerns and appreciate what one timber exporter called the “social value” of Shihuahuaco. As an industry that provides employment for hundreds of rural workers in Amazonia, the harvesting of Shihuahuaco is seen here as a way to make people recognize tropical rainforests as valuable to their prosperity. Once the harvesting of Shihuahuaco decreases because of stringent regulations, the critics say, people will start thinking of rainforests as barriers, and not as opportunities, for development. Accordingly, they will become involved in some of the more lucrative (but environmentally destructive) industries that now proliferate in Peruvian Amazonia, like coca farming or gold mining.

As Peru contends with the CITES decision by radically transforming regulations over the country's tropical timber supply chains, the Shihuahuaco tree has thus become a privileged prism through which to appreciate larger dilemmas surrounding the sustainability of tropical logging and the future of tropical rainforests. While CITES and other instances of global environmental governance have dramatically transformed conversations around endangerment and extinction by demanding information-driven definitions of sustainability, transnational calls to ground trade regulations in robust technoscientific knowledge have been challenged by the enduring status of Amazonian rainforests as internal frontiers of the Peruvian state. Amidst the uncertainties permeating such convoluted process of regulatory reform, various anxieties over the future have come to converge in contentious ways. On the one hand, larger-than-human anxieties over the restoration of Shihuahuaco trees and their various relations with other lifeforms in the face of extinction. On the other hand, all-too-human anxieties over the loss of jobs, industry and value that might ultimately set tropical rainforests in a course of being destroyed by toxicity and deforestation.

Conclusion

As the global environmental crisis sets upon us a time of mass ecological extinction, biodiversity conservation and sustainability have emerged in the last decades as key epistemic and political concerns in various transnational platforms and initiatives seeking to prevent the depletion of endangered species. Biodiversity constitutes a peculiar kind of nature that brings together (rather than apart) economic growth with environmental protection. By casting the diversity of life as an inventory of individual species whose distributions and circulations must be monitored and supervised, endangerment emerges from CITES and other instances in global environmental governance as a condition derived not from the geopolitical asymmetries of contemporary transnational supply chains but from lack of adequate technoscientific knowledge, state oversight, and regulation. Against a world where abrupt cycles of transnational demand can unabashedly ravage over unprotected lifeforms, therefore, sustainability becomes a political demand to envision species as objects of calculation and care. By drawing on the study of population sizes, regeneration rates, geographic ranges, and cargo shipments, sustainability promises to reconcile the industrial extraction of various lifeforms with their long-term preservation. And so, it inscribes endangerment in a temporality of redemption, where the future extinction of species can be avoided via the restoration of an ecological balance.

However, as this article has suggested, calls for such information-driven sustainability have often confronted the legacies of long and recalcitrant histories of technoscientific uncertainty in many biodiversity hotspots around the world. In the specific case of Peru, tropical rainforests have historically been at the margins of state infrastructures of technical legibility. And today, the diversity of life they harbor remains an important frontier of technocratic management and scientific study, with many estimations suggesting than less than half of all tree species in Peruvian Amazonia have been cataloged so far (ter Steege et al. 2016, 7). Further, Amazonian rainforests have long been sites where extractive booms driven by transnational demand have been covered with an enduring aura of trickery, illegality, and corruption. Rather than flourishing upon the expansion of technoscientific knowledge and planning, such extractive cycles have thus relied on the enduring (and, in many ways, intentional) production of opacity and uncertainty. As the CITES decision has propelled an intensive conversation about the sustainability of Shihuahuaco in Peru, controversies over new state regulations have unfolded against the backdrop of the uncertainties surrounding Shihuahuaco's distributions and circulations.

The recent history of Shihuahuaco in Peru also shows us how particular lifeforms come to be constituted as endangered species in contemporary modes of global environmental governance. Further, it exemplifies how these lifeforms become historically entangled with intense affective and political investments. If Shihuahuaco was a name utterly foreign to media and political discussions in Peru until the turn of the century, today it has become an important historical condenser of many ethical and political dilemmas surrounding the future of tropical rainforests in the country. Drawing on their extreme longevity and extraordinary dimensions, Shihuahuaco trees have thus been called “gods,” “living libraries,” and “beings older that the Incas,” all of which connects them with a quasi-transcendental and larger-than-human temporality (see Lay and Tweddle 2022a). But, at the same time, these very same trees come to be cherished by others given their all-too-human “social value” and are envisioned as the manageable substance of a robust industrial development that can protect tropical rainforests by “putting value” in them. As we critically approach these various discursive condensations within the same lifeform, different visions about the future of tropical rainforests also become visible, each bringing with it distinctive ethical and political commitments.

Following the controversies by which Shihuahuaco has emerged as an endangered species also suggests the importance of taking trees and other lifeforms as protagonists of their own political histories. As thousands of Shihuahuaco trees were harvested, processed, and traded in the last 20 years in order to feed Peru's tropical timber supply chains, their particular materialities and temporalities—the heavy density of their timber, their extremely slow growth rates, their longevity, and their extraordinary dimensions—have decisively participated in a wider political economy of shifting infrastructural conditions and transnational middle-class appetites. By acknowledging such more-than-human histories of indiscriminate extraction and endangerment, we might become aware of how the distinctive modes of nonhuman existence that populate the diversity of life might also be considered in their preservation and hopeful restoration. Here, the expressive capacities of Shihuahuaco becomes key to understanding how it has historically emerged as both an endangered lifeform and as an object of sustainability, care and regulation.

More importantly, perhaps, thinking with trees like Shihuahuaco confronts us with deeper existential deliberations about the fate of tropical rainforests. As we trace the ways in which various human and nonhuman entities (including the Shihuahuaco tree itself) participate in the contentious definition of what counts as sustainability in Peru, such controversies are also about our environmental futures, and the way we might govern life and death at a time of mass ecological extinction. In this context, sustainability becomes a term whose definition vastly exceeds mere technoscientific calculations. Rather, it confronts us with larger ethical and political questions that bring us into an encounter with uncertainty, as well as with disparate visions about what more-than-human worlds we might be able to foster today.