Speaker: Julie Velásquez Runk, University of Georgia

Title: Rosewood Networks: Panama, China and Global Illegal Timber Markets

Abstract: In this talk I use political ecology and global environmental governance frameworks to explore the boom in illegal rosewood logging over the last decade. Using Panama's cocobolo rosewood logging as an entry point, I combine interviews, logging permit data, and literature review to demonstrate the worldwide movements of illegally harvested rosewoods for the Chinese market. I show how China's growing middle class caused an uptick in demand for rosewood, resulting in diffuse illegal logging rosewood networks worldwide. I detail how the boom catalyzed new regulatory and global governance efforts to curtail illegal logging. I conclude by addressing the continued challenges for timber governance in an era of global entanglements.

Short Bio: Julie Velásquez Runk is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, one of the only departments dedicated to environmental and ecological anthropology, and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. She grounds her work in community-based collaborative research, using integrative approaches to how people use and manage their landscapes, how that relates to science, conservation, indigenous knowledge, and policy, and how people cope with variability and change. Her diverse research interests include land rights and forest governance histories, indigenous political ontology, zoonotic diseases and deforestation, ethnoornithology, and ethics and art in being and belonging. She is the author of Crafting Wounaan Landscapes: Identity, Art, and Environmental Governance in Panama's Darién, which will be published in Spanish in 2019. She increasingly co-writes with indigenous collaborators and is author or co-author of articles in anthropology, conservation, geography, and botany journals. She has received grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, and Panama's National Secretariat of Science, Technology, and Innovation, and has been an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center and a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research. She is book review editor for Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America and was on the board of the Conference of Latin American Geography. She holds a dual joint Ph.D. in forestry and environmental studies, anthropology, and economic botany from Yale University and The New York Botanical Garden. She uses her background in ecology and conservation practice to build work that is conversant in the humanities and natural and social sciences, and that is relevant to local communities and practitioners.