My colleague Aaron Soto-Karlin and I are wrapping up final revisions on a book chapter for inclusion in Sustainability Now! Sustainability How? Situating Sustainabilities through Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice, edited by Julie Sze. The book is under contract with NYU Press and hopefully will come out in 2018 or early 2019.

Our chapter analyzes an international memorandum of understanding between California, Chiapas (Mexico) and Acre (Brazil). The agreement would allow greenhouse gas emitters in California to comply with a California cap on greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets designed to preserve forests in Chiapas and Acre instead of reducing emissions in California. Our chapter presents the global policy debate over forest carbon offsets as it plays out on the ground. More specifically, we situate global policy within local reality by demonstrating how support for and against the MOU was affected by preexisting political conflict in two of the three participating jurisdictions: California and Chiapas. To do so, we present the historical and political context of the debate in each location.

Research on forest carbon offsets gets very technical very quickly. Aaron and I took pains to make our chapter understandable to people unfamiliar with the terms of the debate, so we were happy to share a draft for inclusion in an interdisciplinary, undergraduate course on “Water and Sanitation Justice.” (One piece of the course focuses on climate change – see the syllabus here). The course was developed by a group of scholars located at multiple campuses of the University of California and taught online by Ben Crow for the first time this spring. Teaching Assistant and PhD student Abby Brown helped develop the course and interviewed me about our chapter for use in the class. I listened to the interview last week and have shared it below.* The interview lasts for 20 minutes.

* Subscribers who get my posts delivered by e-mail will need to click through to the original post online in order to access the interview.