Cultures of Carbon and the Logic of Care: The Possibilities for Carbon Enrichment and Its Cultural Signature

Abstract

Climate change and the associated need to decarbonize pose not just risks to cultures but potential opportunities for cultural experimentation, renewal, and economic dynamism. An Australian case of carbon mitigation through carbon farming represents a discursive tool with which indigenous groups are seeking to leverage a very distinct conceptualization of payment for ecosystem services, one that values the labor and reciprocal relationships and logic of care required to abate or sequester carbon. Inscribed with an inalienable ancestral cultural signature, the indigenous produced carbon offsets being promoted by indigenous carbon market participants represent more than a mere carbon reduction..