For Lorey, “The art of governing currently consists of balancing a maximum of precarization, which probably cannot be exactly calculated, with a minimum of safeguarding to ensure that the minimum is secured at this threshold.”⁷ Under neoliberalism’s economization of everything the act of valuing of the invaluable is one of the most important strategies—and at the same time one of its most violent.⁸ In the context of a growing green economy on the one hand and the ongoing precarization—not to say erasure—of rainforest ecologies on the other hand, a fragile balance is increasingly attempted through so-called “ecosystem services” assessments. These pose questions such as, what is the financial value of rainforests in terms of climate mitigation when forests are not cut down for wood or plantations or to clear the land for mining? In Indonesia, such calculations have been conducted as part of the carbon sequestration program REDD+ and the attendant Forest Ecosystem Valuation Study (FEVS). According to a summary of this study, “By providing quantitative evidence on the values provided by nature, the FEVS seeks to significantly increase investments in forest ecosystems and promote the sustainable management of these natural resources, leading to higher social equity and sustained long-term economic growth.” While one of the study’s stated core aims is the enhancement of the livelihood of the rural population, traditionally, as Michael Goldman shows in Imperial Nature, his brilliant ethnography of the World Bank, progress through investment—especially as it involves government and development agencies—does not have the most laudable record.⁹ It remains to be seen what forest financialization as nature capital will amount to in this world of accelerated speculation, endless destruction, and ongoing precarization.

In terms of environmental rights, many of the environmental activists we’ve spoken to in Indonesia still affirm that, at least theoretically, the national constitution provides a relatively progressive legal framework. Constitutionally, the State owns the land as a guardian of the land and the people. If the State does sell land to a plantation company, its responsibility becomes deferred to the company; yet, the State also remains responsible to guarantee the land’s proper treatment. In reality, however, the enforcement of such laws presents a serious lack. One case in point was the insufficient national and local government response to the massive forest fires raging across the entire country in the fall of 2015, especially in Borneo and Sumatra, where rainforests are rooted in the carbon-saturated and extremely flammable peat soils. To relay this concern by way of a concrete story: a forester in South Kalimantan, who with his small team has been planting 500,000 trees over the last twenty years, saw all but ten percent of his life’s work fall victim to last year’s fires. When the local government did nothing to intervene, the men had no choice but to move to the forest themselves, doing nothing else for several months than digging wells and incessantly pumping water into the flames from small plastic rucksacks carried on their backs. In Europe, we may think that the withdrawal of governmental care for our bodies is a relatively recent phenomenon, but bodies deemed to be “expendable” by corporate and state agents have long been organizing communal care, mutual aid, and ecological defense on the frontiers of capitalist imperialism in Southeast Asia.