From Guyana to Vancouver, Janette Bulkan has built a career on protecting indigenous land rights and access to resources.
Her involvement with social issues in forestry began after she noticed more and more chainsaws in indigenous communities in her homeland of Guyana. The men from these communities were getting into logging.
According to Bulkan, the assumption was that any illegal logging in the country was the work of small-scale, local forestry operations. But after visiting forest sites and documenting practices around the country, she saw that it was the large-scale operations that were not adhering to guidelines and policies.
“Many of these operations were owned by transnational corporations which held, or illegally rented, logging concessions,” she says.
A new UBC faculty member, Bulkan investigated the slippages between national policies, and government and private sector practices, in forestry in Guyana for her PhD research, which began in 2003 at Yale University. She also worked with indigenous groups to document how these large companies were violating well-established forestry guidelines, land claims and human rights.
http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2013/03/06/protecting-land-protecting-people/
Her involvement with social issues in forestry began after she noticed more and more chainsaws in indigenous communities in her homeland of Guyana. The men from these communities were getting into logging.
According to Bulkan, the assumption was that any illegal logging in the country was the work of small-scale, local forestry operations. But after visiting forest sites and documenting practices around the country, she saw that it was the large-scale operations that were not adhering to guidelines and policies.
“Many of these operations were owned by transnational corporations which held, or illegally rented, logging concessions,” she says.
A new UBC faculty member, Bulkan investigated the slippages between national policies, and government and private sector practices, in forestry in Guyana for her PhD research, which began in 2003 at Yale University. She also worked with indigenous groups to document how these large companies were violating well-established forestry guidelines, land claims and human rights.
