Restoring Shihuahuaco

From being a marginal variety of timber, Shihuahuaco has become today the most important timber export in Peru. As a result, growing concerns about its extinction have led to its inclusion in CITES, a multilateral agreement by which its international trade will be subject to regulations that ensure the sustainability of its harvest. In this article, I examine Peru's recent debates over the endangerment of Shihuahuaco in order to consider larger dilemmas surrounding the politics of sustainability in today's global environmental governance. I show how CITES demands increasing levels of technoscientific knowledge and oversight on endangered species. And yet, I also consider how such demands have unleashed various controversies rooted in the long histories of technoscientific uncertainty that are associated to Amazonian rainforests in Peru.