Missing finance for the trees: reflections on finance capital's adventures in a colonial landscape

Michael Ekers and Taliya Seidman-Wright

Chapter 10 in Handbook on Financialisation and Space, 2026, pp 149-170 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter uses Brookfield Asset Management's investments in massive parcels of private timberland located on Vancouver Island on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, as a springboard for understanding how finance capital and, in this case, asset managers and public sector pension plans have sought out timberlands as a ‘new’ investment strategy. We critically unpack the literature focused on financialization and forest lands in North America and then explore the manoeuvring and investments of finance capital in private forest lands in British Columbia that double as unceded Indigenous territory. We stress the need to historicize and concretize investments in timberlands to make sense of the colonial dynamics that are at the core of the financialization of land and, in this case, forest lands. We draw on Brenna Bhandar's rendering of racial regimes of ownership to demonstrate how Brett Christophers’ ‘asset manager society’ is constituted out of a colonial landscape.

Keywords: Finance; Asset Manager Capitalism; Private Timberlands; Racial Regime of Ownership; Indigenous (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035328628
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