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In Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. In particular, the palpable visibility of shifting (swidden) agriculturalists 'slashing and burning' forests has fuelled centuries-old political agendas to criminalise swidden farmers for supposedly destroying swaths of forests valued for timber, biodiversity and now ecosystem services. Swidden farmers who regularly clear and burn forests, have endured a disproportionate burden of blame for investing in and maintaining an old livelihood practice into the 21 st Century. Drawing on Hall's politics of representation, we examine the contrasting political frames, management and practices of clearing and burning forests among upland farmers, state and non-state actors who govern forests on Palawan Island, the Philippines. We describe the social, economic, and biophysical character of swidden clearing and burning among the indigenous Tagbanua of central Palawan, whose livelihoods and landscapes are impacted by green governance and enclosures. Informed by several years of ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how and why Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn forest despite state and non-state actors criminalising these practices for decades. We argue that, despite sustained vilification and reduced fallows arising from governance policies and enclosures, Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn knowing well that, despite the practices being illegal, levels of tolerance and leniency toward swidden is the local norm, rather than exception-highlighting the importance of what we call 'atmospheres of consent'. Ethnoecological understandings of clearing and burning in the uplands, we argue, are crucial to recalibrating the burden of blame placed on poor farmers whose agriculture is deemed destructive by the region's burgeoning sustainability discourse.

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Contemporary social theory has forcefully argued for a 'loving' postenvironmentalism based on intimate care and making kin with the non-human world. These arguments are a central part of an influential and cross-disciplinary scholarly discourse, increasingly adopted by environmental anthropologists, that envisions a universal moral ecology of 'care, love and kinship' as the solution to the near-apocalyptic social and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Philippines, I explore how this narrowed affective repertoire maps awkwardly onto indigenous Pala'wan explanations of their relationship with the non-human world where reciprocity and respect are held in tension with fear, violence and death. I focus, in particular, on the Palawan bearded pig (Sus ahoenobarbus), an endemic species that has become an emblematic conservation species while also being extensively hunted by indigenous peoples across the Island.