Reflections: On teaching world forest history

Environmental History

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 20-29

  Langston, Nancy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 14044273568     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/10.1.20     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2. Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2003).
3. Emily Russell, People and the Land through Time: Linking Ecology and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998);
4. David R. Foster, "Conservation Lessons and Challenges from Ecological History," Forest History Today (Fall 2000): 2-11.
5. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
6. For an analysis of the ecological simplification that has resulted from traditional forestry, see Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
7. Lynne Heasley and Raymond P. Guries, "Forest Tenure and Cultural Landscapes: Environmental Histories in the Kickapoo Valley," in Who Owns America? Social Conflict Over Property Rights, ed. Harvey M. Jacobs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). Heasley and Guries's work provides an exception to the generalization that environmental historians have tended not to pay much attention to land tenure. Their fine-scaled analysis examines the complicated ways that changes in land ownership have led to changes in forest composition.
8. International Institute for Environment and Development, "Land Tenure and Resource Access in West Africa: Issues and Opportunities for the Next Twenty Five Years," (London: IIED, 1999) 2, http://www.iied.org/drylands/pubs/execsumm/7396.html (Accessed 21 December 2004).
9. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, 76-77.
10. Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
11. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
12. For an entry into this extensive literature, we used David Edmunds and Eva Wollenberg, "Historical Perspectives on Forest Policy Change in Asia: An Introduction," Environmental History 6 (April 2001):190-212;
13. Ramachandra Guha, "The Prehistory of Community Forestry in India," Environmental History 6 (April 2001): 213-38.
14. Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite;
15. Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
16. Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohmann, Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the World Paper Economy (London: Zed Books, 1996).
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Ibid., 11.
19. James C. McCann, "The Plow and the Forest: Narratives of Deforestation in Ethiopia, 1840-1992," Environmental History 2 (April 1997): 138-59;
20. Thaddeus Sunseri, "Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874-1915," Environmental History 8 (July 2003): 431-51;
21. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities-Studies in West Africa (London: Routledge, 1998).
22. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach write: "Forest loss has been systematically exaggerated in each country in West Africa-in total it is around 10 million hectares, not the usually cited 28 million. This has happened both by, vastly overestimating the area where forest 'used to exist', and by considering forest lost in earlier centuries to have been lost recently. Forest cover in 1900 may have been more than that in 1700, following depopulation associated with slavery and colonial wars in Liberia, Ghana, and Cote d'Ivoire. The area capable of supporting forest has increased in recent centuries due to climatic improvement, but has varied up and down during deep climatic changes in historical times. Many of today's forests cover areas which were previously savanna, and may exist because of people, not despite them. The vegetation forms supposed to be the least-disturbed or most 'natural' are in fact often the most disturbed, testifying to the capacity of people to enrich soils and vegetation." Press release issued by the Global Environmental Change Programme Office of the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, 24 June 1998;
23. available online at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/gec/pubs/pressrel/ prforest.htm.
24. Ibid. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach's work, not surprisingly, has proven controversial, and many ecologists question their data and results.
25. Heasley and Guries, "Forest Tenure and Cultural Landscapes";
26. David R. Foster and John D. Aber, Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). In a forthcoming essay, Heasley argues that when environmental historians collaborate with scientists, the insights they gain about landscape change can allow them to tell better human histories. See Lynne Heasley, "Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?" in press, Human Ecology.
27. See Lynne Heasley, "Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS Help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?" in press, Human Ecology.