CONFERENCE PROGRAM

Click on individual titles to show or hide full abstracts for each paper.

1. 9:00 AM — Introduction and Organization

   • Mark Lycett — Director, Program on the Global Environment
   • Kathleen Morisson — Conference co-organizer; Director of the Center for International Studies

2. 9:20 AM — Conceptual Frameworks

   We begin with consideration of some of the conceptual underpinnings of scholarship on forests across the disciplines, from the development of disciplinary traditions in the social sciences to the specific construction, history and analytics of tropical science. Participants in this panel explore the different ways in which temperate and tropical environments have been imagined and examined, noting the consequential nature of these intellectual frameworks for research, policy, and conservation. Consideration of these frameworks leads immediately to questions about how such understandings have shaped (and continue to shape) substantive understandings of landscape change.

   • Susanna Hecht — Regional and International Development & Institute of the Environment, UCLA
     A Theory of Forest Resurgence

     This paper discusses representations of tropical forests and ideas of tropicality which have obscured understanding the anthropogenic woodlands. The paper then goes on to analyze the dynamics of various forms and political economies of landscapes and their insertion into global discourses of environment and development. The paper argues that peasant landscapes, largely excluded from environmental or productionist roles in the global economy, and profoundly reshaped by globalizations of commodity markets, international migration and new capital flows into the countryside, are now the main areas of forest recovery. Long demonized as forest destroyers, peasants now play a largely positive and dynamic role in tropical ecosystem regeneration, even though they do so largely as policy orphans.

   • David R. Foster — Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard Forest, Harvard University
     The Natural and Cultural History of a Temperate Forest. Local Stories, Global Connections, and Environmental Opportunity and Challenge
   • Fredrik Albritton Jonsson — History, University of Chicago
     Invisible Forests: Natural Knowledge in the Making of Classical Economics

     This paper rethinks the origins of classical economics from the perspective of the new historiography of science and environmental change. It also revises the arguments of Richard Grove in Green Imperialism by analyzing the relation of classical political economy to rival forms of natural knowledge. Eighteenth century natural historians tended to stress the particularity and instability of natural processes on the periphery. Forests figured prominently as crucibles of climate change, as patriotic projects to secure naval timber, and as models of long-term resource management either by the colonial state or paternalist landlords. In Scotland, the myth of the prehistoric Caledonian Forest became a particular spur for such schemes from the 1770s onward. Contemporary writers used Roman and medieval sources to assert the existence of a vast forest in the Scottish Highlands up until recent times. They also insisted that the destruction of these woodlands by invading armies and shortsighted locals had set in motion a process of climate deterioration and peat bog formation across the north. The myth of the Caledonian forest thus offered a northern counterpoint to the anxieties regarding deforestation in tropical colonies. It was employed to mobilize planting schemes by government bodies as well as private landlords in the 1760s and 1770s. In this way, natural historians used evidence of environmental degradation to plead for the importance of their expertise in managing peripheries.

     The myth of the Caledonian Forest helps shed new light on the environmental presuppositions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Adam Smith was indebted to natural historians such as Carl Linnaeus, Pehr Kalm and Pierre Poivre for his understanding of natural systems in general as well as the specifics of colonial agriculture and forestry. But Smith read these natural histories selectively in order to underscore the harmonious and benign operation of natural systems across the globe. Despite his familiarity with patterns of ecological degradation, climate change, and natural cycles of drought, Smith downplayed such evidence in favor of a providential notion of self-regulating natural cycles, which only overweening policies of economic protectionism could disturb. Against the claims of the Scottish naturalists, Smith looked at deforestation only as a simple indicator of progress. The reduction of woodland was to Smith an entirely desirable affair, analogous to the removal of a surplus population of small tenants, with no malign environmental effects. Smith’s selective appropriation of natural history thus made it possible to ground exchange in a providential balance of nature while also rejecting out of hand pleas for the colonial management of nature. Yet this “liberation” of nature arguably came at the cost of excluding a great deal of natural knowledge from the domain of economic analysis. By relating the environmental presuppositions of The Wealth of Nations to the rival claims of natural historians, we can in fact chart the emergence of two diametrically opposed blind spots: a political critique of the imperial state that deliberately abandoned the need for environmental expertise and a form of ecological knowledge which celebrated colonial domination.

   • Roderick Neumann — International Relations, Florida International
     Stories of Nature’s Hybridity in Europe: Implications for Forest Science and Policy in the Global South

     If there is a single dominant story about Africa’s forests, it is a deforestation narrative wherein the continent’s increasing, land-hungry population progressively reduces forest cover, destroying habitats and diminishing biodiversity in the process. It is a familiar story, not only for Africa, but much of the world. The story of Europe’s forests, as told by the agencies and directorates of the European Union, is more complex, if not completely inverted. According to the European Environmental Agency, Europe’s current biodiversity is the product of centuries of human interaction with nature: “In Europe, more than on any other continent, the influence of human activity has shaped biodiversity over time”. Land abandonment resulting from demographic and socio-economic shifts in rural Europe is thus “considered detrimental to biodiversity”. Forests are included in the EU’s hybrid nature narrative. The EU’s habitat classification system defines several forest types shaped by centuries-long management. At least one major type, Sclerophillous grazed forests (dehesas), is recognized as the product of a particular land management regime. In many of the forest habitat type definitions, the Nature-Society boundary is blurred and indeterminate. The EU’s Forestry Strategy thus emphasizes “restoring traditional management” to minimize biodiversity loss. Hence, if a single dominant story could be written for Europe’s forest it might read as follows. Forest cover is the product of millennia of human occupation and use. Ergo, demographic and socio-economic changes leading to rural land abandonment and the collapse of traditional management systems threaten to reduce the biodiversity contained within many habitat types.

     For those of us who have studied people’s interactions with forests in the Global South and have witnessed states’ forced evacuations of forest reserves, curtailment of forest access, and cordoning off of forests from dependent communities, the EU’s hybrid nature narrative gives pause. Does the nature-society dialectic manifest itself so differently in Europe than in Africa? Or is the EU’s particular environmental narrative, like so many stories about forests in the Global South, grounded more firmly in ideology than rigorous scientific research? This paper critically evaluates the EU’s hybrid nature narrative, both in light of supporting empirical data from Europe as well as the empirical findings of select studies in Africa and other regions of the Global South. It investigates the social and ecological meaning of key terms such as “traditional management,” “abandonment,” and “biodiversity.” It speculates on the implications of Europe’s hybrid nature narrative for policy formulations for and scientific understanding of people-forest interactions in the Global South.

   • James Fairhead and Melissa Leach — Social Anthropology, University of Sussex
     Amazonian Dark Earths in Africa?

     Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE), anthopogenic black soils, have been widely discussed in tropical America, where such studies have done much to recast the history of Amazonian occupation. Indeed, such soils have been documented into Costa Rica and seem to be a widespread technology that spread out from the Amazonian hearths, documenting the close history between people, land, and agricultural productivity in this part of the world. In contrast, Africa still maintains its wild primitivism in the popular imaginary, and thus the question of anthropogenic soils remain undiscussed. We outline the discourse about soils and tropical degradation and present data on the development of anthropogenic soils in Africa. Extensive fieldwork at two West African settlements and comparative studies in five others show first that dark earth analogues do exist in West Africa, and that there are great similarities between agro-ecological practices in Amazonia and West Africa that directly affect soil richness. Similarities in soil context, farming methods, climate, and decreases in human population likely contributed to the development of African soils comparable to ADE; while differences in resource availability, domestic animals, and ‘ruined villages’ in Africa may have had an unparalleled influence on the African soils.

3. 1:00 PM — De-agrarianization and Agricultural Change

   Structural changes in rural areas, in tenurial regimes, and the economic role of peasantries in the modern state have radically transformed the meaning, political space and configurations of different form of agriculture. Papers in this section examine the complex relationships between agriculture and forests, interrogating our understanding of rurality in light of historically different forms of urbanism in the tropics. Both de-agrarianization and re-agrarianization may be associated with signficant environmental change, but these patterns are neither unidirectional nor universal. Historical research suggests that some of these processes are not new but have significant long-term histories.

   • Michael Heckenberger — Anthropology, University of Florida
     The Fractal Forest: An Archaeology of Body and Built Environment in the Amazon

     The archaeology of ancient polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reevaluation of early urbanism and long-term change in socio-ecological systems in tropical forest landscapes. Late pre-Columbian land-use and change, related to hyper-articulated clusters of small- (villages) and medium-sized (towns) settlements that represent individual polities in a regional peer-polity, are described. These patterns document a southern Amazonian variant of an early (pre-modern) galactic (?) pattern of urbanism, which may have characterized similar areas of the broad region. Understanding anthropogenic landscapes of the southern Amazon, in the so-called “arc of deforestation,” has critical implications for conservation and development, notably to reduce degradation of ecological systems and maintain regional biodiversity.

   • Kathleen D. Morrison and Andrew M. Bauer — Anthropology, University of Chicago
     The Plate and the Plow: Agrarian Change, Cuisine, and Forest History in Southern India

     Dry tropical and sub-tropical forests and woodlands once covered more than half of the world’s tropics and now account for about 46% of the total forest cover of India. Despite this, the vegetation dynamics and histories of such forests are poorly-understood, perhaps in part because of their complex entanglements with human histories. In this paper we trace both agrarian and forest histories over the last three millennia, using archaeological, historical, and paleoenvironmental data from northern Karnataka. In particular, we follow the development of both elite and non-elite South Indian cuisines and track the implications of changing diets on the landscape, from field to forest. The increasing demand for irrigated rice, vegetables, tree crops, and spices placed specific demands on agricultural production and the extraction of forest products. The elite South Indian meal includes elements from both upland (humid tropical) and lowland contexts and, as such, its demands came to resonate across the peninsula. We examine how changing agrarian practices and patterns of intermittent urbanism led to episodes of both massive deforestation and of forest resurgence in the semi-arid interior, considering how this long-term history might inform on issues facing Indian forests (and farmers) today.

   • Nicholas Menzies — Wildland Resource Science, UCLA
     Ancient forest tea: how globalization turned backward minorities into green marketing innovators

     Over the last fifty years or so, the landscape of Xishuangbanna prefecture in the southwestern borders of China’s Yunnan province has been transformed from a mosaic of tropical forest, paddy rice and swidden cultivation, to extensive tracts of cash crop plantations, mostly rubber and tea. In the history of that transformation, the state has played a major role in advancing a vision of modernity in which large scale plantations of cash crops effect the transformation of society from a peasant mode of production to a modern, industrialized and ultimately socialist model. In implementing this strategy, a clear distinction was made until the mid 1980s between immigrant Han Chinese workers on State Farms and indigenous ethnic minorities who were deemed too backward to be capable of managing rubber. In the uplands, policies to end swidden agriculture, together with government poverty alleviation programs promised prosperity through the cultivation of terraced tea, a modern and ‘scientific’ alternative to the long-established practice of growing tea under the forest canopy. Over the last decade, however, the growth of urban and international markets for “green” products and for products with an ethnic and cultural heritage, have confounded government agencies’ conventional constructions of modernity and scientific development. The formerly ignored, backward practice of growing tea under the forest canopy has been recast as a sustainable, marketable niche product with a distinguished cultural cachet triggering official and unofficial plans to recreate “ancient forests” under which to grow more ancient forest tea.

   • Yayoi Fujita — Anthropology, University of Chicago
     From Swidden to Rubber: Transforming Landscape and Livelihoods in Mountainous Northern Laos

     Rugged terrain and war had long inhibited development of northern Laos. However, influx of development aid and improvement of road networks throughout the 1990s and opening of the regional border had began to invite foreign investment, and promote regional trade namely with China and northern Thailand since the 1990s. Coupled with government policies restricting shifting cultivation practices, and on the other hand promoting relocation and consolidation of remote villages had significant impact on demographic and land use patterns in the upland areas. Opening of the regional border with China in the early 1990s had particularly boosted commercialization of agriculture in Sing District of Luang Namtha province located across the border from Southwest China, as flow of investment, people and goods flourished. Upland farmers whose livelihoods were based on upland shifting cultivation practices are increasingly engaged in commercial agricultural production including sugarcane and rubber exported to China, which is transforming their landscape and livelihood. The current paper is based on fieldwork in Sing district and it provides overview of demographic and land use, and livelihood changes. It also examines driving forces of change, and different perspectives of key agencies involved in upland resource management and development including villagers to understand the meaning of change.

   • Chris Reij — VU University, Amsterdam and USGS Data Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science, South Dakota; Gray Tappan — USGS Data Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science, South Dakota, USA
     Scale, Causes and Impacts of Re-Greening in Niger

     A recent study of long-term trends in agriculture and environment in Niger found large-scale re-greening of agricultural farmland areas in Niger and in particular in regions with high density population. This is not surprising in itself, as increasing population densities encourage farmers to intensify agriculture, and trees are part of the production system. The scale of this farmer-managed re-greening is surprising. It is mainly happening on farmland and extends over about 5 million ha. Farmers have indicated that they have been protecting and managing spontaneously regenerating trees since the mid-1980s. They began this practice because they had to “fight the Sahara.” They had to combat the impacts of dust and sandstorms, as opposed to the popular notion of an advancing front of sand dunes. The ecological and economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s acted as a trigger, along with growing population pressure and changes in the role of the State with regard to devolving more authority to local communities. Farmland re-greening has resulted in a wide range of impacts. It has led to more complex and more productive farming systems, improved household food security, changes in local climate, increased drought resilience, local increases in biodiversity, improved soil fertility, and a reduction in time women need for the collection of firewood. While these positive impacts do not occur everywhere, there are many positive indicators of environmental change at a vast scale. Adequate quantification of the different impacts remains an important challenge.

4. 3:45 PM — Violence and War

   Conflicts over forests can trigger wars, and wars, amazingly can produce forests. The tensions of forest politics, the insecurity of agriculture and natural resource-based livelihoods in war zones, and continuing danger from land mines and other residues of conflict have meant that significant areas of forest have regrown in former agricultural lands, increasingly defining “no man’s lands,” or becoming themselves contested socio-political spaces. War zones and violent areas express extreme levels of social conflict in landscapes that, ironically, are seen as more “natural,” even as they are managed through, and shaped by violence.

   • Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest — Environmental Science Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley
     “Emergency” Enclosures: Political Violence and the Resurgence of Forests and Forestry in Southeast Asia

     In this paper we look at the ways that the construction of political forests and professional forestry in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia were shaped through political violence. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand experienced “Emergencies” and insurgencies during which political violence was staged in or from many of these countries’ forests—then called “jungles”– in reference to their use for staging insurgencies. We show how these political movements are best framed not as comprised of “recalcitrant” “unincorporated” national subjects, but as alternative civilizing and state-making projects that used the forests as sites from which to launch territorializing projects. Both the insurgencies and counter-insurgency strategies were organized around perceptions of ethnic identification with national states. Millions of people were moved, with suspect ethnic groups generally moved out of forests, and more trustworthy ethnic groups settled into forests to practice agriculture. Counter-insurgency practices also channeled huge resources into “development” in particular zones. This development was meant to alleviate the poverty that was understood to make subjects susceptible to alternative civilizing projects, and into intensified surveillance of forests. Surveillance technologies and information could subsequently be used by forest departments to strengthen territorial control of political forests. The outcomes across the sites examined in this study thus varied according to the particular ethnic character of the different insurgencies and states; the relative influence of forestry departments who preferred strategies that cleared people out of forests, as well as diverse ecologies, military power, and broader state capacity to monitor and control peoples’ activities.

   • Emmanuel Kreike — History, Princeton
     Beyond Words: Re-image(n)ing War-Induced Historical Environmental Change

     Although 20th Century Africa was marked by intense violence, relatively little attention has been paid to how war and violence have contributed to environmental degradation, rural poverty, and humanitarian crises on the continent. Yet, Africa’s wars led to massive destruction of infrastructure and property, enormous refugee displacement, rampant disease, and depopulation, which exacerbated poverty and increased environmental degradation, further fanning the flames of conflict. The raw data on historical environmental change and war in 20th century Africa pre-dominantly consist of written and oral words. Words are not only abstractions several degrees removed from any physical reality but such critics as Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, for example, have argued that words may misread past landscapes. The integration of digital tools and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has the potential to add dramatically to the capacity of the humanities to more fully understand and explain the dynamics of war-induced environmental change. Digital and GIS datasets and modeling not only add powerful new sources and tools, but also provide the means to more effectively link time (the domain of history as a discipline) and space (the environments people use and move through), qualitative and quantitative sources, as well as word and image, greatly enhancing the understanding of the processes involved as well as offering new visual ways of presenting the results of the research.

   • Liliana M. Dávalos — Department of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY Stony Brook, USA; Leonardo Correa — Sistema Integrado de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilícitos - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Colombia; Adriana Bejarano — Department of Environmental Health Sciences, University of South Carolina, USA
     Fighting the Wrong War: Unmet Basic Needs and Coca Cultivation in Colombia

     Despite at least two decades of implementing aerial eradication and expenditures on the order of several billion dollars, the goal of eliminating coca cultivation in Colombia remains elusive. Since aerial fumigation was first implemented in the mid 1980s, coca production and processing became integrated, making Colombia both the world's largest producer of coca leaves and the largest exporter of cocaine. As a result of this vertical integration, forest fragmentation associated with coca production has increased dramatically. At present, the spatial and social dynamics of frontier colonization are mostly linked to coca, rather than to legal commodities such as cattle or oil palm. We analyzed the spatial distribution of coca over the last 7 years with the goal of uncovering correlates of coca production and expansion in Colombia. Our analyses included as independent variables biologically relevant features, such as temperature and precipitation maxima and minima, and forest ecotones, as well as factors directly linked to the campesino economy, such as migration, accessibility, and poverty. With few exceptions, the current distribution of coca reaches all habitats with suitable environmental conditions. Net emigration, a high percentage of households with unmet basic necessities, and medium accessibility characterized areas where coca has expanded. Coca production was not directly linked to unemployment – an urban phenomenon – or immigration. The results suggest that most coca growers are local campesinos, and that alternative crops require extra credit or subsidies to overcome the relatively difficult access to legal markets. Together with field surveys conducted by SIMCI, these results support the hypothesis that eradication has led to internal displacement, thereby speeding forest fragmentation in Colombia.

   • Raymond Bryant — Geography, King's College, London
     The Fate of the Branded Forest: Science, Violence and Seduction in the World of Teak

     One of the defining traits of modern capitalism is the role of the brand in shaping consumer choices in the marketplace. As brand-named goods deepen their ‘colonisation of the mind’, they are seen to exert a greater influence on a widening array of consumer products and, by extension, on the production processes that underpin those products. However this process is neither new nor confined to the world of the usual manufactured goods. Indeed, it has ruled the fate of forests populated by much sought after tree species such as mahogany and teak over a lengthy historical period. Here, the product’s very biophysical properties become the basis of a ‘brand’ identity.

     This paper examines selected implications of the ‘branded’ forest with reference to the historical and contemporary case of teak, a highly valued hardwood found notably in Burma (Myanmar). It does so in relation to three interconnected material and discursive processes: (1) the role of science in the location, production and promotion of teakwood; (2) the role of violence in the ‘management’ of those inhabited forests in which teak is located; and (3) the role of seduction and marketing in the cultural representation of teak as a wood of ‘distinction’. These interlinked processes have had a profound impact on the constitution of a world of teak – a unique commodity culture based on equally distinctive socio-natural dynamics. In considering the relationship between brand, product and people in this manner, this paper assesses how such things as globalization, the science of product definition and management, forest loss and resurgence, the politics of ‘violent forests’, and the manufactured seductions of culturally distinctive products, come together and are embodied in the fortunes of teak as a ‘luxury’ wood.

1. 9:00 AM — Violence and War, Continued

   • Alan Grainger — Geography, University of Leeds, UK
     Tensions Between External Ordering and Internal 'Disorder' in the Tropical Forests

     The Global North has attempted to impose order onto tropical forests ever since 'scientific forestry' was introduced in colonial times. Yet even then, owing to widespread reliance on 'indirect rule', there was a painfully weak correspondence between the image and social reality. External interventions have continued in the post-colonial era, initially through the establishment of national parks and other protected areas, and most recently with such linguistic and symbolic impositions as "illegal logging" and sustainability labels. The production of knowledge about what happens in tropical forests has also been influenced by fitting often questionable global statistical data into positivist ordering structures such as cross-sectional regressions. These purport to show, among other things, that deforestation is principally a response to population growth, while civil wars are not explained by political grievances but by rebel groups wanting to loot timber and other natural resources. But how do societies really relate to forests in the tropics once the modernist lens of the North is removed? This paper argues that simple dichotomies, such as those between sustainable and unsustainable forest management, and between ordered and disordered societies, are not helpful. By means of case studies from the Philippines, Sierra Leone and Thailand it examines the full spectrum of disorder, from civil war, to insurgency and endemic informality. It finds that while there may well be extreme conflicts between the discourses of participating actors, the one source of continuity - albeit in different forms - is the prevalence of informal institutions which are closely entangled with forest resources. While this undermines Northern expectations of the adoption of formal modernist institutions, it is entirely compatible with features of dominant social, economic and political institutions, which also subvert Northern imaginings. The result is two, quite different, social constructions of forests, the divergences between them being finessed by ambiguity when can no longer be rendered invisible by discursive constraints.

2. 9:30 AM — Urbanization, Markets, and "New Forests"

   Urbanization in the tropics has created powerful markets for both global and local commodities. Tropical urban spaces are often also profoundly biotic places through the integration of production systems within urban areas, the creation of tastes and markets for local products, and their impacts on forms of intensifications within their hinterlands. Emergent markets for energy, carbon offsets and payment for environmental services and markets for tropical exotica have the potential to dramatically expand the purview of new regional forests. These processes all, however, have significant effects on the structure of local ecologies.

   • Christine Padoch, Louis Putzel, and Angela Steward — Economic Botany, New York Botanic Garden
     Urban Residence, Rural Employment, and the Future of Amazon Forests

     The movement of rural people to cities and the growth of urban areas are processes that have historically had important impacts on rural environments, including forests. How rural-urban migration specifically affects forest cover in the tropics has recently received much attention. Census data from Brazil and Peru report that approximately 70% of the population of lowland Amazonia now resides in urban areas and that strong rural-to-urban migration flows continue. Urbanization will lead to recovery of substantial areas of the tropical forests of Amazonia if migration drains the rural zones of population and returns abandoned farmland to forest. Several researchers, however, have pointed out that migration data can be misleading. For poor Amazonian households the rural-urban distinction is largely artificial because circular migration is very common. In this paper we detail yet another aspect of the rural-urban continuum. Using recent data from two widely-separated regions of Amazonia, we show that despite their official urban residence, many Amazonians continue to earn their income by working in rural occupations: logging, farming, and fishing. We examine some potential effects of this pattern on the future of Amazon forests.

   • Deborah Barry — Governance and Forests Program, CIFOR (Center for International Forest Research) and Rights and Resources Initiative; Ruth Meinzen-Dick — International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and CAPRI (Collective Action and Property Rights Initiative)
     The invisible map: Community tenure rights in the forest

     Over the last 20 years, a little known trend of land tenure reforms has swept across the world’s southern forests, resulting in the official transference of tenure rights to communities of over 250 million hectares of forestlands. This so-called ‘forest reform’ (not agrarian reform) is transferring a broad set or bundle of rights to indigenous peoples, local communities and groups to access forestlands and resources, providing initial opportunity for improving the livelihoods of poor forest-dependent communities. Communal titles are the most widespread, with a wide range of land use rights within the perimeters.

     The definition of these rights, the marking of how and where they are held, who grants them, and who holds them are not straightforward under the ‘classic’ tenure system models. The range of land use rights from individual to common property use is obscured. Tools for mapping land use have expanded and become more participatory, helping to base these reforms on local institutions and rights, but are still largely in the hands of researchers and state agencies. These tools, increasingly incorporating GIS systems are excellent for using land use as a determinant of property boundaries or perimeters, but once these are established the knowledge is seldom available for communities themselves to use as a way to clarify, share or negotiate their complex systems of rights with outsiders. These internal customary practices and defacto rules-of-the-game adhered to by local communities are also dynamic, changing during different seasons, with new leadership, changes in forest product prices and often interacting with new rules imposed by external regulations or market opportunities once tenure is granted. There is a growing need to need to represent these rights - with a conceptual and practical framework - in order to both manage and defend them.

     This paper first presents a framework in which to consider how bundles of rights are distributed between the state, the collective, smaller groups and individuals within communal tenure systems. It then argues why the framework needs to be turned into a tool for multi-purpose participatory research at the intra and inter community levels. It makes the case that the tool can help communities themselves give visibility to internal tenure systems ‘within the perimeters’ of their forestlands. Finally, the paper mentions the issues and challenges that will need to be addressed as the development of this ‘tool’ goes forward.

   • Lesley Potter — Human Geography, Australian National University
     Forest survival and resurgence in Indonesia? Community forests, adat forests and agroforests in a neoliberal age
   • Eduardo Brondízio — Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT) and Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Indiana University
     Forest Resources and City Services: Rural-Urban Household Networks in the Amazon Estuary

     There is increasing connection between resource and service economies in the Amazon estuary. The rise of the açaí fruit (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) economy during the past twenty years has driven intensification of production and management in regional forests. However, while most families maintain an active forest economy, increasingly they depend on access to urban services such as education and healthcare and on government assistance through retirement and family subsidies programs. The growing complexity of the açaí fruit market has also encouraged rural families to strengthen social networks to urban areas where they participate in the marketing of their product. Technological advancements, particularly in the areas of transportation and communication, have both facilitated these connections and in essence shorten them.. Accordingly, rural households have increasingly invested in city houses, their own transportation and cell phones and the education of their children. These investments have offered security against land expulsion and/or shortage, and, a safe haven for children who attend urban schools, family members who work and those who constantly visit town for services or to collect different forms of assistances or wages. Simultaneously, the region has seen an increasing expansion of urban areas and growing forest cover and economy. Increasingly, social networks, investments, and access to services and employment extend rural households within and between communities, to local towns, and to the regional capital, Belém.

     Building upon ongoing collaborative research, this paper examines the increasing complexity of rural – urban socioeconomic networks in the Amazon estuary. Kinship, reciprocity, and economic networks are examined between households within and across rural communities, local towns, and the regional capital. Social networks are characterized in terms of type, spatial extent, and intensity. Long-term, longitudinal ethnographic research is complemented with data from 350 household surveys in 8 rural communities, two local towns (Ponta de Pedras and Barcarena), and the capital Belém carried out in 2007 and 2008. Historical remote sensing (1969-2007) provides a spatial-temporal perspective to the rise of a forest-based economy. In analyzing social networks, the paper discusses the rise of multi-sited households characterized by family members living in more than one location but acting as an economic unit through resource flows and mutual support: forest and water resources on the one hand, city services and support on the other. It explores the flow of resources and labor during different seasons, the economic strategies of rural households to secure access to urban areas, and their participation in the marketing of açaí fruit. The formation of extensive rural-urban social networks and multisided households represent a dimension of social life of estuarine forests which increasingly defines the region’s culture, economy, and environment.

   • Robin Sears — The School for Field Studies
     From Fallow Timber to Urban Housing: Tablilla Production and Marketing in Peru

     Tablillas, small-dimension lumber, are sweeping the timber markets in Peru from informal trade in rural villages to major housing suppliers in Lima. This expanding market for lumber from fast-growing timber is reshaping the productive landscape in the Amazon region by inspiring a system of timber production quite distinct ecologically, socially, and economically from the dominant practice of selective logging. In this paper I introduce the species and production systems that feed this emerging and expanding market, explore the social networks that facilitate the processing and marketing of tablillas, and present an economic model that describes the system from the point of view of the rural producer. Finally, I discuss regulatory changes that would allow rural farmers to participate more directly, legally and sustainably in the tablilla boom.

3. 11:50 AM — Other Associations: Plantations, Secondary Forests, and the ‘Construction of Natures’

   While much public attention has been focused on the conservation of old-growth forests and the conservation of what are presumably ‘natural’ landscapes, there is great value in studying other associations such as secondary forests, plantations, and the many other anthropic landscapes, some of which were previously assumed to be ‘pristine.’ Not only are such contexts of growing global importance, but they also have much to tell us about the long-term dynamics of human-forest interaction and the complex and variable roles humans have played in the successional pathways of tropical forests.

   • Robin L. Chazdon — Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut; Braulio Vilchez Alvarado — Escuela de Ingeniería Forestal, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica; Susan Letcher, Amanda Wendt, and Uzay Sezen — Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut
     Effects of human activities on successional pathways: Case studies from lowland wet forests of northeastern Costa Rica

     Studies of forest succession in lowland wet forests of northeastern Costa Rica illustrate a variety of ways in which human activities affect successional pathways. (1) Hunting of vertebrates has reduced local populations of peccaries and agoutis, which are important seed predators. Consequently, the density of tree seedlings is 1.5 times higher and the density of saplings is 3.4 times higher in secondary forests in non-protected areas compared to secondary forests within La Selva Biological station, where hunting has been prohibited for 40 years. These pronounced differences affect rates of mortality and recruitment of seedlings and saplings and can ultimately impact the rate and composition of tree recruitment. (2) The duration and intensity of agricultural land use (primarily for cattle pasture) influence rates of aboveground biomass accumulation and species composition in forests 10-40 years post-abandonment. (3) Due to different forms of pasture management, abandoned pastures vary considerably in the abundance and composition of remnant trees. In addition to providing their own seed rain, remnant trees provide perch sites and roosts that generate diverse seed rain from a host of frugivorous birds and mammals during both initial and intermediate stages of succession. Young secondary forests with diverse remnant trees show increased diversity of tree seedlings and saplings compared to adjacent sites with few or no remnant trees. (4) The location of forest patches in the surrounding landscape has major implications for initial colonization and genetic structure of an abundant canopy palm species. Agricultural practices that increase diverse tree cover within pastures and in buffer zones of protected areas increase the diversity and rate of forest regeneration in local secondary forest patches.

   • Clark Erickson — Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
     Culture amidst the Pristine: The Anthropogenic Forests of the Bolivian Amazon

     Biologists, ecologists, and conservationists expect and find high biodiversity within what has been assumed to be the pristine tropical forest of Amazonia. Historical ecologists and landscape archaeologists now question this traditional assumption. They document clear signatures of human creation, transformation, and management of the so-called pristine environments of the Amazon Basin and throughout the Neotropics. By treating the complexly patterned palimpsests of landscapes as dynamic material culture or built environment amenable to multiscalar temporal and spatial analysis, archaeologists can contribute to a better understanding of the human history of forests. Over the past 18 years, colleagues and I have conducted landscape and historical ecological research on pre-Columbian earthworks in the Bolivian Amazon. Our research initially focused on earthworks built for agriculture, transportation, communication, water control, and the management of fish within the vast savannas and wetlands of the region. Much to our surprise, we began to document similar earthworks deep within what appear to be relatively pristine forests. We have documented associations of 1) chocolate groves and ring ditch earthworks in Baures; 2) mahogany forest and raised fields in the Tsimane Indigenous Territory; and 3) biologically diverse forest and the settlement mound of Ibibate in the Sirionó Indigenous Territory of the Bolivian Amazon. Historical ecologists stress that successful management and conservation strategies for contemporary and future biodiversity should be based on a sound understanding the human history of any environment. In the Bolivian Amazon, the history of forests is much more dynamic and complex than a simple “return to nature” or “forest recovery” of a previously occupied, constructed landscape. In this presentation, I explore how anthropogenic and historical processes created and shaped in the forested landscape from the Pre-Columbian period through the Colonial and into more recent periods and I suggest some ways that the past might inform the future.

   • David L. Lentz — Biological Sciences, University of Cincinnati
     Long-Term Impacts of Ancient Maya Agroforestry Practices in the Northern Petén Region: Case Studies at Tikal and Dos Hombres

     Evidence of ancient agroforestry activities and their lingering impact on tropical forest species diversity has been revealed through recent paleoethnobotanical investigations of two archaeological sites in the Lowland Maya area: Tikal in northern Guatemala and Dos Hombres in northern Belize. Tikal, one of the foremost polities of the ancient Maya realm, relied heavily on the adjacent lowland rainforest as a resource base for fuel and construction materials. We analyzed wood samples from timbers used in the construction of all six of the city’s major temples as well as two major palaces to determine which tree species were being exploited during the Late Classic period. We observed a change in preference from large-growing, upland forest species to more diminutive, seasonal wetland (bajo) species around 741 A.D. Also, we recorded a decrease in lintel beam width over time. These findings concur with models that hypothesize widespread deforestation during the Late Classic period and indicate a declining forest resource base by the 9th century A.D.

     In the Dos Hombres study, the goal was to ascertain the impact of ancient Maya agroforestry activities on modern tropical forest biodiversity in the area. Forest transects (10 m wide by 1.35 km long) that measured, mapped and recorded all trees greater than 10 cm at breast height were conducted. Two areas with a similar geological underbedding (consolidated limestone that developed from a Pliocene sea bottom), topography, elevation, climate and rainfall were selected for study. Both areas had been previously mapped by ecologists who designated them as the same forest type. The areas also had been intensively surveyed by archaeologists who located a large settlement (Dos Hombres) in one area, but found no evidence of human occupation in the other transect area. Dos Hombres was a moderately large civic/ceremonial center with cut-stone architecture, ball courts, temples and plazas surrounded by house compounds typical of a Late Classic Maya settlement. Results showed that the species richness index (d1) and the Shannon-Wiener Index of Diversity (H) was lower for the forest adjacent to the Dos Hombres site (d1 = 15.12, H = 1.293) than the area that was unoccupied (d1 = 21.08, H = 1.325). Furthermore, a significantly greater percentage of the total of individual trees identified at Dos Hombres were known to have been used by the ancient Maya (36.4%) verses 28.3% in the unoccupied area (Pearson Chi Square = 5.032; p = 0.025). Similarly, the Maya used a significantly greater percentage of the number of species identified at Dos Hombres, 55.3% compared to 33.9% of species from the transect through unoccupied forest (Pearson Chi Square = 4.215; p = 0.04).

     In conclusion, the studies at Dos Hombres and Tikal have shown that: (1) ancient Maya agroforestry activities were carefully planned and initially conservative in nature, leading to a stability of resource extraction that lasted well into the Late Classic period; (2) during the middle of the Late Classic period at Tikal, those management strategies appear to have changed and coincided with a marked degradation of available resources; and (3) the ancient Maya construction and agroforestry activities of the Late Classic period have had significant long-term influences on composition and biodiversity of the Neotropical forests in the northern Petén region.

   • Monica Janowski — University of Sussex, UK; Huw Barton — University of Leicester, UK; Graeme Barker — University of Cambridge, UK; Chris Hunt — Queens University, Belfast, UK; Lindsay Lloyd-Smith — University of Cambridge, UK; Samantha Jones — Queens University, Belfast, UK
     Discovering the past, constructing the future: human-environment stories, histories and relationships in the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak

     This paper focuses on the Kelabit Highlands in Sarawak, the highest inhabited area in the island of Borneo. It draws on anthropological fieldwork carried out over the past 20 years by Janowski and on a new anthropological-archaeological-environmental science collaborative project, The Cultured Rainforest. The Cultured Rainforest aims to explore the history of settlement, agriculture and the human relationship with the landscape and the environment in this forested, highland area. Through myth and stories, personal and group histories, data from archaeological investigations and data from pollen cores, our aim in the project is both to attempt to understand ‘what really happened’ in the recent and ‘deep’ past through confronting, comparing and triangulating different kinds of information, and also to explore the social and cosmological underpinnings of myths and stories about the past, linking these to present-day human behaviour, social structure, beliefs and cosmologies. The paper will attempt to draw some conclusions about the ways in which the past can be used by different actors in the service of the present and the future in the context of very rapid environmental change and profound social transformations.

4. 3:15 PM — Policies and Politics

   For at least the last several thousand years, human engagements with forests have been at least partially mediated through institutional contexts, including state and local policies and directives. Indeed, one might argue that politics, in the more general sense of interested intersocial engagement and interaction is always implicated in human-environment interaction. More specifically, papers in this section examine both historical and recent implications of public policy and the strategies of state and non-state actors, including new citizen coalitions dedicated to conservation goals, for forest dynamics.

   • Sara Berry — History, Johns Hopkins University
     A forest for my kingdom? ‘Forest rent’ and the politics of history in Asante (Ghana)

     Founded in the late 17th century by people whose forebears had moved north into the tropical forests of southern Ghana, the precolonial Asante state drew much of its wealth from the consumption and circulation of forest resources. Food crops grown on freshly cleared forest land sustained the population of the capital, Kumasi (estimated at 20-25,000 in the early 19th century) and the large establishment of the royal palace; gold mined from beneath the forests fueled a complex ‘political marketplace’ of state patronage and power; trees and other forest plants supplied raw materials for Asante artisans, builders and healers; and all of these resources fed into a far-flung network of international commerce that supplied the Asante economy with slaves and manufactured goods, and European slavers with the “black gold” of their Atlantic empires. By the early 1900s, forest-grown cocoa had replaced palm oil and slaves as Ghana’s principal export, supplemented by smaller but significant international sales of gold and timber. In the 20th century, as in the past, much of Asante’s wealth (and that of Ghana) has derived from the extraction of natural ‘rent’ from the trees and rich sub-soils of its forests.

     Crucial to Asante’s economy, the forests have also figured centrally as a locus of spiritual and social power—a source and an object of multiple contestations that shaped the changing contours of state power and of the forests themselves. In the 20th century especially, the extraction of ‘forest rent’ has outpaced both natural and human efforts at regeneration, leading to a steady depletion of forest cover and soils, and intensifying struggles over land and authority at all levels of Ghanaian society. Viewing contemporary struggles over land and forest resources in historical perspective, this paper explores some of the ways in which people’s efforts to exploit, protect and imagine the forests have impinged on their relations with one another and the state, and discusses the way legacies of past forest exploitation figure in contemporary struggles over state and local authority, and in the continuing salience of Asante—and ‘tradition’—in Ghana’s ‘modern’ political economy.

   • Mahesh Rangarajan — History, University of Delhi
     Forest as faunal enclave: Endangerment, Ecology and Exclusion

     A country with a billion people on less than two per cent of the earth’s terrestrial surface area may seem a strange place to consider the survival of forest as intact ecological entities. Mega fauna matter in more than symbolic terms for they are bound up with substantial conflicts on how to govern and keep intact the forest estate. Though a small spectrum of wider conflicts, they serve to highlight the ways in which polity and ecology impact each other. One question is if the forest can or will survive intact as a faunal enclave given the intensity with which the larger landscape is cultivated or industrialised. How and where the enclave if at all it is that interacts with the larger society, its economic pressures and political tugs o war becomes a critical issue.

     India is clearly at a cross roads with fierce contest over the fate of its forests. Of the multitude of claimants of this space are those who see them as the last redoubt of endangered life forms and others who see access to them as birth right of under privileged peoples. Science and culture, local and regional polities, bureaucracies and forest peoples, industry and agriculture are locked in contest. The roots of the conflicts lie in the distant past. The very term jangala in Sanskrit or kadu in Tamil, two of the most ancient extant languages on earth, conveyed not one but many meanings. Landscapes were graded in terms of the animals, the flowers or the societies that inhered from them. In the absence of any equilibrium, there were constant changes in the land. Till as recently as 1800 much of India was forest, whether secondary or primary, with cultivated arable being only islands in sea of green. Antagonism was not the only relationship, with polities embracing incorporating in complex ways such lands, their resources and peoples. Large animals, both wild and tame ones, were integral to these processes of political, cultural and ecological change.

     While it is commonplace to see the creation of the colonial Forest Department as a land controller as a watershed in ecological terms, equally critical changes were unleashed by the princes who ruled a third of the land mass. Nature was not only enclosed in government estate, it was also re-natured in significant ways by the princes and aristocrats. In doing so, dominant groups through the late 19th and early 20th centuries anticipated many practices that today go by the label of ‘conservation’. The restraints on usufruct rights and the expansion of cultivation in particular were grounds of contention. The use of coercion of labor for forestry and hunting, bans on trapping and swidden cultivation, were but part of a maze of restrictive practices that lay at he heart of forestry and game conservancy. Fierce contests in the forest were rule rather than exception. At the same time, there was considerable give and take, inevitable given the expanse of the land and the diversity of its ecologies and peoples. These grey areas and ‘zones of anomaly’ are of more than antiquarian interest given the polarizations of the present. What is striking is the ways in which the core agendas of the preservation of nature taken aboard in the 1970s and after drew from earlier precept and practice. As dominance over wild lands and beasts was confirmed, the urge to protect some remnants grew often among the very classes that had led the conquest. The new nationalism and global concerns had distinct elements that were fresh but in terms of administrative practice and tactics on the forest floor they drew on past precedent. Even those who dissented from a model that saw growth as a cure all differed on which shade of green was best.

     Multiple fault lines divide those who consider the fate of the forest as entity. Preservationists see total protection as the right response, and ground their case in the fragility of life cycles and ecosystems. Populists concur with the aim but pit local rights against the bureaucracy, and often, traditional versus scientific knowledge. Unusual alliances still exist, showing there is space to re-negotiate the survival of the forest as entity. Part of this arises from the logic of representative democracy that allows for debate and compromise. In a range of real life cases, where common ground exists, ideal type solutions can and do give way to more nuanced, workable approaches. But there are huge variations between regions such as parts of southern India where polities have a wider base, and governments a better record of welfare and the more feudal traditions of the north west and centre of the country. Retention, reconciliation and restoration of forest (and allied) ecologies each can have a role. But whether these individual approaches can coalesce to influence the larger trajectory is a challenge and a daunting one.

     As in the past, the issues of the forest are linked to the larger questions of polity and economy. The shape of the forests, diverse as they are hinges on the outcomes of hard political choices. The idea of equity and the promise of ecological sanity are both equally on trial. And the forest is an arena where the conflicts are among the most stark, the choices the most difficult. Even as global factors loom larger than ever, national and more so regional politics will play a critical role. It is this creative space for rainbow alliances and coalitions of interest that may well hold the key to the endurance of forests in the coming century. Science as well as history may yet have a role to play: to help create new opportunities while transcending the worst of the past.

   • Jefferson Fox — East-West Center, University of Hawaii
     The production of forests: Tree cover transitions in Thailand, Laos, and Southern China

     Literature from across the Southeast Asia regions suggests that national policies are making it increasingly difficult for farmers to maintain traditional swidden agricultural systems and the secondary forests associated them. Simultaneously, markets pressures are encouraging farmers to engage in new and different forms of commercial agriculture. While it has become all too apparent that Montane Mainland Southeast Asia is on the cusp of major changes in tree cover, there is much uncertainty about the direction of change and the impacts it will have both people’s livelihoods and environmental variables such as biodiversity, carbon sequestration, watershed hydrology, and climate. This paper summaries data collected from a project examining land-use and land-cover change along a new North-South highway corridor linking Northern Thailand, Northern Laos, and Southern Yunnan, China. In Xishuangbanna, (the most southern prefecture in Yunnan Province), China, both semi-privatized state farms and minority farmers are planting rubber at rates that threatens to transform the landscape between 300 and 1,000 m into an unbroken carpet of rubber. In northern Thailand, large areas have been set aside as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, while in other areas rural people are becoming increasingly divorced from farming, with education and consumerism creating a context where rural people are disintensifying, even abandoning their land, in favor of non-farm pursuits. In this paper I examine how an assortment of factors including government policies on issues ranging from forest classification, eradicating opium, stabilizing shifting cultivators, to promoting trade, and developing infrastructure; new markets; and changing aspirations and human agency are affecting tree cover across this transect. I also examine what the different types of tree cover we find developing mean for how forests are defined.

   • Thomas Rudel — Human Ecology, Rutgers University
     When Do People Decide to Protect Forests?: A Comparative Analysis

     During the past twenty-five years protected areas have expanded considerably in extent throughout the world, but the agents and means of protection seem at first glance to be quite different from rich to poor nations. Local residents working in concert with local and state politicians provide the impetus for forest protection in the wealthy nations while international environmental NGOs working in concert with national politicians provide the impetus for forest protection in the poor nations. A comparative analysis of protected area expansion in two forested regions, the New Jersey Highlands in the northeastern United States and the Andean foothills of Ecuador, suggests that the above contrast is overdrawn. Although the political coalitions that accomplish protection differ in their composition between the two places, similar circumstances drive both processes and similar problems come with the expansion in protected areas.

   • Peter Crane — Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago; Liam Heneghan — DePaul University; Francie Muraski-Stotz — Brookfield Zoo; Melinda Pruett-Jones — Chicago Wilderness Consortium; Laurel Ross — Field Museum of Natural History; Alaka Wali — Field Museum of Natural History; and Lynne Westphal — U.S.D.A. Forest Service Chicago Wilderness: Integrating Biological and Social Diversity in the Urban Garden

     In 1995, 34 public and private organizations joined together to launch an unconventional regional conservation effort, the Chicago Wilderness initiative, in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. These organizations, already engaged individually in a variety of conservation, restoration and public engagement activities, recognized that while the “natural areas” of the Chicago region had great value, both for biological diversity and for people, the threats that they faced, and the opportunities that they presented, required a more coordinated regional approach. They set themselves the mission of protecting the natural communities in the Chicago region and restoring them to long-term viability, in order to enrich the quality of life of the region’s people, and to contribute to the conservation of global biodiversity.

     The challenges faced by the fledgling Chicago Wilderness consortium were many. The group needed to transcend political and institutional boundaries, share resources and expertise, and foster collaboration across diverse partners and stakeholders in setting regional conservation goals. They also needed to attract new funding to support this innovative approach to conservation in an urban landscape on a regional level. Now, twelve years later, the underpinning goal, to create common ground in regional conservation has been far surpassed. The Chicago Wilderness consortium has grown to over 220 public and private member organizations, including federal, state, county, and local agencies, municipalities, conservation organizations, universities, park districts, homeowners associations, faith-based organizations, and schools. The result has been unprecedented cooperation in viewing the metropolitan landscape as a whole and developing Chicago Wilderness as a national and international model for how nature and people can coexist harmoniously in an urban region.

     Nevertheless, the Chicago Wilderness consortium must continue to evolve as it confronts existing and emerging challenges and opportunities in a complex social and political landscape, which includes the continuing transition to a post-industrial economy, changing demographics, and shifting political alignments among the City and neighboring counties. There remain urgent needs for increased public engagement, improved scientific knowledge and better management of existing “protected areas.” In particular, because many of the processes that once sustained “natural” communities of the Chicago area either no longer work, or are greatly modified, there is much to be done to build broader support for the interventionist “gardening” practices needed to replace them. At the same time, there are key opportunities to build on the vision of the Burnham Plan, which a century ago preserved much of the existing green space at the core of Chicago Wilderness. Increased public, civic and political interest in regional planning presents the opportunity for a still more inclusive vision of Chicago Wilderness that secures the green infrastructure of the Chicago metropolitan area and ensures its long-term viability.

5. 5:45 — Discussion and Future Directions

   • Kathleen Morrison, Susanna Hecht, Christine Padoch