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Title: Misreading the African Landscape : Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic by James Fairhead, Melissa Leach ISBN: 0-521-56499-9 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 17 October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: exposes challenges facing postcolonial environmental science
Comment: When the authors of this paradigm-shifting book traveled to Guinea, they planned to study the social dimensions of what generations of ecologists had perceived as a tragedy of the commons which had led to massive deforestation. What they discovered instead was that generations of ecologists had been reading this African landscape backwards: mistaking forest islands which had been cultivated by precolonial peoples for the last remaining stands of an ancient forest which they imagined had once completely covered the plains. In fact, the area where rural farmer-silviculturalists had been accused of decimating a fictitious oldgrowth forest is too dry to allow tree communities to thrive naturally. Only through human intervention had the grassland been interrupted with small pockets of highly biodiverse forest communities.
A landmark work in political ecology, this remarkable study exposes the dark side of environmentalist intervention measures that seek to curb perceived tragedies of the commons by nationalizing the management of natural resources and prohibiting traditional land-use practices that are believed to have adverse consequences. Under the influence of an expert-generated misreading of the local ecological history, the Guinean government had instituted environmental protection measures which penalized the traditional silvicultural practices that the precious forest islands depended upon for survival, on the mistaken supposition that these apparently primitive and abusive practices were a threat to the "last remaining" forests in the district. Pay close attention to the ecological historiography presented in this book, which reveals what shaky data are often used by highly educated environmental scientists to infer the natural and social systems dynamics at work in a given environment. This blows away the widely-held assumption that low-income rural people without college-level environmental educations are the most short-sighted and ignorant decision-makers involved in the management of public forests and other ecologically complex natural resources.
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