Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face – including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation – are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests' past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces – from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems – has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics. Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, "The Social Lives of Forests" attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests – how we define, understand, and maintain them – is changing.
About the Author
Susanna B. Hecht is professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Topanga, CA.
Kathleen D. Morrison is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author or editor of several volumes, including "Daroji Valley: Landscape History, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System". She lives in Chicago.
Christine Padoch is the director of livelihoods research at the Center for International Forestry Research, Indonesia. She lives in Bogor, Indonesia.
Reviews
"'The Social Lives of Forests' should have a strong and positive influence on the fields of ecology, conservation, environmental history, and many social sciences. A clear message emerges that established views and conservation approaches based on seeing people as separate from nature – or viewing the land as divided into the pristine and wild versus the humanized and despoiled – are erroneous and doomed to generate unsuccessful policies and approaches to stewardship. These are not novel ideas, but this volume is unusual and valuable in making a forceful case for their validity based on work from many different landscapes and cultures and a great diversity of environmental and historical conditions" – David R. Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, Harvard University
"Forests are complex ecological entities, but they are also cultural, historical, political, and social, all at once. Above all, say the contributors to this excellent volume, forests are working landscapes with multiple lives and livelihoods. 'The Social Lives of Forests' brings together a posse of the world's leading scholars of forests who challenge us to think about trees and people in entirely new ways. This book is an exhilarating and intellectually capacious exploration of forests as biomes and as artifacts. A bravura piece of social science scholarship" – Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
"Very engaging. 'The Social Lives of Forests' offers a must-read, highly interdisciplinary perspective yielding fresh, rich insight and incisive accounts of a global swath of sustainability issues and politics surrounding forests and their current and future management, markets, policies, cultures, and conservation along with their incredible past histories. A joy" – Karl Zimmerer, Pennsylvania State University and editor of "Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation"
"An all-too-uncommon union of the hard and social sciences, 'The Social Lives of Forests' is a groundbreaking work that reframes both the history of the world's forest lands and the debate over their future. Stressing the centuries-long human role in the creation and maintenance of wooded landscapes, and their relation to both rural and urban life in the globalized world of today and in the past, the articles in this book collectively provide a new way to think about forest ecosystems and their inhabitants. This is a book that will surprise and inform historians, ecologists, foresters, environmentalists – and anyone who cares about the forests around us" – Charles C. Mann, author of "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus"
