Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic: 90 (African Studies, Series Number 90)
Cambridge University Press, 10/17/1996
EAN 9780521564991, ISBN10: 0521564999
Paperback, 384 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded both by scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. In this 1996 text, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, how people have created forest islands around their villages, and how they have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence, and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this fascinating study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, encouraging a radical re-examination of some central tenets in each of these disciplines.
Introduction
1. Convictions of forest loss in policy and ecological science
2. Forest gain
historical evidence of vegetation change
3. Settling a landscape
forest islands in regional social and political history
4. Ecology and society in a Kuranko village
5. Ecology and society in a Kissi village
6. Enriching a landscape
working with ecology and deflecting successions
7. Accounting for forest gain
local land use, regional political economy and demography
8. Reading forest history backwards
a century of environmental policy
9. Sustaining reversed histories
the continual production of views of forest loss
10. Towards a new forest-savanna ecology and history.