3/7 African forests
Fairhead and Leach, selections, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (course mywebspace folder).
For your journal, you may consider: what sources of evidence do Fairhead and Leach use to support their central argument? How else might you interpret those same sources of evidence?
PAPERS: bring to class one or two potential topics that interest you. In class, we will work in small groups to pose good questions about your potential topics.
In the introduction, Leach and Fairhead mention the sources they use for their research, and they include archival documents, writings from anthropologists and Guinean scholars, aerial photographs, oral interviews and scientific research among other sources. One of the most interesting elements of their research was to heighten the importance of the local knowledge and use it, alongside other techniques such as aerial photos to challenge research that drove forest policies that were originally developed through "scientific research." I find this particularly interesting as I do primarily qualitative research for my thesis, but I work closely alongside restoration ecologists who work with quantitative data.
ReplyDeleteEven though I know that one can question scientific research, it has been only very recently (through participation in a graduate ecology class) that I started to realize to what degree scientific researchers routinely question other's research, and I think that the Fairhead-Leach writing delves into the idea that research outcomes and methodologies can be open to critique and interpretation, as well. Also, introducing oral history into the mix, while acknowledging some potential pitfalls of these interviews, starts to create a more realistic vision of historical research and how policy development can be influenced.
Having been greatly influenced by the restorationists in my department, I kept wondering about how and why forests are so valued. The restoration perspective in my department generally is about figuring out "original" land patterns (and this book revealed how difficult and contentious this can be) and then making decisions based on that knowledge. It's not always to establish "pre-euro" settlement patterns, but, I think in Western ecological thought, this process starts with the idea that all options (prairie, savanna, forest, wetlands etc.) are equally preferable, because they all have inherent "goodness" and value, in essence. I felt, that to a certain extent, the writing started out with the assumption that forests are a preferable landscape to savanna, even if the landscape was originally more savanna and that proving that the culture added to the forest was inherently proof that they were a positive influence on the landscape.
Can science “rob society of its history?”
ReplyDeleteExamining Guinea’s Kissidougou region, anthropologists James Fairhead and Melissa Leach make a strong case that scientific interpretations of the forest-savanna landscape were ahistorical and harmful to traditional cultures. In Misreading the African Landscape, they offer a powerful reminder of a theme that has echoed throughout this semester's readings: namely, that our perspectives on forests are colored by the theoretical lenses through which we choose to view them. The authors argue that western scientists, proceeding from a belief in an inherent separation between nature and culture, looked upon the savanna of Kissidougou and saw a “degraded” landscape denuded of trees by local inhabitants, save for the “forest islands” surrounding villages. Indeed, they “read forest history backward” -- examining the vegetation of contemporary landscapes and deductively arriving at conclusions about changes over time. The villagers, whom scientists and policy-makers blamed for clearing forests, brought a different view to their ancestral lands. The forests surrounding their villages were not “relics” of a supposedly “pristine” ancient forest, but in many cases enduring legacies of long-standing cultural practices to cultivate woodlands to serve community needs. For villagers, then, the savanna was “half-full” (of forests), not “half-empty” as it seemed to scientists and administrators.
Proceeding from a belief that all concepts relating to the land -- be they “scientific” or grounded in “lived history” -- are social constructions, Fairhead and Leach use scientific studies, aerial photographs, colonial records, and oral recollections of village elders, among other documents, to understand changes in Kissidougou’s forest-savanna over the past century. Ultimately, they conclude that the degraded-forest interpretation espoused by scientists and policy-makers was wrong, failing to comprehend the local land-use history that gave rise to the savanna-forest landscape of Kissidougou. The authors found that inhabitants not only created many of the forest islands in the first place but that such forests expanded over the past 100 years as a result of local practices -- findings that contradict notions of precipitous forest decline. Thus, colonial and post-Independence policies curbing traditional practices -- including a law making brush fires punishable by death -- frequently proceeded from error and disrupted communities and ecosystems alike.
Fairhead and Leach make a strong case that the theoretical blind spots of traditional western science did indeed rob villagers in Guinea of their history, and of present forms of subsistence.
-John
Throughout the reading the authors are questioning the history of the landscape, and especially the role of humans in altering the landscape. I found a quote in the introduction particularly interesting, "Nature is an essential reference point against which to discuss human impact (6)." I think this is an interesting view, because nature, which is difficult to even define, is always changing no matter if humans are involved or not. In the second portion of the reading this is noted, mentioning how ecosystem seem to have some permanence, but in reality, they are more changing that not. It is interesting to look at the interrelationship between humans and nature and how they evolve together.
ReplyDeleteFairhead and Leach have included numerous methods for research in their attempts to determine what was historically natural about the Kissidougou landscape. I was on a similar thought track as Dee was as I was reading. I was thinking about the differences between the qualitative and quantitative methods for gathering data. With a background mostly in hard sciences, I’m more familiar with and have more in training in quantitative methods and analysis. It was really interesting to me to read work done using more qualitative data. It is good practice to better understand the benefits and importance of social and cultural significance and the historical data they can provide. But still, I could not help but wonder while I was reading all their techniques, “Could they use the pollen record from the region to determine what has historically been present and where it was been present?” Would having this information change opinions on how the landscape should currently be managed?
-Amanda
The theme of humans being separate from nature seems so come up a lot when talking about different forests. It seems that a lot of the time native people see themselves as an integral part of an ecosystem such as the Kissidougou did. They weren’t degrading the landscape by burning the savanna to get rid of trees; they were an essential part in making it more diverse with small sections of forest.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with Dee and Amanda about the ideas of restoration. Nature is always changing with or without us. How can we tell what should be there and what shouldn’t be? I have had two summer internships doing habitat restoration. Reading this and other articles makes me wonder if what I was doing really made sense. The idea of controlling invasive versus species has started to seem a bit bogus to me. The government thought that the savanna was invasive, but the trees were actually the ones that would probably be listed as invasive today because they thrived only because of the village people.
I also found it interesting that the trees were seen as pristine and therefore better in part because they could be used for the economy and created an ecosystem that was better for humans to live in. Maybe we need to stop looking through lenses that show what is better for us and instead see how a diverse landscape can be better for many other species.
-Mallory
Fairhead and Leach began their examination of Kissidougou forests by looking at the canon ecological accounts of the history of the forest/savanna boundaries, and found that inconsistencies abounded. The one which stuck out to me was the way in which soil composition was used as an explanatory factor and dismissed as not affecting the vegetation composition of the landscape at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, Fairhead and Leach explored oral histories of the native people, cross-checked those histories with each other, compared those histories to other forms of records (including place names, as well as what we more traditionally think of as records), and also looked at aerial photography. They also argued that forest islands have been so significantly shaped by the habitation history of an area that they can't really be understood outside of the landscape's interaction with the people.
I'm going to derail to wildly hypothesize about the question from near the end of Chapter 1: why, in western thought, can people promote the forest only by retreating from it? Like Amanda and Mallory mentioned, the relationship between humans and nature in western culture is not comfortable, and I think the human-animal relationship is playing a role here. If in western thought the forest = the wild, and the wild's inhabitants = only animals, and humans =/= animals, then humans =/= inhabitants of the forest. I hope I didn't leave myself any logic loopholes there, but you all get what I mean.
If humans did go into the forest and promote it, then humans would be playing a culturally animal role, which generally western culture isn't comfortable with: western people tend to see ourselves as having a certain otherness in relation to the natural world. Succesful promotion of forest growth isn't compatible with whatever essentially apart-from-nature quality we assign to ourselves.
One way of defining the inferiority of a group in western culture is to portray them as more animal-like than your own group. Western colonizers were totally on board with defining native cultures as inferior, and so assigned to non-western cultures a relationship to nature which western culture didn't/doesn't have, so that the ideas like pre-colonial Native Americans living in non-landscape-altering harmony with nature were rendered culturally acceptable and absorbed into the western cultural landscape.
This also largely shut members of non-western cultures out from western institutions like science, so that our modern scientific practices were from the start rooted in only the western outlook. Which, as we see in these readings and a bunch of our readings before, is not the same as having been rooted in a well-rounded approximation of reality. If humans-as-ecosystem-participants as Mallory mentioned had been incorporated from the start, this class would probably be really different.
While I was writing this I also suddenly found it interesting that the word “rooted” like I just used it above even has that meaning for things that aren't plant life.
-Erin
Fairhead and Leach use a variety of evidence—aerial photographs, document archives, oral testimonies, social processes and kinship histories—in an attempt to reconstruct the environmental history of an African landscape that “policy-makers have been…reading backwards” (237). Fairhead and Leach’s method seems quite sufficient in breadth, using both “hard” and “soft” evidence to fill gaps for a cohesive case against a forest’s decline as previously perceived; the use of photographic evidence mapped to oral histories in particular formed a uniquely wholesome data set. As Dee suggests, acknowledging upfront some potential pitfalls of the oral histories and gathered interviews adds some validity to the authors’ argument; they are aware of interviewees’ possible bias, pressure from outside groups, political agendas and the sheer danger of exaggeration, and they make an honest attempt to dump such outliers, much as a scientist might excuse a data point for say, measurement error.
ReplyDeleteJohn’s point “For villagers then, the savanna was ‘half-full’ (of forests), not ‘half-empty’ as it seemed to scientists and administrators,” is a great way summarize the outlook disconnect between those making rules and those living with rules in Kissidougou. At several points throughout these chapters the disconnect is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing, but I suppose that without Fairhead and Leach’s presented variety of evidence and a prior knowledge of traditional use and local histories in the area, gaps simply get filled in—literally, the previous researchers here filled the forest island gaps with the assumption that the land once held lusher forests. But as Fairhead and Leach suggest, “the form and distribution of forest patches cannot be understood outside settlement history” (113) and “accounting for forest island patterns and distribution….requires attention to the ways the landscape has been peopled and settled, and to population changes and movements within it” (92), like fortification strategy, soil improvement, and preservation of past processes. Though I’d argue there’s no such thing as an absolute truth, as Leach and Fairhead prove, the deeper you delve, the closer you get.
-Stevie
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ReplyDeleteI agree with Erin in that western colonizers see local people as inferior. Colonizers see the local people as the cause of deforestation and landscape degradation because they are lesser and uneducated. The colonizers only think of the area as being degraded since there are only islands of forest around local people, and do not even think of the possibility that it is the other way around. That the local people are actually responsible for the islands of forest, and that they are advancing not retreating. In one quote from a team responsible for a river project in Kissidouguo they are discussing the reasons for the degradation of the region, “The origin of perverse use of brush fire…Parallel to the physical causes of soil erosion.” This quote alone shows the judgment of the westerners on the local people. That their use of fire is perverse when in actuality it was helping forests expand.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the western idea of local people’s interaction with forests is that it can only be harmful. This is Ironic, because as Fairhead and Leach show there is an ample amount of evidence to the contrary. The authors show that there is plenty of evidence that the local people are actually in part responsible for the forests, and that the forests are expanding not retreating. The most convincing of this evidence was the oral accounts and aerial photography. I found it satisfying at the end of chapter 2 that the authors work did affect agency understanding of the forest islands, and when presented with evidence that they actually changed their ideas instead of maintain the status quo.
Throughout the chapters, it was interesting to see how sometimes the large discrepancy between between oral and scientific evidence can lead to uncertainties and even more questions regarding vegetation and land use change. This also made me wonder in our own country the degree to which oral records are used and recognized in understanding landscape history and ecology. How much do historians rely on the oral histories of Native Americans in understanding land use change? In my opinion, no two cultures describe or identify vegetation or the landscape in the same way, making this type of research emphatically difficult (and frustrating as well!). Still, through Fairhead and Leach’s research extrapolating from a multitude of sources, they seemed to have painted a convincing picture of presettlement landscape conditions.
ReplyDeleteAs Erin and others summarized previously, western ideology in restoration is often one of domination and contriving nature to meet immediate needs. Although I share Mallory’s sentiment regarding the frustrations of restoration efforts, Fairhead and Leach portray the Kissidougou region as dynamic and adaptive system, a system that can never be seen through the same lens for very long.
The notion of adaptive and transferrable landscapes, as Fairhead and Leach point out can lead to policies lacking knowledge, ultimately leading to unforeseen consequences. I found the linkage between vegetation history and policy in Kissidougou (chap 8) particularly interesting in the fact this correlation was unrecognized at the time and how sometimes policy can have more far-reaching effects on landscape change than previously imagined. “Evidently, local interests in managing the environment for agro-ecological productivity and local needs sometimes produce the results which policy…aims for.” (260)
-Joelle B.
Throughout the reading I was completely baffled by why people were so unaware of the history of the Kissidougou landscape. Perhaps part of the answer lies in previous readings' discussions of the influence of modernity. It is not that people are unable to look back and learn from history. It is the pressure to move forward that makes looking back seem irrelevant or inconsequential. It does not really matter to the scientists and policy makers (the ones referred to by Fairhead and Leach) if their perception of the past is true. It only seems to matter how they will move forward.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me that the mosaic landscape is perhaps just as alarming to these scientists and policy makers as the wild and unruly forests were to the German foresters. Sameness is desirable over diversity. The tensions of the ecotones, those changing grounds, are unsettling, and it is presumed that there was once order and stability.
Dee mentioned the notion of an original landscape. I was also interested in that notion of a landscape having an origin and also the thought that the original landscape is what works best. Perhaps this goes back to the Western notion of Paradise, the Garden of Eden and then the Fall.
Finally, I was interested when Fairhead and Leach talked about the spirituality of the Kissidougou people and the belief that the spirits are helpful but it is important to keep them at a safe distance. This belief makes the desire of many Christians to become closer to God seem almost arrogant. Comparing different spiritualities with the ideas surrounding forests can give a greater understanding of how forests are treated by different cultures.
I thought the part about the termite mounds and how they are compared to the spirits and ultimately to the people of a village was amazing. The diagram on page 91 comparing the pattern of the termite mounds to the patterns of the forest islands was a great illustration of the whole issue. Natural processes can be cultural processes and vise versa.
Villages in Kissidougou where centered around small forests in the savannah. As a result of the European idea that nature and people are opposing forces, the history of the forest islands has been incorrect. Instead of asking the villagers of Kissidougou about the landscape, European scholars applied deforestation models that fit European landscape data but do not make sense in Kissidougou. I really liked the already underlined quote “more history and less philosophy are needed for progress in ecological study in Africa” (10).
ReplyDeleteIn Europe, where most of the natural landscape was forest, many scholars failed to recognize that Kissidougou’s land response to humans could be the direct opposite of the patterns seen in Europe; instead of starting with a forest and humans creating prairie, starting with savannah and humans promoting the growth of forests.
Instead of learning how the local populations potentially generated forests from savannah, the villagers have been blamed for savannisation. The assumed deforestation that took place is blamed on the villager’s “intellectual incapacity for reflection” (29) under the assumption that the forest islands are only relics of a once vast forest.
This reading brought back the question of how to integrate “science” with local knowledge to create effective and fair legislation. It reminded me of some of the water resource issues that I have learned about. For example, in Australia there has been a lot of controversy over building desalination plants. The government insists the desalination plants are necessary for the growing populations, and has also blamed climate change on their decreasing water reserves. Although there is agreement that Australia’s temperature is rising because of climate change, there is not agreement with hydrologists that their rainfall numbers have been affected. The government has been criticized for creating a water supply equivalent to the more temperate areas of the world instead of the focusing on implementing end use water efficiency practices which could be more practical given Australia’s climate.
Sam Reuter
3/7
Fairhead and Leach spend a lot of time talking about the history of the Kissidougou region, the discrepancy in forest history, generally accepted views versus differing science, and oral histories of the forest and forest type. Previous posters have elaborated on these, as well as social biases that have influenced how the forest has been treated by the indigenous peoples. Two ideas that have not been brought up yet include concepts of climax states and influences of historical climate change.
ReplyDeleteViews of historic vegetation have, in part, been based on a theory of forest succession and the idea of a climax community. The argument was made that simply because the region should have been able to support a humid forest, that it once did. This makes sense only if you assume that succession ends with a climax community. This used to be a fairly generally accepted theory, but has lost some credibility. Historic evidence shows disturbances do occur even in climax communities on a somewhat regular basis. Stand replacing fires in old growth forests are one example. Even though these events may only happen once every few hundred years, the aftereffects of the disturbance will last for equally long periods of time.
Historical climatic change is linked to the theory of succession, seeing that a stable climate is an assumption of successional change. Once the notion of climatic change is brought in, it is easy to argue that vegetation is always in disequilibrium, as Fairhead and Leach did on page 53, “Climatic fluctuation removes the notion of original vegetation and climatic potential; instead, at any time vegetation may be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions that are themselves in continual transition. The ideas of succession and historic climates cannot be ignored when looking to the past for information on vegetation.
Cory
Fairhead and Leach examine an impressive variety of sources in order to understand the history of landscape change in the West African forest-savanna ‘transition zone’. In order to investigate how different inhabitants, and how outside groups, understand the forest-savanna dynamics in the region, Fairhead and Leach use ecological evidence, archival documents, aerial photographs, maps, oral accounts, interviews, observational accounts, and surveys. Like Dee pointed out, a major element of the research presented was aimed at highlighting the stories of the local experience and social histories in relation to the environment in order to understand the landscape.
ReplyDeleteIn the introduction Fairhead and Leach spend a significant amount of time addressing the ‘nature/society’ relationship. The way in which researchers and ecologists view this relationship has a great impact on the conclusions to be drawn from investigation. “While in western thought nature and society are, in their ideal form, inherently distinct, albeit acting on each other, for Kissia and Kuranko these potentially analogous concepts are inherently indistinct, moral and fallible (p. 7).” The authors really try to break away from ideas of ‘pristine nature’ and of a distinct separation between nature and society in their arguments.
Chapter 2, ‘Forest gain: historical evidence of vegetation change’, presented research from historic photographs, documentary evidence, and oral collections. The main conclusion drawn from these sources is that forest patches in the transition zone prove to have been created by local populations or extended from much smaller forest patches. The differences between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 in how policy makers and environmental agencies view the landscape versus local people are huge. Landscape change in any region of the world is not simple, especially when put on such a large time scale.
-Molly Evjen
I was taken by Erin’s argument, as I often find my mind stuck on a carousel when thinking about western society’s elevation of human status above that of animals, nature, and even other human cultures. Plants and animals, including humans, impact nature, but as a species that can consciously think about the consequences of our lives on the natural environment should not give us the authority to change the ways of those who are not doing things according to western standards but give us the responsibility to ensure our actions are even the right ones.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I found the two methods for researching the deforestation in Africa, Indigenous Technical Knowledge or Ethnoscience, quite interesting. The first seems more traditional of past academics, and consists of translating the knowledge of the people of the land to western terms and determining the validity and basis of traditions and customs. The second, Ethnoscience is a more open approach to viewing traditional ways of life. As reading about the second, I would find it a very challenging task and agree with the authors that it would be almost necessary to translate certain customs to western customs just to understand the motivation behind them. I could see Ethnoscience as a holistic way to approach research but wonder is it exists in the definition given in the reading.
-Roxanne Wienkes
I found myself questioning whether I was accurately evaluating the authors' arguments and evidentiary support a few times throughout this reading assignment. I would like to make a note that John, your detailed yet uncomplicated summary of Fairhead and Leach's main points really helped to solidify my comprehension of the reading.
ReplyDeleteFairhead and Leach argue that ecological science is open for much interpretation and that in following ecological scientists' interpretations of the environmental history of a location (in this case, Kissidougou in Ghana), people have essentially put horse blinders on and have looked past many other potentially accurate interpretations.
Misreading the African Landscape explores and refutes the many convincing arguments of current ecological science that largely blame humans (namely "dysfunctional" and "incapable" peasants) for the "degradation" of the Kissidougou landscape. The authors do such a good job at laying out the reasoning for both sides of the argument that I actually found myself questioning their position at a few points in the beginning of the reading process. Through oral histories, photographs, historical records, many different scientific studies and simply broadening their perspective (beyond the thought that ecological science must be always be correct in determining environmental history) they come to the conclusion that the current perception of the forest/savanna relationship in this area is incorrect. The villagers actually helped to create and maintain forest islands (they know the land as "half full" and not "half empty" of forests). Throughout the reading the authors remind us that although ecological science (in Kissidougou) can prove and explain much about present-day (and arguably future) land use, many of their historical conclusions were based off of assumptions and lacked actual historical information.
I'd like to correct myself-I wrote Ghana instead of Guinea! Oops!
ReplyDeleteAn important theme or topic in class all semester has been that of perspective and the clashing of western thought with indigenous cultures. I find that view refreshing, who would have thought that the savanna is half-full and not half-empty of forest? In the many classes I have had dealing with conservation and other environmental topics it is always about the loss or destruction of habitat/nature, a very half-empty mindset. Even when the contrary is true it takes a much more concerted effort and analysis to determine this as exampled by Fairhead and Leach using many forms of evidence both qualitative and quantitative. While on the other hand with out much evidence it is assumed that humans are the cause of forest loss (which is usually the case), not gain. (guilty until proven innocent)
ReplyDeleteMany western scientific ideas in many respects are supported by cultural knowledge. For example termite presence worked as a predictor of soil quality and type that would then facilitate the growth of dense woody vegetation. Fertilization and the return of soil nutrients also fall within this idea. The end outcome is still there, but how they get there is very different. The connectedness to the forest comes through in everyday life of a village, which promotes forest growth “many of the individual activities which contribute to forest establishment are nevertheless undertaken without this outcome in mind” (88). “Indeed, for most village men and women, the origins of forest islands are the logical extension into the past of processes experienced in the present” (88). It is also difficult to assess ones home as half-empty when their relationship is so closely tied to the forest islands everyday.
The case of historical misinterpretation of the landscape in Kissidougou is a fantastic story: it gives hope to pessimistic conservationists who have been only able to see degraded or degrading human landscapes, and it calls into question decades – maybe centuries – of conclusions by ecological scientists based on methods of so-called ‘empirical reality’ (14). Though I’m absolutely in favor of increasing the diversity of disciplines from which scientific conclusions are drawn, I find that this case raises several questions and concerns. I understand how the misinterpretation of deforestation in Kissidougou is an important case to the discipline of reading landscapes for conservation purposes, but how representative of a case is it, really? I know that appearing as a skeptic makes me just as vulnerable to accusations of ethnocentrism (discussed in posts by Kathleen and Erin) as the scientists who originally did not value the social influence on forests in the area, but it would be dangerous to discontinue the efforts of NGOs who are interested in preserving forests in Africa based on the findings of this study alone.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, the case of Kissidougou enriches the study of the relationships between humans and nature by providing a counterpoint to the argument that pristine wilderness is good while human influence is bad. I think that Mallory brings up a good point about the economic aspect of the value judgments made about forests vs. savanna, or native vs. invasive species. Is our preference for certain types of life over others and certain types of landscapes over others perhaps as ingrained and potentially problematic as the ethnocentrism that initially prodded scientists to impose European values on a society that was doing just fine without them? The answers to questions like these will have an enormous effect on future conservation and restoration efforts throughout the world.
- Annie
I was struck by a particular quote in the introduction, “Ecologists who seek out untouched nature – pristine forest – against which to assess human impacts are drawing on and reaffirming this divide; they may be disappointed, but not conceptually challenged, when they find pottery shards in their soil pits beneath ‘natural’ vegetation” (6). At first I laughed and then I thought about why it’s so funny, because it’s true. We were raised on the idea or the perception of a pristine wilderness, untouched and unaffected by human influence. The irony is, there is no forest, no piece of the Earth unaffected by human influence.
ReplyDeleteJohn, Molly and others have described in detail Fairhead and Leach’s studies and conclusions.
It is exciting to see humans creating forests and in essence improving the landscape, because all I ever hear is how humans have only degraded or deforested landscapes. If this is true in Guinea, could it be true elsewhere? Have histories been misread by not considering all aspects of forest influence? Guinea is truly a unique circumstance, but it is not the only location where indigenous populations have planted beneficial species.
These ideas really made me think about the whole idea of restoration. How do we know to which level we are restoring the forest or the landscape? Are we going back into all of the history needed to fully understand the circumstances that shaped the forest or landscape in the first place? Nevertheless, I feel restoration is a good thing, in fact, the changes in Kissidougou could be seen as a form of restoration. The Kissi created a landscape that was most beneficial to their needs and restored vibrancy to the landscape.
-Hanna Engevold