Misreading the African landscape : society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic
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Bibliographic Information
Misreading the African landscape : society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic
（African studies series, 90）（Paperback re-issue）
Cambridge University Press, 2011, c1996
- : pbk
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Note
First published 1996, re-issued 2011
Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-347) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- 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.
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