The Social Lives of Forests ─ Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence

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.

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, and author of The Scramble for the Amazon and the ?Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha. 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.