The Social Lives of Forests

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 and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha. Kathleen D. Morrison is the Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology and department chair at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author or editor of several volumes, including Daroji Valley: Landscape History, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System. Christine Padoch is the research director of forests and livelihoods at the Center for International Forestry Research, Indonesia.

— David R. Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, Harvard University

— Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

— Karl Zimmerer, Pennsylvania State University and editor of "Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation"

— Charles C. Mann, author of "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus"

— Tobias Plieninger, Science

— Rob McKenzie, National (UAE)

— Lydialyle Gibson, University of Chicago Magazine

— J. L. Rhoades, Antioch University New England, Choice

— Patrick Meyfroidt, Université Catholique de Louvain and Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium, Ecology

— Laura Rival, University of Oxford, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

— Ghazala Shahabuddin, Centre for Ecology Development and Research, Current Science (India)