Description
Book SynopsisAfrican forest landscapes are often considered as degraded. However, this fascinating 1996 study reveals how inhabitants have enriched their land when scientists believe they have damaged it. It provides a framework for ecological anthropology, and a challenge to old assumptions about the African landscape.
Trade Review'This is a bold and important book, an analytical tour de force. It mounts a forceful attack against the received wisdom on deforestation and the spread of the desert.' Wendy James and Richard P. Werbner Amaury Talbot Prize 1997
'Misreading the African Landscape is a powerful and ambitious book which offers a compelling new paradigm of research method and management philosophy.' Journal of African History
'Misreading the African Landscape is a powerful and ambitious book which offers a compelling new paradigm of research method and management philosophy … No doubt Fairhead and Leach seek to inspire an audience of social scientists and policy specialists - they doubtlessly will do so. Yet, more than anyone, I hope historians will be the ones responding to this superb example of environmental research.'
'James Fairhead and Melissa Leach provide a splendid example of the new genre in a thoroughly researched and well-presented case study of the 'islands' of Kissidougou.'
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 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.
