Abstract
Abstract. Forest is in trouble. The most recent (2015) FAO Forest Resources Assessment shows an encouraging trend towards a decrease in deforestation rates, but it also points out that since 1990 total forest loss corresponds to an area the size of South Africa. Efforts to curtail deforestation require reliable assessments, yet current definitions for what a forest exactly is differ significantly across countries, institutions and epistemic communities. Those differences have implications for forest management efforts: they entail different understandings about where exactly a forest starts and ends, and therefore also engender misunderstandings about where a forest should start and end, and about how forests should be managed. This special issue brings together different perspectives from practitioners and academic disciplines – including linguistics, geographic information science and human geography – around the problem of understanding and characterizing forest. By bringing together different disciplinary viewpoints, we hope to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary efforts to analyse forest change. In this introduction, we propose that interrogating the relationship between forest definitions, boundaries and ways of valuing forests constitutes a productive way to critically conceptualize the trouble that forest is in.
Highlights
The trouble with forest: definitions, values and boundariesMuriel Côte1, Flurina Wartmann2, and Ross Purves1,3 1Department of Geography, University of Zürich, Zürich, SwitzerlandReceived: 20 March 2018 – Revised: 31 August 2018 – Accepted: 17 September 2018 – Published: 9 October 2018 AbstractForest is in trouble
We propose to open the “black box” of trouble that we understand as cutting across three concepts – definitions, values and boundaries
Value here is not meant in the sense of liking certain ecological characteristics more than others, but in the sense of seeing certain ones rather than others. An example of such valuation is articulated in the work of Ghazoul and Chazdon (2017) on what counts as ecosystem degradation and recovery
Summary
Forest is in trouble because forest cover is changing rapidly, and because our ways of categorizing forests are never stable. Value here is not meant in the sense of liking certain ecological characteristics more than others, but in the sense of seeing certain ones rather than others An example of such valuation is articulated in the work of Ghazoul and Chazdon (2017) on what counts as ecosystem degradation and recovery. Our thinking emerged from discussions that took place during a workshop that we organized in 2016 around the theme of “the trouble with defining forests – semantics, ontology, territoriality” It gathered the authors of the articles that make up this special issue, and other academic and conservation practitioner colleagues in Switzerland and from abroad, with expertise in the fields of land cover/land use science, linguistics and political ecology. What the papers have in common is a motivation to reach out beyond disciplinary trenches, and below we propose that querying the relation between forest definitions, boundaries and values constitutes a good way to reach that aim – as concepts to think with, rather than to explain or predict – and towards more critical, yet more inclusive, ways of imagining the trouble that forest is in
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