The Social Life of Nature

Abstract

disciplines explores historically the politics of nature in particular local contexts through environmental projects, movements, and associated discourses. Environmental discourses vary with the particular context, including the details of time, place, phenomenon, agents, and consequences. For instance, state government officials may consider a tropical forest to be only a resource for logging to gain revenue, but indigenous people may consider the same forest to be their physical, historic, cultural, and spiritual homeland, a landscape in which they depend on the sustainable use of non-timber forest products (NTFP). Thus, many things in the Asian tropics and elsewhere may be perceived, conceptualized, and valued in remarkably different ways-field, forest, tree, frontier, wilderness, native species, exotic species, resource, sustainability, management, conservation, rights, property, profit, environment, nature, culture, ethnicity, indigenous, native, tribal, peasant, forester, scientist, environmentalist, tropics, south, north, region, community, local, national, international, transnational, global, and so on. Furthermore, meanings may compete and conflict resulting in practical consequences-ecological, demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, religious, historical, and so on. In