Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories
Author: Jonathan Padwe
Publisher: Culture, Place, and Nature
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780295746906

"This study of the cultural and ecological dimensions of waves of dispossession in Cambodia's northeast highlands focuses on the Jarai minority ethnic group. Presented from the perspective of the residents of Tang Kadon, a village of Jarai hill-rice farmers located just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, it weaves together historical background on the often-racist perceptions of the Jarai by lowland Cambodians and Westerners with rich ethnography that presents living memories of how the residents of Tang Kadon survived aerial bombardment and a land invasion during the Vietnam War, only to find themselves relocated to the "killing fields" of the Khmer Rouge regime. Tracing the mutual influences of people on land and land on people, it narrates highlanders' successful efforts to put back together their complex, highly diverse agricultural system, seed by seed, after a decades-long interruption. By focusing on the relationship between processes of social change and human-environment relations, from the days of the precolonial slave trade to the present moment of land grabs along a rapidly transforming resource frontier, the book shows how history and memory are visible in the land. It addresses timely issues in anthropology and political ecology, and will be of interest to readers in allied fields including environmental studies, geography, and Southeast Asian studies"--

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories
Author: Jonathan Padwe
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295746912

In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial bombardment and the American invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, only to find themselves relocated to the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge regime. Now back in their homeland, they have reestablished agriculture, seed by seed. Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories tells the story of violence and dispossession in the highlands from the perspective of the land itself. Weaving rich ethnography with the history of the Jarai and their treatment at the hands of outsiders, Jonathan Padwe narrates the highlanders’ successful efforts to rebuild their complex, highly diverse agricultural system after a decades-long interruption. Focusing on the ecological dimensions of social change and dispossession from the precolonial slave trade to the present moment of land grabs along a rapidly transforming resource frontier, Padwe shows how the past lives on in the land. An engrossing treatment of timely issues in anthropology and political ecology, this book will also appeal to readers in environmental studies, geography, and Southeast Asian studies.

In Defense of Plants

In Defense of Plants
Author: Matt Candeias
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1642504548

The Study of Plants in a Whole New Light “Matt Candeias succeeds in evoking the wonder of plants with wit and wisdom.” ―James T. Costa, PhD, executive director, Highlands Biological Station and author of Darwin's Backyard #1 New Release in Nature & Ecology, Plants, Botany, Horticulture, Trees, Biological Sciences, and Nature Writing & Essays In his debut book, internationally-recognized blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias celebrates the nature of plants and the extraordinary world of plant organisms. A botanist’s defense. Since his early days of plant restoration, this amateur plant scientist has been enchanted with flora and the greater environmental ecology of the planet. Now, he looks at the study of plants through the lens of his ever-growing houseplant collection. Using gardening, houseplants, and examples of plants around you, In Defense of Plants changes your relationship with the world from the comfort of your windowsill. The ruthless, horny, and wonderful nature of plants. Understand how plants evolve and live on Earth with a never-before-seen look into their daily drama. Inside, Candeias explores the incredible ways plants live, fight, have sex, and conquer new territory. Whether a blossoming botanist or a professional plant scientist, In Defense of Plants is for anyone who sees plants as more than just static backdrops to more charismatic life forms. In this easily accessible introduction to the incredible world of plants, you’ll find: • Fantastic botanical histories and plant symbolism • Passionate stories of flora diversity and scientific names of plant organisms • Personal tales of plantsman discovery through the study of plants If you enjoyed books like The Botany of Desire, What a Plant Knows, or The Soul of an Octopus, then you’ll love In Defense of Plants.

Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War

Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War
Author: Kosal Path
Publisher:
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2020
Genre: Cambodia
ISBN: 029932270X

"Why did Vietnam invade and occupy Cambodia in 1978? And why did it eventually change its approach, shifting from military confrontation to economic reform and reconciliation with China in the late 1980s? Drawing on rarely accessed archival documents, Kosal Path explores this major change in Vietnamese leaders' objectives and strategies. Unlike most studies, which attribute the invasion to political elites' paranoia and imperial ambition over Indochina, Path argues that Hanoi's move was rational and strategic, intended to resolve its economic crisis and counter imminent threats posed by the Sino-Cambodian alliance by cementing its own alliance with the Soviet Union. As these costly efforts failed in the 1980s, Vietnamese thinking shifted from the doctrinal Marxist-Leninist ideology that had prevailed during the last decade of the Cold War to the approach that would come to characterize the post-Cold War era. Path traces the moving target of Vietnam's changing priorities: first from military victory to Socialist economic reconstruction in 1975-76; then to military confrontation in 1978-1984; and finally, in 1985-86, to the broad reforms dubbed Doi Moi ("renovation"), meant to create a peaceful regional environment for Vietnam's integration into the global economy. Path's sources include internally circulated reports from provincial authorities, ministries, and ad hoc Party committees--materials that have been largely masked by the Vietnamese nationalist history of Vietnam's selfless assistance to Cambodia's revolution and glossed over by the Cambodian nationalist narrative of Vietnam's longstanding imperial ambition in Cambodia"--

Unsettled Frontiers

Unsettled Frontiers
Author: Sango Mahanty
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501761498

Unsettled Frontiers provides a fresh view of how resource frontiers evolve over time. Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands have witnessed successive waves of market integration, migration, and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted as new commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French rubber plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge; from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging to govern. Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land claiming, and expansive social and material networks in these transitions, which result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux, where communities continually strive for security within ruptured landscapes.

Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma

Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma
Author: Ralph
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501746960

Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma is about commitment to an ideal, individual survival and the universality of the human experience. A memoir of two tenacious souls, it sheds light on why Burma/Myanmar's decades-long pursuit for a peaceful and democratic future has been elusive. Simply put, the aspirations of Burma's ethnic nationalities for self-determination within a genuine federal union runs counter to the idea of a unitary state orchestrated and run by the dominant majority Burmans, or Bamar. This seemingly intractable dilemma of opposing visions for Burma is personified in the story of Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera, two prominent ethnic Karen leaders who lived—and eventually left—"the Longest War," leaving the reader with insights on the cultural, social, and political challenges facing other non-Burman ethnic nationalities. Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma is also about the ordinariness and universality of the challenges increasingly faced by diaspora communities around the world today. Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera's day to day lives—how they fell in love, married, had children—while trying to survive in a precarious war zone—and how they had to adapt to their new lives as refugees and immigrants in Australia will resound with many.

Restoring Tropical Forests

Restoring Tropical Forests
Author: Stephen D. Elliott
Publisher: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Deforestation
ISBN: 9781842464427

Restoring Tropical Forests is a user-friendly guide to restoring forests throughout the tropics. Based on the concepts, knowledge and innovative techniques developed at Chiang Mai University's Forest Restoration Research Unit, this book will enable improvements in existing forest restoration projects and provide a key resource for new ones. The book presents three aspects of the restoration of tropical forest ecosystems: the concepts of tropical forest dynamics and regeneration that are relevant to tropical forest restoration, proven restoration techniques and case studies of their successful application, and research methods to refine such techniques and adapt them to local ecological and socio-economic conditions.

Mountains of Blame

Mountains of Blame
Author: Will Smith
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295748176

Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and to force them to abandon traditional modes of land use. After adopting ostensibly modern and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, the Pala’wan people have experienced drought and uncertain weather patterns, which they have blamed on their own failure to observe traditional social norms that are believed to regulate climate—norms that, like swidden agriculture, have been outlawed by the state. In this ethnographic case study, Will Smith asks how those who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation have come to position themselves as culpable for the devastating impacts of climate change, examining their statements about changing weather, processes of dispossession, and experiences of climate-driven hunger. By engaging both forest policy and local realities, he suggests that reckoning with these complexities requires reevaluating and questioning key wisdoms in global climate-change policy: What is indigenous knowledge, and who should it serve? Who is to blame for the vulnerability of the rural poor? What, and who, belongs in tropical forests?

Shifting Livelihoods

Shifting Livelihoods
Author: Daniel Tubb
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295747544

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadian mining companies prospect for open-pit mega-mines. Drug traffickers launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold into Colombia and claiming it came from fictitious small-scale mines. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, Shifting Livelihoods investigates how resource extraction reshapes a place. In the Chocó, gold enables forms of “shift” (rebusque)—a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining’s effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in this fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine.

Timber and Forestry in Qing China

Timber and Forestry in Qing China
Author: Meng Zhang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295748885

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse that devastated European forests at the same time. This comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development.