Christopher Boyer – Political Landscapes
3 November, 2021 -
examPrep
- xiii – political landscapes is two stories of redemption that each begin with campesino loss of land or land access and end with the recuperation of those lands or access rights in one form or another of “community forestry”
- Two neatly chronological narratives that, separately tell a linear story of beginning in one state and end in another but, when strung together into a larger narrative, represent historical cyclicality, as one begins where the other ends
- These repeating pattern capture the essential dimensions of Mexican environmental history, yet i believe they obscure as much as they reveal
- Could this be a theme?: obscurantism — where stories about knowledge are as much stories about ignorance?
- Xiv – environmental history has “shucked off” much of the “activist veneer” that led an earlier generation of scholars to portray the landscape as something that was only acted upon by humans, rather than as an anthropogenic space that both structures and is structured by human behavior.”
- 10 – political landscapes: geographies made meaningful through political interactions and contestations
- 11 – a central argument: the politicization of forest landscape is one of the greatest threats to its ecological integrity
- 12 – revolutionary forestry: embeds resources use within the context of social justice AND scientific management
- 14-15 – legibility, illegibility, visibilizing, obscuring
- 103 – scientific competency translated into authority of expertise over environmental decisionmaking
- 125 – the activities and their residual documentation that makes landscapes legible to governments also makes them legible to historians
- 165-66 – inverse relationship between politicization of landscape and the ability of people to conceive of it as a living ecosystem — burning the forest reduced conflict by eliminating the object of contention in it — the commodified trees
- 168 – linear progressionist model of development – rural dev. To keep people from migrating to, and overwhelming, the cities
- 244 – “. . . oral traditions constituted the most useful archive of such knowledge. . . . These collective memories also functioned as a symbolic link among residents and in this sense helped define community identity. Popular ballads . . . have become part of an imagined collective experience that . . . posits a strong symbolic bond between the villagers and their woodlands.”
- Knowing environment through song or oral history