October 6, 2014
A lantana-lined path in the BRT Hills
The thorny bush Lantana camara, with its attractive pink, yellow, and orange flowerlets, covers vast areas of forest understory, fallow lands, and hedges in the hilly mountains fringing the southern end of Karnataka state, India. These upland areas are also home to several marginalized cultural groups (‘scheduled tribes’, or ‘indigenous people’) as well as a diversity of wildlife – elephants, tigers, bears, gaur, three kinds of deer, monkeys, boars, wild dogs, leopards. On our recent scoping trip to the Biligiri Ranganaswamy Hills some four hour south of Bangalore, we discovered that there were at least three ways one could talk about the lantana situation, each following familiar tropes: as a story of invasion, of dispossession, or of creative redemption. Read the rest of this entry »
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Development, Fire, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: India, lantana, protected area | 
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Posted by christiankull
September 27, 2014
Oil palm gets all the attention, but what about acacia? Oil palm has become synonymous with deforestation in Indonesia and resulting losses of orang-utan habitat, increased carbon emissions, and unhealthy smoke haze. But equally large areas of peatland are being converted to pulp and paper plantations of tropical salwood wattles like Acacia crassicarpa and A. magnum, trees that now cover many millions of hectares in South East Asia. In Riau province, Sumatra, the two big pulp mills (operated by Asia Pulp and Paper [APP] and Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd [APRIL]) have around 75 and 45 per cent (respectively) of their pulp plantations located on peatland. The ways in which such forestry concessions have been granted and implemented have inspired dramatic protests: 28 residents of the Meranti Islands in Riau Province stitched their lips shut while demonstrating in front of government buildings in Jakarta (Jakarta Post; Transparency Int.). Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Political ecology, Research, Sustainability | Tagged: deforestation, forestry, Indonesia, peatland, protest | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
May 9, 2014
I’ve finally received my copy of the new edited book Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar, edited by Ivan Scales of Cambridge University. This will be a fantastic resource for scholars of Madagascar new and old, as well as more broadly. It includes chapters on a full array of topics: on biodiversity, palaeoecology, and archaeology, on the measurement and causes of deforestation, on environmental politics, policies, programs, and projects, and on different economic development-and-conservation solutions, often (but not always) from a political ecology perspective, broadly construed.
Highlights for me in the book – which also has two of my own chapters – include: Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by christiankull
September 10, 2013
How did forty years of rural development, population growth, and conservation action transform the landscapes of highland Madagascar? My recently published [1, 2] analysis of a region-wide sample of air photos from circa 1950 and 1991 document several key trends: crop fields, settlements, and exotic trees are replacing open grassland, while irrigated rice is expanding at the expense of wetland and riparian vegetation.
Farmhouse among the intensively cultivated rice terraces of Betafo, west of Antsirabe
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2 Comments | Development, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research, Smallholder farming | Tagged: aerial photography, afforestation, agrarian change, agricultural development, land use change, Madagascar | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
August 31, 2013
Indonesia‘s courts recently recognised community forests (or customary ‘adat‘ forests) as distinct from state forests (i.e., government land). This is a landmark decision, as shown in an excellent analysis by Elizabeth Kahurani [1]. It overturns a presumption that the state is first and foremost the guardian and manager of forests, and vests more rights in local communities. In the context of south-east Asia, where states have a poor history of protecting forests (especially in ways that respect local indigenous people), this is an important victory. In contrast, here in Fiji and in much of the rest of the Pacific, the situation is quite different: most land (and hence forest) is ‘native land’ and belongs to traditional village structures. Revenue from logging goes to the iTaukei land board and the villages (the forest service just overseas licences), also two state owned companies grow pine and mahogany on leased native and crown land [2]. In Madagascar, the situation is different again. The presumption of unoccupied land (hence, forests) as state domain comes first, and most significant areas of forestland have been demarcated as parks, reserves, or classified forests. Since the mid-1990s, neighbouring communities may gain use and management rights to some forest areas, but the forest is still fundamentally the state’s [3]. Rural social movements are much weaker than in Indonesia, and the conservation lobby (which usually tends to favour state control) is stronger, in relative terms.
Indonesia’s decision can be read through the Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest’s ideas about “political forests”. Their article in Journal of Asian Studies [4] traces the history of the idea of state forests, and how it was constituted dialectically with customary rights: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Fiji, Madagascar, Political ecology | Tagged: community forests, Fiji, forestry, Indonesia, land tenure, Madagascar, state forests | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
May 10, 2013
As the international development community gears up to renew a global plan for improved ‘disaster risk reduction’ from 2015 (the ‘post-Hyogo’ framework), it is striking to reflect on how central the idea of disaster risk reduction has become in the development industry. Boosted in no small measure by attention to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and in tandem with efforts at climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction has been a dominant theme over the past decade. In my own world, it appears everywhere I look
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Posted by christiankull
March 20, 2013
What happens when you combine human labour, introduced plants, and particular societal histories and structures in a certain tropical landscape? You end up with anthropogenic or cultural landscapes – the “matrix” in current ecological jargon – such as the domesticated forests1 of southeast Asia, the tree gardens of Caribbean or Pacific islands, the shambas of Africa, the rice terraces of Madagascar. Despite their aesthetic and cultural attractions, these smallholder farming landscapes are directly or implicitly critiqued by many – for not being as productive as modern industrial agriculture, for trapping people in rural poverty, and for taking up space at the expense of natural habitats. In two recent papers with French collaborators, I argue instead that such landscapes can be sustainable sources of useful products, can facilitate vibrant and resilient rural communities, and can be resilient contributors to the functioning of local and global biophysical systems.
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Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research, Smallholder farming, Sustainability | Tagged: agriculture, biodiversity, hotspots, invasive alien species, sustainability, tropics | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
January 8, 2013
Who controls Madagascar’s flora, fauna, and landscapes? How, and for whom, are its forests, grasslands, and waters governed? Over the past three decades, Madagascar’s local environments have become more and more internationalized – subjected to western worldviews and gazetted into protected areas with foreign funding.
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1 Comment | Book Review, Development, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: conservation, environment, geopolitics, Madagascar | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
December 12, 2012
Are Australian acacias planted overseas miracle plants for rural development, or are they the worst kind of environmental weeds? The battle lines appear rather stark at times. At least when one reads environmentalist Tim Low’s rebuttal to a critique that Jacques Tassin and I wrote of his views. We thought our statement to be tempered and tried to build a reasonable case for responsible use of exotic agroforestry trees (see also previous blog). But Low calls us “in denial about dangerous aid”, flogs a misplaced example about mesquite in an argument about acacia, all the time preaching his argument to the converted in the journal Biological Invasions. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Acacia, Development, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Political ecology, Research, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: Acacia, development aid, environment, forestry, invasive alien species, miracle trees, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
April 2, 2012
As a geographer, I feel obliged to register a complaint about the proliferating and geographically criminal use of “the Global South” to refer to what others call poor countries, the developing world, or the Third World. To any resident of Australia or New Zealand, the expression jars. It must do the same to those in Chile, Argentina, or South Africa who look north at relatively poorer places. And what about where poverty and deprivation are a northern phenomenon (politically-divided Korea, culturally-divided aboriginal Australia and Canada)? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by christiankull
Christian Kull 