Tany malalaka: settling new land in the western highlands of Madagascar

December 9, 2023

Like over a million (!) other viewers, I was captivated by the recent video “What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?” by Christophe Haubursin on Vox. Curiosity, satellite images, internet, a budget for a talented local filmmaker, and excellent production allow the team to explore why a village appears out of nothing fifteen years ago inside a remote broad, circular mountain in central Madagascar. Having spent days and days poring over historical air photos and maps of highland Madagascar for my own research, I palpably felt empathy for Haubursin’s landscape voyeurism. Then imagine my excitement as I realised I’ve been there myself, almost at the village site, on the southern summit of the mountain Ambohiby, in 1999, before it was built!

In this post, I’ll do two things: comment on some photos from my 1999 climb of Ambohiby, and give some leads for people looking to read further on the colonisation of empty lands in highland Madagascar, as I have been researching the settlement of new lands by Betsileo farmers since my masters thesis fieldwork in 1994.

My photo of the view north from Ambohiby summit in July 1999. The new village site Anosibe Ambohiby would be in the burn scar in the middle.
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2 Comments | Environmental History, Madagascar, Research, Smallholder farming | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
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Understanding ‘forest transitions to sustainability’ better by mapping and analysing forest history in detail: case of Thừa Thiên-Huế Province, Vietnam

October 6, 2023
Figure 6 from the paper (” Land cover ~1966 (a) and 1973 (b), and natural forest cover and transformations 1966–1979 (c, d).”)

The FT Viet project’s new paper in the journal Land Use Policy is a major contribution both to studies of “forest transitions” (the idea that as places develop over time, forest loss switches to forest regrowth) and to the specific history of forest dynamics in central Vietnam’s Thừa Thiên-Huế province. Led by Roland Cochard, with remote sensing whizzery contributed by Mathieu Gravey and colleagues, this paper is a very rich and careful historical analysis of fifty years of forest change based on remote sensing and documentary sources.

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Forest livelihood transformations: from wartime ‘A Shau valley’ to today’s A Lưới district

May 1, 2019

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining PhD student Nguyen Thi Hai Van in her field sites in the upland A Lưới district of Thừa Thiên-Huế province, central Vietnam. She introduced me to her key informants, took me around the fields and woodlots, and translated as she conducted a number of focus group sessions. Of the many interesting ideas and observations that emerged, the overall theme was certainly one of the dramatic and rapid changes affecting the peoples’ livelihoods and landscapes.

Van (second from left) leads an animated participatory mapping session.
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What are the environmental humanities?

March 10, 2017

Among the most potent recent academic buzzwords must figure “The Environmental Humanities”. This bandwagon is clearly attractive: an ever-growing bouquet of new journals, positions, institutes, books, and networks carries this label.[*]

In this blog, I’d like to propose an alternative definition for what the environmental humanities constitute, one that goes a little bit against the standard definition. In short, instead of emphasising meta-discipline, interdisciplinarity, and knowledge domains, my definition emphasises modes of knowledge creation and communication. Let me explain.

The environmental humanities emerged in particular out of history and literature departments (environmental history, eco-criticism), with a number of other contributors from across a diverse spectrum of academia (Nye et al. 2013). Well-known figures like Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold are claimed as predecessors. Definitions of the environmental humanities, in my (perhaps naïve) reading, seem to coalesce around three points: Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Book Review, Environmental History, Interdisciplinarity, Political ecology, Sustainability | Tagged: , | Permalink
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Farmer livelihood practices and the forest transition in Africa

December 19, 2015

In what situations do the practices of small-scale family farmers lead to increased tree cover, particularly on a continent better known for land degradation and deforestation?  Research on the “forest transition”, a pattern where net deforestation is replaced by a net gain in forest cover, has so far avoided much mention of Africa.  In contrast, it is historically documented in western Europe, eastern North America, east Asia, and seemingly underway in parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia.  This research tends to focus on factors such as economic modernisation, rural abandonment, urbanisation, or even globalisation as driving forces of the forest transition.  Two recent studies I contributed to focus instead on Africa – one in West Africa, one in Madagascar – and on transitions brought about by rural farmers. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Development, Environmental History, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research, Smallholder farming, Sustainability | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
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People and the dispersal of baobabs around the Indian Ocean

April 2, 2015

The baobab, that iconic, majestic, and grotesquely massive roots-in-the-sky tree, teaches us something surprising about “nature”.  It demonstrates that what appears to be “natural” has been – for millennia and millennia – also fundamentally “social”, for people have been important dispersal agents of these trees.  Researchers like Chris Duvall and Jean-Michel Leong Pock Tsy have shown this for the African baobabs.[1,2]  Our recently completed research project, led by Priya Rangan, demonstrates this in multiple ways around the Indian Ocean.  Baobabs are such useful and remarkable trees [3], it is hardly difficult to imagine people not picking up the hard but pleasantly light and fuzzy fruit pods and walking with them.

A young baobab near an Aboriginal rock art site

A young baobab near an Aboriginal rock art site (photo: CKull)

One part of our project looked at the single species of baobabs found in Australia: Adansonia gregorii, called boab. It grows in the Kimberley region in the northwestern part of the continent.  In a study just published in PLoS ONE [4], we combine evidence from baobab genetics [5] and Australian Aboriginal languages to show that humans have been the primary agents of baobab dispersal.  In particular, we reveal their crucial role in dispersing baobabs inland from now-submerged areas of northwest Australia during the dramatic sea-level rises at the end of the last glaciation.  (See also this article in The Conversation as well as  Priya’s blog about the study)

A further question is how the baobabs arrived in Australia in the first place.  Oceanic dispersal via seed pods floating in currents, several million years ago, remains the most plausible explanation, as our collaborator David Baum has shown [6].  Yet, another one of our baobab collaborators (and veritable Renaissance man) Jack Pettigrew advances an interesting speculative argument about a possible human role in transporting the baobabs, building on evidence from rock art in the Kimberley and in Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Environmental History, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Marooned plants and subaltern histories

February 7, 2015

What role did slaves from Africa and Madagascar play in transporting, spreading, and cultivating new plants in the sugar colonies of Mauritius and Reunion? What can plant names teach us about the lives and landscapes of marginalized people in the past? Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by christiankull