Presentation of the thesis at the public defence, Sept. 2026
What are those magic moments that make farmers practising alternative agricultures feel that they are doing the right thing? Perhaps it isn’t the headline ideological commitments, but instead little glimpses during the humdrum of daily life. Andrea Mathez unravels these ideas, mixing ethnographic work in Morocco and Switzerland, philosophical considerations of hope, utopia, and enchantment, and embodied participatory engagements with goats, weeds, water and between farmers from the two places.
The endemic Uapaca bojeri tree forms patchy savanna woodlands in widely dispersed parts of Madagascar’s central highlands. As a rare wooded landscape in a grassland region in a country otherwise famous for tree loss, tapia has attracted a fair bit of fetishised attention (it also helps that two tapia regions are easy to get to from the capital).
A team of outsiders comes to grassland villages in rural highland Madagascar and asks about bushfire (doro tanety). Fire is bad, respond the villagers. It has no advantages and degrades the environment. Asked the same questions, city dwellers in Antananarivo are more equivocal: it’s bad for the environment, but might be a necessary evil for cattle raising and farming. Meanwhile, fires continue to be lit prolifically in this grassy landscape with a long dry season, a little less than in the past, but still omnipresent in the landscape with smoke plumes, black scars, and night-time flickering lights.
What’s going on here? To understand these contradictions, one needs to understand fire ecology, agrarian livelihoods, the power of discourses, as well as the psychology and ethics of research methods. Fire ecology, because fire is inevitable in wet-dry tropical grassy landscapes. Agrarian livelihoods, because fire can be a simple and effective tool for pasture renewal and field preparation (at the same time as a threat to thatched roofs and tree plantations). The power of discourses, because a century of anti-fire propaganda by governments, foresters, and conservationists – serving their interests, reflecting older temperate zone biases – shapes the frame in which people talk about fire. And research methods, because how do you ask people their honest opinions about a criminal activity when you arrive in their village in a sparkling four-wheel drive vehicle? These questions are at the center of a paper “Anti-fire statements coexist with millions of anthropogenic fires in Madagascar” that we recently published, under the leadership of Víctor Fernández García and funded by a SNIS research grant.
Fire play in Ambarinanahary, 1994. The foreign researcher (me, a masters student at the time) arrives in a village, not yet conversant in the local language. My guide, interpreter, and friend, a geography student from Antananarivo, translates my questions about farming, land use, and village history. After sunset, people note my excitement at the bushfires lighting up the horizon in different directions across the grassy plains. An hour later, we’re called outside, there is laughter and urgency in the air, it seems like half the village is there. I take out my camera, struggle with the exposure for night fire photos, and the kids start mugging it up in front of the flames. Read the rest of this entry »
Why is resource tenure important for forest restoration and tree planting? Tenure security has been correlated with successful restoration. But what does this mean, how does one analyse it, and how does it play out in different contexts? How do questions around resource tenure impact global, national and sub-national restoration initiatives? The Interdisciplinary Expert Panel of our Velux-Stiftung funded project on the governance of tree planting and forest restoration has prepared a Policy Brief to answer these questions.
Ornamental ravintsara trees (front left) in Isoraka, Antananarivo, Madagascar (also: jacaranda, aurucaria…). photo: CK 2022.
You know how sometimes a word or thing appears at the margins of your conscience, associated with some value (good, bad, …), but where you really know nothing about it? For me, this describes ravintsara. Long interested in the Malagasy environment, it is perhaps natural that a tree with a name like that would catch my attention (even a beginner in Malagasy will get that it means “good leaf”). While doing research on fire, agrarian change, and highland reforestation, ravintsara crossed my path plenty in the late 1990s and 2000s, but it was never centre stage. I first encountered it knowingly in 2014, when friends showed me some they had planted a few to ornament their land outside Antananarivo, and they were proud to have something native and not pine or eucalyptus. But strangely, its name was already there in a list of 1000s of plants in an inventory of introduced species in Madagascar that colleagues and I put together. And then since moving to Europe I started noticing ravintsara in the essential oils section of French pharmacies.
Chanelle Adam’s PhD, just defended, shows there is history and reason behind my encounters and confusions. It turns out that the botanical and chemical identity of the tree has only been established for three decades or so. Ravintsara was indeed introduced to Madagascar, probably in the 19th century (it is better known elsewhere as the camphor laurel, Camphora officinarum, source of camphor oil). And yet… the variety growing in Madagascar turns out to be a chemotype specific to Madagascar called 1,8-cineole, which is low in camphor oil and high in cineole (also found in eucalypts, rosemary, and bay leaves). To confuse matters further, the endemic tree Cryptocarya agathophylla (also used for essential oils) was previously called ravensara (though not by locals) and confusion between two persists. As environmental programs proliferated on the island in the 1990s and 2000s, the search was on for local trees to reforest the island, and ravensara/ravintsara was a prime candidate (hence my encounter on my friends’ plot in the peripheries of Tana). And with development programs entering the 2000s looking for “win-win” solutions for both environment and livelihoods, essential oil distillation was widely promoted – especially as local distillers and scientists (perhaps benefitting from long-term French investments and know-how in the fragrance, oil, and pharmaceutical arena) had set the groundwork in previous decades, themselves building on and branching from colonial era industries (ylang-ylang, cloves, vanilla…). Hence the little ravintsara bottles in French pharmacies. This all leads up to the opening scene of Chanelle’s thesis, the time when during the height of the Covid 19 crisis the just-deposed President of Madagascar himself claimed to have a cure for the coronavirus – a concoction based in part on ravintsara. And that’s a story that Chanelle tells much better than me!
Madagascar’s environmental past is more complex and regionally diverse than the tired narrative of a once-forested island devastated by people would have us believe. In a just-published opinion piece led by one of my academic heroines, Alison Richard,we unpack this oversimplified story, showing how diverse landscapes—from ancient grasslands to dynamic forest mosaics—shifted over millennia, shaped by both natural forces and human action. Yet traces of that older narrative linger stubbornly in scientific debates and conservation strategies. Escaping this narrative trap requires paying closer attention to the deep-time environmental record and to the heterogeneity of human histories across the island.
Seems like everybody is planting trees or restoring forestlands these days. The emphasis is often on carbon capture to attenuate climate change. But this emphasis on carbon offsets (and the money behind it) draws in powerful global actors and carbon market intermediaries. Meanwhile, the costs of forest restoration are all too often unjustly borne by less powerful, local people living in places where trees are planted or restored. How forest restoration efforts be governed so that benefits can accrue at all spatial scales, from global to local?
There is a lot to be said for research that builds on lessons from many academic disciplines and between scientists and practitioners. But in such research one always has to negotiate power relations. Whose vision dominates, who compromises? Who gets more of the funding? Which framework is used?
Stephen Legg, a former colleague from my days at Monash University, asked me for 600 word statement titled “I am a geographer” for the magazine of the Geography Teacher’s Association of Victoria. It was a fun occasion to reflect. See below.
Stopping and reversing deforestation is a foremost priority in much of the tropics. Numerous policies and programs try to stem forest clearance, encourage tree planting, and restore forest landscapes. The hope is to promote “forest transitions” similar to the historical turnaround in forest cover trajectories in wealthy temperate countries. Such efforts have become all the more urgent given the climate and biodiversity crises. Yet it is often assumed that more forests is better and more sustainable, without careful consideration of how and where it happens, who wins and who loses, and what kinds of forests. In a recent open access paper, we identify nine pitfalls to such assumptions. Hopefully this inspires researchers, policymakers, and leaders to promote more diverse transitions to sustainable forest use and management.
The nine pitfalls and their implications for research and policy. (Figure 2 from our paper in the journal Environmental Conservation). With photos of forest landscapes across Southeast Asia: (a) plantations of rubber and acacia spreading in central Vietnam with remnant natural forest on hilltops; (b) ancestral lands of Pala’wan farmers on Palawan, Philippines; (c) announcement of an application for a communal land title for heritage land that has already been converted to oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia; and (d) paddy rice fields and upland forest with swidden in Hsipaw, Myanmar. Photos (a) Tran Nam Thang, (b) Wolfram Dressler, (c) Jennifer Bartmess, (d) Kevin Woods.Read the rest of this entry »
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