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).
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Conservation, Environmental History, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: deforestation, environment, fire, invasive species, Madagascar, pine, tree planting, Uapaca bojeri | 
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Posted by christiankull
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.
Leave a Comment » | Fire, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: bushfire, environment, Madagascar, political ecology, research ethics, social bias | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
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.
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Interdisciplinarity, Political ecology, Research, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: afforestation, biodiversity, climate-change, conservation, deforestation, environment, extraction, forest restoration, forest transition, forests, livelihoods, plantation forestry, political ecology, power dynamics, productivism, reforestation, southeast Asia | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
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.
3 Comments | Book Review, Development, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: conservation, environment, geopolitics, Madagascar | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
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
During a live radio interview today on Radio France Culture (info / listen), the host Sylvain Kahn put me on the spot, asking whether, as an Australian geographer I thought that French geography was missing out on the environment question. I deflected the question, not feeling qualified to judge an entire disciplinary tradition I have only partial exposure to. But as far as I understand from my conversations with French geographers, his question was not innocent. Read the rest of this entry »
6 Comments | Research | Tagged: climate debate, discipline, environment, France, geography, national tradition, political ecology, radio france culture | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
The landscapes that characterize different places on the earth, and from which many people earn their livelihoods and their sense of place, and which support diverse flora and fauna, are often built with a mix of local and introduced plants. Sometimes, introduced plants succeed so wildly in their new home that people come to see them as weeds or pests, crowding out crops or native species, changing soil conditions, altering fire regimes, or affecting the water table. The field of invasion biology emerged over the past few decades seeking to document, understand, and stop such “alien invasions”. But the fervour of this effort has at times crashed head-on with alternative worldviews. One of South Africa’s top weeds, for example, is the Australian native silver wattle, also naturalized in France where it is celebrated for its winter flowers and as an ingredient for Chanel No. 5 and other perfumes [1][2]. Such conflicting outlooks were on stark display at a workshop I attended in October 2010 at Stellenbosch, South Africa, on Australian acacias as a global experiment in biogeography.
Picture 1: Do plants need passports? Who should control plant movements, and on what basis? Silver wattle (Acacia dealbata), native to Australia, invasive and assimilated as mimosa in the Côte d’Azur, France.
Picture 2: Do Australian acacias need passports? Australian passports specify “free passage without let or hindrance”…
3 Comments | Acacia, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: australian acacias, control, environment, eradication, geographic perspectives, invasion biology, invasive alien plants, landscapes, livelihoods, nature, plant transfers, quarantine, region, sense of place | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
