Kendra McSweeney

Valuation of consumption and sale of forest goods from a Central American rain forest.

Researchers recognize that society needs accurate and comprehensive estimates of the economic value of rain forests to assess conservation and management options. Valuation of forests can help us to decide whether to implement policies that reconcile the value different groups attach to forests. Here we have measured the value of the rain forest to local populations by monitoring the foods, construction and craft materials, and medicines consumed or sold from the forest by 32 Indian households in two villages in Honduras over 2.5 years. We have directly measured the detailed, comprehensive consumption patterns of rain forest products by an indigenous population and the value of that consumption in local markets. The combined value of consumption and sale of forest goods ranged from US

Who Is “Forest‐Dependent”? Capturing Local Variation in Forest‐Product Sale, Eastern Honduras

17.79 to US

The Dugout Canoe Trade in Central America's Mosquitia: Approaching Rural Livelihoods Through Systems of Exchange

23.72 per hectare per year, at the lower end of previous estimates (between US

Environmental Politics After Nature: Conflicting Socioecological Futures

49 and US

Outbacks: the popular construction of an emergent landscape

1,089 (mean US

Conditional Cash Transfers, Food Security, and Health: Biocultural Insights for Poverty-Alleviation Policy from the Brazilian Amazon

347) per hectare per year). Although outsiders value the rain forest for its high-use and non-use values, local people receive a small share of the total value. Unless rural people are paid for the non-local values of rain forests, they may be easily persuaded to deforest.

Topographic Maps: Rediscovering an Accessible Data Source for Land Cover Change Research

How researchers describe groups living within or near the worlds tropical rain forests has important implications for how and why these groups are targeted for assistance by conservation and development organizations. This article explores how data about market behavior can be used to assess one aspect of forest peoples’ livelihoods: their “dependence” on forest resources as a source of market income. With the intent of revealing the importance of methodology to how we describe forest peoples’ livelihoods, I draw from a multiyear survey of market activity among the Tawahka Sumu of Honduras and distinguish nested measures of the Tawahkas’ engagement in forest-product sale. Results indicate that whether or not the Tawahka —or any forest group — can be considered financially “dependent” on forest resources depends on the spatial and temporal scales at which data are aggregated. As a group, the Tawahka earned 18 percent of total market income from forest-product sale, but their group profile masked a high degree of heterogeneity at the village and household level. Similarly, multiyear data indicated that while group-level generalizations adhere from year to year, they belie considerable change in households’ market behavior across years. I discuss three ways in which the findings are relevant to the theory and practice of conservation and development in the humid tropics. I emphasize the importance of spatial scale in interventions, how market-oriented conservation schemes can benefit from a broader conceptualization of the economic context in which forest-product sale occurs, and how longitudinal analysis can reveal the dynamism of forest peoples’ livelihoods.

Changing lives and changing science? The merits and limits of “interdependent science”

Abstract For over 300 years, dugout canoes have been traded within and between ethnic groups in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I describe the development and contemporary dynamics of the canoe trade in order to operationalize, in one particular landscape, recent calls by geographers and anthropologists for greater ethnographic engagement with rural livelihoods. For example, historical analysis of the Mosquitias canoe trade reveals several unexpected insights into the relationship between remote rural peoples and international capital, including the interaction and co-constitution of local and international trade circuits through time, how rural producers could manipulate canoe production to take advantage of boom-time trade circuits, and how canoe trading took on added importance during recessionary periods. Analysis of contemporary canoe production among Hondurass Tawahka Sumu points, in turn, to the economic viability of canoe trading, especially in contrast to cash crop production. Individual producers, however, face a variety of constraints on their ability to benefit from the canoe commodity chain, with young, undercapitalized households facing the largest barriers to canoe production and sale. Reliance on canoe sales can speak to a households undercapitalization or to its ability to invest in new opportunities, especially in the form of education for their children. Ultimately, the canoe case study demonstrates how attention to the trade in everyday materialities in remote rural regions can help to envision and operationalize a new form of rural development, in which endogenous projects and capabilities are foregrounded.

Rural Household Demographics, Livelihoods and the Environment

This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and other nonhumans, we identify multiple distinct forest types that currently exist as both material reality and future vision. Each forest is characterized by antagonistic ideas about ideal species composition, structure, and function and about specific actions and actors deemed necessary and threatening for the forests persistence. Each forest represents a very different vision for how socioecological relationships should be fostered. We argue, first, that broad acceptance that the environment is fundamentally socioecological does not mark the end of environmentalism. Rather, urges to environmentalism proliferate as people aim to foster the social natures they envision—and do so through interventions that are internal to what the forest is and does. Second, the proliferation of environmentalisms generates new forms of environmental conflict, which manifests over what sorts of social natures can and should exist (i.e., what they should do and for whom) and which interventions are beneficial or harmful to the survival and proliferation of the forest in the future. Ultimately, we demonstrate that socioecological futures are being shaped today through political struggle not over naturalness but over what should be done, by whom, to bring about which social natures, and to the benefit of whom (human and nonhuman).

Natural Insurance, Forest Access, and Compounded Misfortune: Forest Resources in Smallholder Coping Strategies Before and After Hurricane Mitch, Northeastern Honduras

What is an ‘outback’? Why is the term being applied to landscapes bearing little resemblance to the Australian interior? Based on a survey of the rising international use of this term, and a case study from Ohio, it is suggested that outbacks are discursively produced: (a) where post-industrial relationships between an urban place and its much larger, contiguous periphery have matured; (b) where economic shifts have resulted in patchy but recognizable re-naturalization of erstwhile fields or industrial badlands; (c) by rural groups, who recognize and promote the ‘environmental power’ of their changing landscapes; and (d) when proximate urbanites consume these landscapes as accessible, nostalgic, multi-use recreational getaways. The outback concept, then, offers a framework for exploring a new type of re-greened, post-industrial landscape through its discursive production by citizens, in a way that encompasses multiple forms of social, economic and ecological change. Where landscape scholars tend to explore these issues in isolation, simultaneous ‘outbacking’ of different landscapes around the world draws attention to popular articulation of commonalities in rural experience.