Louise Fortmann

Whose landscape? A political ecology of the 'exurban' Sierra

In rural places that sit at the uneasy crossroads between ‘traditional’ natural resource-based production and ‘new’ economies and cultures of aesthetic landscape ‘consumption’, ideas of landscape become increasingly important and contested. This paper examines one such conflict in Nevada County, California - a former mining and ranching community in the Sierra Nevada that has experienced rapid ‘exurban’ in-migration and gentrification. In-migrants brought with them particular ‘aesthetic’ or ‘consumption’ views of landscape that long-time residents with continuing ties to the ‘old’ production landscape viewed as political threats. These tensions have recently ignited a political firestorm over a proposal by the environmentalist-dominated county government to incorporate landscape-scale aesthetic and environmental principles into county planning. The ferocity of this contest reflects the multiple issues at stake, including competition between different forms of rural capitalism, class conflict and social control, and cultural frictions. At each level of this multi-tiered conflict, ideas of landscape are key. Together, political ecology and new cultural geographical studies of landscape provide powerful insights into the ways that the politics of landscape - revolving around the question of who ‘owns’ the landscape or decides how it ‘should’ look - become a pivotal node in the shifting human-environment dialectic.

The rock, the beach, and the tidal pool: People and poverty in natural resource‐dependent areas

Abstract Explaining why poverty exists in natural resource‐dependent areas (NRDAs) presents a formidable challenge, given variability in the nature, spatial manifestations, and social character of human well‐being. Nonetheless, there are structures and processes unique to NRDAs, including resource degradation, increasingly restrictive public land use policies, concentrated land ownership, and high rates of occupational injury that create the potential for impoverization in NRDAs. Given this complex context, we examine two theories of poverty. We find processes such as the shift from labor to capital‐intensive resource extraction, profit squeezes, and increased capital mobility identified in advanced capitalism theory help to explain NRDA poverty. In addition, processes identified in the theory of internal colonialism such as unequal exchange, the clash between traditional and secular cultures, and the control of public agencies by powerful private interests are more basic forces in creating NRDA poverty.

California's privately owned oak woodlands: owners, use, and management.

Social science research is an important tool for guiding development of education programs for owners of private rangelands. California oak woodland, a productive and extensive range type in California that is undergoing rapid changes in use and management, is the focus of this study. Results indicate that landowners with different property size differ demographically, make different uses of their land, and have distinctly different attitudes toward oak management and living in the oak woodland. Owners of smaller properties, on the increase in rural California, do not earn their living from their land, and will respond best to resource education programs that they believe will contribute to bettering the quality of life they seek by residing in the oak woodland. Owners of larger properties, the traditional clientele of advisory agencies, will more likely respond to programs that protect and enhance earnings from their property. Still, even a third of the owners of the largest (over 5,000 acres) properties earn the majority of their income from sources other than their lands. To be effective, range-oriented education programs and policies must track the changing composition of rural populations, and the changes in attitudes, needs, and interests that accompany demographic shifts.

American forestry professionalism in the third world: Some preliminary observations

Forestry, with its fulsomely developed and articulated worldview, provides an excellent case study of cultural and professional biases in projects intended to aid developing countries. Much of the forestry professionals received wisdom is defined by the ideology of the progressive era conservation movement: a preeminent emphasis on technical expertise as the basis for decision making; a related tendency to prefer comprehensive government planning and to denigrate the expertise and priorities of local resource users, who are seen as political advocates serving their own interests; a preference for managing trees, for lumber and as distinct from other forest and tree uses. This mindset leaves the forester in a poor position to understand the uses which forest users in other cultures see as important, to utilize the expertise of locals in the design and implementation of proposed aid programs, and to enquire meaningfully into alternative systems of land and tree tenure which will determine the success of those programs. Foresters are not the only professionals with trained incapacities; however, greater sensitivity to the settings in which aid projects will succeed or fail would be especially useful for western-trained foresters working in nonwestern forests, and for local foresters trained in western concepts and priorities.

Sciences, knowledges, and the practice of forestry

We address the question of how credible knowledge that will contribute to more effective forest policy and management can be produced. We argue that some forest-related knowledge-producing practices of professional scientists and of local people are similar, and given the differences in the knowledge they produce, we explore how they might be used productively together to create better understandings of forests with resulting better forestry practice and policy. Using a case study of participatory forest ecology research, we demonstrate that when professional (conventional) scientists do research in collaboration with local experts (civil scientists), the resulting knowledge can be more accurate and more policy relevant than they could produce doing research on their own or only with other conventional scientists.

Bonanza! The unasked questions: Domestic land tenure through international lenses

The lens of U.S. popular culture provided by country and western music and horror films reveals an understanding of property in the United States as complex, contested, and fluid. International scholarship has analyzed property in similar terms. U.S. property relationships are explored here through application of six themes found in the international literature: (1) property as social process, (2) customary tenures, (3) common property and community management of resources, (4) gender, (5) the complexity of tenancy relationships, and (6) land concentration.

Locality and custom: Non-aboriginal claims to customary usufructuary rights as a source of rural protest☆

Abstract Scholars have generally recognized neither the existence of contemporary non-aboriginal claims to customary property rights in the United States of America nor their importance as a source of rural protest. This is a study of claims to usufructuary rights that are a truncated form of non-aboriginal customary property law. In this case, when the claims of residents of a small community to customary usufructuary rights to adjacent forest resources for subsistence and livelihood uses came into conflict with claims made under formal law, they repeatedly defended their claims by means of social protest. These findings suggest the need for greater attention to the local processes defining and defending customary claims to property and their role as a source of social action.

The effects of nonmetropolitan population growth on resource management

Abstract Studies of nonmetropolitan growth have neglected the effect of changes in the nature of new residents and land‐holding size on individual resource management. This study of management of a resource‐at‐risk shows that deleterious resource management does not follow automatically in the wake of population growth. There is no difference in likelihood of new and long‐standing residents to manage resources, although they probably manage for different reasons, and new residents are more likely to practice protective management. No differences in management on parcels of different sizes were found. Discriminant analysis in which variation due to length of residence is taken into account, however, shows protective management to be predicted by property size and “connectedness”; to the land rather than by demographic variables. Future studies of resource management should consider economic and non‐economic management goals, “connectedness”; to the land and resource, and non‐professional (indigenous) manag...

The Federal Forests Are Not What They Seem: Formal and Informal Claims to Federal Lands

Introdu ction .......................................................................... 630 I. Introductory Comments About Levels of Government .... 631 II. The Norm al M odel ........................................................ 633 III. Diverse Ownership Claims on Federal Lands ................ 634 A. Intermixed Ownership ............................................ 634 B. Leases and Private Development and Access R igh ts ..................................................................... 63 5 C. Inform al Claim s ...................................................... 636 D. Spill Overs and Ecological Interconnections ............ 639 IV. Administrative Jurisdiction Elements of the Normal M od el ........................................................................... 64 1 V. Decisionmaking Elements of the Normal Model ............. 644 C on clu sion ............................................................................ 646

On Really Existing Communities – Organic or Otherwise

The good news is that Telos has moved beyond critique towards a positive program for federalism and communities, or what Paul Piccone calls “federal populism.” While the model of federal populism seems to have shifted from the European Community to the Lombard League, this focus on examples of federalized communities is to be encouraged. The bad news is that Telos has not subjected “federalism” and “communities” to the same thorough-going critique it has given other notions such as “Civil Society” and the “New Class.” What needs to be analyzed are “really existing communities” as they are found in the US today.