Racial,Gender, and Professional Diversification in the Forest Service from 1983 to 1992

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service traditionally has been dominated by white, male for esters, particularly in its professional and leadership ranks. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, civil rights legislation, lawsuits, and statutes that mandated interdisciplinary planning collectively impelled the agency to begin diversifying by race, gender, and profession. This study attempts to quantify the progress the agency has made in workforce diversification since the early 1980s by grouping Forest Service job series into categories and tracking changes in these categories over time. The study reveals that the numbers of employees in “nontraditional” Forest Service fields (e.g., the social and biological sciences) increased markedly, but that these employees remain vastly outnumbered by employees in traditional fields such as forestry. The number of women in the agency also increased greatly, but women made much greater gains in administrative support positions than in jobs that put them in the pipeline for leadership positions. They remain vastly overrepresented in clerical and administrative positions and highly under rep resented in professional and technical positions. People of color made gains in nearly all job categories, but, like women, remain significantly overrepresented in jobs that will not lead to leadership positions. Thus, while aggregate numbers show greater diversity in the Forest Service workforce, a more detailed analysis reveals that the leadership ranks are still the domain of white, male foresters.     

Trees as technology: planting shelterbelts on the Great Plains

The turbulent climate of the Great Plains made windbreaks necessary for the protection of settlers and their livestock and crops. At first individual farmers tried to plant their own shelterbelts but with little success. The US Forest Service, with the establishment of the Bessey tree nursery, in 1902, and the field planting of the Nebraska National Forest, developed the expertise to carry out farm forestry on the plains. In 1934 the Forest Service undertook the Prairie States Forestry Project, an eight‐year program to plant shelterbelts from Canada to Texas, in response to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. These shelterbelts were a technological solution to environmental and social problems. As they grew, successful shelterbelts developed forest characteristics and served as habitat for birds and wildlife. As systems that were both technical and ecological, shelterbelts embodied a confluence of culture and nature in the technology that farmers and foresters used to engineer a more suitable environment for American society on the Plains.     

Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity Chain

The questions at the centre of this article are: who profits from commercial forestry, and how? Through access mapping with commodity chain analysis, this study examines the distribution of benefits from Senegal's charcoal trade and the multiple market mechanisms underpinning that distribution. Benefits from charcoal are derived from direct control over forest access, as well as through access to markets, labour opportunities, capital, and state agents and officials. Access to these arenas is based on a number of inter-related mechanisms including legal property, social identity, social relations, coercion and information control. A commodity chain is the series of relations through which an item passes, from extraction through conversion, exchange, transport, distribution and final use. Access mapping involves evaluating the distribution of benefits along the chain, and tracing out the mechanisms by which access to benefits is maintained. It sheds light on the limited role of property, the embedded nature of markets, and the role of extra-legal structures and mechanisms in shaping equity and efficiency in resource use. It does so in a socially situated, multi-local manner, spanning the geographic spread of production and exchange. It also illuminates the practical issues surrounding establishment of community participation in benefits from and control over natural resources.     

WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE? COUNTER-MAPPING FOREST TERRITORIES IN KALIMANTAN,INDONESIA

This paper examines the politics of land and forest rights in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Forest mapping by government forestry planners allocates rights of resource use and land access according to forest types and economic objectives, only rarely recognizing indigenous occupancy rights or forest territories customarily claimed or managed by local people. As maps and official plans based on them ignore, and in some cases criminalize, traditional rights to forest, forest products, and forest land for temporary conversion to swidden agriculture, indigenous activists are using sketch maps to re-claim territories - a process that requires re-defining many traditional forest rights. The paper considers the political implications of mapping and the implications of a focus on land use rather than forest use.     

The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty

City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the “floors” principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living‐wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policies—collective‐action theory, regime theory, and pluralism—and for advocates on behalf of the urban poor.     

Forestry disputes in provincial France during the nineteenth century: the case of the Montagne de Lure

The nineteenth century in France marked the origins of modern forest management. Two important dates mark the advent of the organisation of forestry: first in 1824, the creation of the Forestry School in Nancy, and then in 1827 the adoption of a Forestry Code specifying to what extent forests were to submit to the forestry regime. Throughout the nineteenth century, forestry administration crystallised the resentment of village communities in the Montagne de Lure through the increasingly strict management of activities linked to the forest. During the 1800s almost all foresters, with a few exceptions, claimed they were the ones who knew the truth and represented collective interests against local populations that they judged to be ignorant and not very concerned with the future. The policy of Restoration of Mountain Terrain (RTM) that was put in place in the Montagne de Lure near the end of the nineteenth century marks the outcome of such a process. It reflects the power of the centralised body of forestry engineers over forest management in France and the decline of local communities, weakened by massive rural depopulation and by a succession of economic crises. Forest space therefore crystallises during these decades of dispute between local and central power.     

Environmental Action,Gender Equity and Women's Participation

For poor households, and especially for the women who own little private land, forests and village commons have always been critical sources of basic necessities in rural India. However, the availability of these resources has been declining rapidly, due both to degradation and to shifts in property rights away from community control and management to State and individual control and management. More recently, though, we are seeing small but notable reversals in these processes toward a re-establishment of greater community control over forests and village commons. Numerous forest management groups have emerged, initiated variously by the State, by village communities, or by non-governmental organizations. However, unlike the old systems of communal property management which recognized the usufruct rights of all villagers, the new ones represent a more formalized system of rights based on membership. In other words, under the new initiatives, membership is replacing citizenship as the defining criterion for establishing rights in the commons. This raises critical questions about participation and equity, especially gender equity. Are the benefits and costs of the emergent institutional arrangements being shared equally by women and men? Or are they creating a system of property rights in communal land which, like existing rights in privatized land, are strongly male centred? What is women's participation in these initiatives? What constrains or facilitates their participation and exercise of agency? This article provides pointers. It also demonstrates the relevance of the feminist environmentalist perspective, as opposed to the ecofeminist perspective, in understanding gendered responses to the environmental crisis. 1 Abbreviations used in this article: FPC=Forest Protection Committee (under JFM); JFM=Joint Forest Management; NGO=Non-Governmental Organization; VCs=Village Commons; VP=Van Panchayat (forest council).
     

The Role of Metallurgy in Transforming Global Forests.

Forest degradation—both past and present—has been a significant research focus of many disciplines in recent decades, and it is an area in which the multidisciplinarity and long-term perspectives of archaeological endeavour has the potential to make a particularly valuable contribution. One of the past craft activities that has long been linked to significant socio-economic change and associated accelerations in forest cover reduction and environmental decline is the intensification of early iron production—an industry reliant on the consumption of charcoal as fuel for much of its history. However, the impact of iron production on the transformation of woodlands is dependent on a suite of interrelated factors—climatic, ecological, technological and cultural—only some of which have so far been adequately scrutinised. This paper explores the theoretical context that links iron production with deforestation in academic and popular cultures, examining the role that archaeology can play in investigating this association, before reviewing recent methodological approaches that aim to interrogate the relationship between metallurgy and the environment in archaeological settings.     

Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois Valley

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield paradigm and the post-war compact between private capital and federal forest agencies were justified in part to foster stable rural timber economies. Nowhere has this compact been more significant than in rural Oregon. And yet nowhere are its failings more apparent. The central argument of this paper is that the failure of federal sustained yield policies to sustain rural communities stems from an implicitly naive model of industrial capitalism. By ignoring the inherently destabilizing character of capitalist industry, by further failing to refine the notion of community stability, and by failing to take genuine steps to defend rural society from the upheavals of industrial change, the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have allowed community stability to languish in the dogged pursuit of accelerated cutting rates. This paper explores industrial change in Oregon's forest products sector in the post-war era of federal sustained yield management, looking specifically at southwest Oregon's Illinois Valley.     

Is the Forest Service Keeping Up With the Times?

Interest groups involved in the Forest Service's 1990 Resources Planning Act (RPA) forest planning process and representatives from accredited forestry schools were surveyed via a written questionnaire on their perceptions of change within the Forest Service since 1976. Respondents felt that the agency had changed, particularly during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Consumptive users perceived the change to be negative, while non-consumptive user groups and forestry schools felt it was somewhat positive, although they still felt the Forest Service had much further to go in this direction before achieving these groups' desired priorities for National Forest management. These results indicate that the agency is undergoing a net shift in direction towards increased emphasis on non-commodity forest uses. In general, external forces, such as Congress and the courts, were seen as having a greater impact on agency change than were sources of change within the agency itself. Forestry schools agreed most often with non-consumptive users, indicating that these programs may be undergoing a change away from their traditional focus on timber production. In addition to providing valuable insights on the subject of change in the Forest Service, these survey results locate areas of agreement and disagreement, and provide valuable feedback to the agency regarding its constituent groups' views about its performance in managing the National Forests.     

Facing Up to the Centre: The Emergence of Regional Elite Associations in Angola's Political Transition Process

This article compares two regional elite associations in Angola's southern Huíla province — the Associação dos Naturais e Amigos de Kuvango, Jamba e Chipindo (Anakujachi — Association of Natives and Friends of Kuvango, Jamba and Chipindo) and the Associação Solidariedade Nyaneka‐Humbi (SNH — Nyaneka‐Humbi Solidarity Association). It demonstrates how these associations have gained increasing political significance through their representation of local interests. This is facilitated by deeply felt social and political exclusion resulting from war and a centralized state that hardly reaches the periphery where these associations are based. Until now, the central Angolan state has refused to grant the regions more autonomy despite an official gradualismo decentralization policy which introduces elected bodies at district level. In response, the strategy of these associations has been to ensure that their representatives obtain positions within the state, both nationally and locally, so that they could represent the interests of their specific region. Using the example of these regional elite associations, the article retraces the struggle over resources and citizenship, which is embedded in contemporary urban–rural interactions that mark political change in Huíla province.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

明清时期徽商在巢湖流域的经营活动

明清时期,由于巢湖流域农业的发展以及当地人以农为本、少事商贾习俗的影响,徽商遍布巢湖流域大小城镇和集市,在流域内从事商业经营,并形成了较为明显的经营特色.徽商给巢湖流域的市镇发展带来了生机和活力,对于沟通城乡市场,使之成为一个统一的整体,发挥了重要作用.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Really shit work? Bodily becoming and the capacity to care for the urban forest

The urban forest has a significant impact on the city’s social and ecological performance. However, shrinking space and resources needed to care for trees means cultivating community care for the urban forest is an increasingly salient issue. To this end, the paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the powers shaping people’s capacity to care for trees. It identifies the body as one of these powers and turns to Deleuze and Guattari for a theory of corporeality that illuminates the body’s role in the process of becoming a ‘bushcarer’. This highlights the trans-corporeal practices and encounters that endow people with the skills and desire needed to care for the urban forest. With the ethical utility of the body being debated by social and cultural geographers, this article defends its potential by suggesting the body and its encounters are deeply implicated in the development of a dyadic capacity to care for the urban forest. For urban forestry, this means community engagement might be framed as an ethical event that facilitates experiments in bodily composition that might change our ways of thinking, feeling, and being with the urban forest.     

Measuring Efficiency in Local Government: An Analysis of New South Wales Municipalities' Domestic Waste Management Function

Data envelopment analysis is used to measure the technical and scale efficiency of the domestic waste management function in 103 New South Wales local governments. After allowance is made for nondiscretionary environmental factors that may affect the provision of these local public services, such as congestion and the inability to operate machinery in densely populated urban areas, comparison of efficiency across geographic/demographic criteria is made. The results suggest that, on average, waste management inputs could be reduced to just over 65% of the current level based upon observable best-practice, while productivity losses due to scale effects account for slightly over 15% of total inputs. The results also indicate that inefficiency in urban developed councils is largely the result of congestion and other collection difficulties encountered in densely populated areas, while inefficiency in regional and rural councils stems from an inability to attain an optimal scale of operations.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

晚清时期南洋地区中华商会的角色定位及其实践

论文聚焦于晚清南洋各埠中华商会的创办及其在保障当地华人华商权益、增进海内外同胞沟通与交流等方面所发挥的作用,从章程文书和案例两个视角剖析南洋中华商会的角色定位。20世纪初,清政府倡导创办商会,南洋各埠华商积极响应。由于清政府在海外的护侨保侨作用有限,南洋中华商会在近代海外华人社会中扮演着多重角色。它不仅是商业联合组织,更是维护海外华侨权益、增进海内外同胞交流的重要支柱。早期中华商会的一系列努力奠定了其在海外华侨社会中的影响与地位,并延续至今。     

Children’s right to the city: the emergence of youth councils in the United States

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) spells out many rights, including the right to participate in decision-making. Within an urban context, a child’s ‘right to the city’ includes the opportunity to participate in local governance. Youth councils (YCs) provide such opportunities. Using a nationwide survey in the United States, this paper describes YC characteristics and accomplishments. Findings show that YCs generally operate with little funding and are commonly administered within parks and recreation departments or city council offices. In addition, YCs created prior to the 1990s primarily addressed youth-related problems, whereas those created after 2000, focused more on leadership skills. Significant accomplishments reported by YCs include the development of leadership skills and knowledge of government, and community-based service projects. The conclusion considers the impact of YCs on furthering the goals of the CRC and giving youth access to decision-making.     

Prospective Future Trends in Urban–Rural Relationships Within the Territorial Agenda of the EU: A Critical Analysis of Implementation with a Special Focus on the Example of the Czech Republic

In recent years, urban–rural relationships have attracted an increasing interest for more than just the issues they represent, i.e. the growing polarization of economic growth and the ever widening disparities between cities and the countryside. Another factor includes their conceptual context that concerns—above all—the implementation of the Territorial Agenda (TA) of the EU. This paper mainly focuses on identifying the solutions of urban–rural relationships under the umbrella of the TA EU within the practical context existing in the Czech Republic. The conclusions from this paper were used as the expert basis for primary research on this issue within the framework of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2009. The recommendations for policy-making at both the EU and the CR levels can be applied over the long-term horizon and should also be seen in the next programming period.