Writing Political Forests

In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the concept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches allowed us to locate subjects and processes in specific field sites within an emergent global forestry network produced through multiscale interactions and movements within and among colonial and FAO forestry empires. We revisit the key processes through which we learned to see common and contrasting mechanisms that have made forests inherently political in our six research sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, linking these “classic” mechanisms to concepts in wide use today. These concepts include understanding political forests as co-produced, the significance of expertise in their reproduction, and the interactions between politics and the lively materialities of political forests. Among other conclusions, we suggest that the political forest is being replaced by what could be called “political conservation”, which has its own knowledge networks and expertise that displace but also build on political forestry. Finally, we reflect on how these ideas are being further developed by the authors in this symposium, whom we gratefully acknowledge for demonstrating that the politicisation of forests continues to be significant today.     

Laboratory Notes,Laboratory Experiences,and Conceptual Analysis: Understanding the Making of Ohm's First Law in Electricity

Georg Simon Ohm's work in the field of electricity led to what is now considered to be the most fundamental law of electrical circuits, Ohm's Law. Much less known is that only months earlier, Ohm had published another law—one that differed significantly from the now accepted one. The latter entailed a logarithmic relation between the length of the conductor and a parameter that Ohm called “loss of force.” This paper discusses how Ohm came up with an initial law that he felt compelled to correct a few months later. We analyze Ohm's publication as well as his laboratory notes, relating them to our own laboratory experiences while using the replication method to study his work. We also discuss the conceptual background of Ohm's work. We conclude that he was significantly influenced by French studies in the field of electricity, most notably the ones by Charles Augustin Coulomb.     

Wealden nature and the role of London in nineteenth-century artistic imagination

The new outlook on nature as a restorative for jaded urban-dwellers that is associated with Victorians' sense of an increasing separation from their natural environment, had a powerful influence upon the imagination of mid nineteenth-century landscape artists choosing to work in south-east England. Although they established close business relations with the metropolis and provincial cities, they experienced a loss of confidence in London as a subject for landscape painting and with new opportunities for travel provided by railways they preferred to satisfy a quasi-scientific curiosity in the visible appearance of natural and semi-natural beauty in the green world beyond London, especially in the expressively-shaped Weald, long connected with aesthetic appreciation and scientific observation. Their specific contribution of plain-air realism was to conceive the Wealden landscape both as a natural marvel and a human epic, an idea then new and exciting to the mind. Their feelings of awe and wonder have Ruskinian undertones and are inextricably linked with the drama of earth history that natural scientists were simultaneously unfolding in a newly constituted laboratory of field studies. This spiriting of a new, imagined, wilderness out of what wooded nature still survived in a shrunken form after the clearings of pioneer farmers became an inexhaustible source of enrichment to nineteenth-century urban life and conforms at least partially with mid-Victorians' perception of a natural habitat juxtaposed with one of the world's largest and most artificial environments that Victorians themselves were creating. It became a nearly symbolic image of an ideal English landscape which existed largely as a protected paradise of the urban imagination.     

Strand,David,An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China

Mobility and mutability;appeals for public support;desires to construct public opinion;claims to reflect the public will.Thus does David Strand describe the early years of the Republic of China from about 1912 to 1924,when political institutions failed but a republican political culture was nonetheless established.Mobility refers to activists and politicians and soldiers who moved all around the country and sometimes abroad,and mutability to their capacity to take on different roles,from conspirator to journalist to senator.Strand's richly textured study conveys the political passions of this period,and argues that it shaped how voices would be subsequently raised against even the harshest political oppression.     

'Respect the life of the countryside': the Country Code, government and the conduct of visitors to the countryside in post-war England and Wales

Geographers examining the spaces of government and governance, and in particular those drawing upon the writings of Michel Foucault on government and governmentality, have tended to overlook the importance of different media, technical devices and practices of self-government to specific rationalities and programmes of government. In this paper I argue that the materialities and immaterialities of many mundane media technologies, the way they articulate and translate particular programmes of government, and the way they instil practices of self-government in citizens, are important but frequently overlooked dimensions of the geographies of government. I focus on the codes of countryside conduct – The Country Code/Countryside Code – that have been published in England and Wales since 1951. I examine how the National Parks Commission, and subsequently the Countryside Commission and Countryside Agency, identified the potential strengths and limitations of using the Country Code booklet to govern the conduct of visitors to the countryside. The paper shows how the material form of the booklet and methods of distributing and promoting it were seen to matter, and examines how civil servants attempted to extend the 'reach' of the Code and articulate its message through a diverse range of media which entailed different kinds of performative encounters in different spaces.