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complete desert. Now there exists no more than a little belt of trees around
each village
...
' (Nicholas, 1914: 1R12). More than a generation after this
observation, Kissidougou's chief botanist wrote of 'oases of equatorial vege-
tation in the middle of savannah burned by sun and fire
all in regression'
(Adam, 1948: 22). 11 On what basis were these and other confident claims by
European settlers made and sustained?
Valentin and others did not have the benefit of modern time-series aerial
photography or satellite imagery. What's more, though they could have
consulted Kissia and Kuranko farmers about their experience of decadal
vegetation change, they chose not to - at least not in any sustained or deep
way. This no doubt reflected the attitudes of superiority that underpinned
the everyday racism, be it malign or 'paternalistic', that structured every-
day life in Europe's African colonies up until the 1950s and 1960s when
they became independent nation states. In addition, West African botanists
before Valentin's time had observed that palm oil trees grow quickly in
'secondary forest' (i.e. that which replaces original forest after, say, log-
ging) but do not thrive in savannah. Thus, when they noted several palm
oil trees in most of Kissidougou's forest islands, it was taken to indicate
the loss of mature semi-deciduous forest to land clearance for farming or
grassland-scrub fire.
Moreover, the absence of settlements in many forest islands reinforced
the idea that they were natural, vestiges of once continuous tree cover. As
important, if not more, than all these reasons for Kissidougou's deforesta-
tion discourse were influential new ideas in ecological theory. In the early
twentieth century, American botanist Fredric Clements (1928) published
what became a germinal book, Plant succession . Based on field observation
and experimental data, Clements proposed that each climatic zone gave rise
to what he called a 'climax community' - an ensemble of vegetative species
that are well adapted to prevailing patterns of temperature and precipitation,
varying according to local relief, soils and hydrology. When 'disturbed', a
vegetative community will, Clements argued, return to its climax condition
(given sufficient time), with 'secondary succession' species colonising the
soil only to give way to larger and denser vegetation (e.g. trees) later on.
Clements's arguments about stable climate-vegetation equilibria were,
intentionally or not, normative. They implicitly proposed a biogeograph-
ical 'baseline' against which current vegetation patterns in a given region
could be compared. His work also popularised the idea that sub-climax veg-
etation was an aberration, either because of extreme natural events (like
a prolonged drought) or human interference with natural processes. Plant
succession positioned people as exogenous variables, not constructors or co-
producers of vegetative landscapes . 12 Coincidently, Clements's book was
published the same year Woodrow Wilson created America's first national
parks, one of several federal responses to the large-scale destruction of plant
and animal species (like the bison and passenger pigeon). His work soon
proved influential in the then relatively small world of botanical education
...
 
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