Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
long played an important cultural role in community life. Individual trees,
and particular sites within forest islands, assume important roles in family
histories, hierarchies of status within communities, rituals, rites-of-passage
and the identities of males and females. Thus, when government-licensed
loggers entered Kissidougou to cut down selected mature trees, it would
often cause cultural offence because the trees in question possessed sym-
bolic value. The question then arises: how, for so many decades, did state
forestry scientists, managers and field agents manage to miss what Fairhead
and Leach uncovered? Why did a generalised discourse about deforestation
at the hands of errant farmers come to be applied in areas like Kissidougou
where it ought not to have been?
The persistence of deforestation orthodoxy
We will never have a full answer to these questions. The historical record
is incomplete and the various epistemic workers in question, such as
André Aubréville, are long deceased. What the multi-decade persistence
of Guinea's deforestation orthodoxy demonstrates was well summarised by
Leach, writing with geographer Robin Mearns:
but that 'what
constitutes
knowledge, what is to be excluded and who is designated as qualified to know
involves acts of power'.
(Leach and Mearns, 1996: 16 [quoting Foucault, 1971], emphasis added)
It is not merely that 'knowledge itself is power'
...
Leach and Fairhead have offered some informed speculation about how
Guinea's forest service was able to able to represent the forest-savannah
mosaic as a zone of persistent tree loss for so long. I now list their
First, a pattern of non- or limited communication with local farmers
established by French colonists was subsequently hard to overturn, even
after Guinea became independent. Though some travellers and botanists
did recognise that tree islands in Kissidougou and elsewhere may not have
been historical relics, others (like Aubréville) disagreed or classified them
as exceptions that proved the rule. Because the epistemic community of
botanists and agro-foresters was so small in West Africa until the 1990s, it
arguably required considerable courage (and compelling evidence) to be the
person who would challenge - if only at the level of a few localities - the
prevailing deforestation discourse. Second, ideas about 'the rule' (deforesta-
tion) came from many observed instances of tree loss elsewhere in Guinea
and West Africa; they were bolstered by Fredric Clements's idea of spatially
continuous 'climax communities' of vegetation, which, as I've previously
noted, created an expectation of biogeographical consistency at the regional
level.
Third, national and local forestry department officials, like most state
employees, were apt to define themselves as participants in Guinea's
