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'modernisation' and 'development'. This perhaps disposed many to see peas-
ants and smallholders as hide-bound to 'tradition' and embodiments of a
past that Guinea's post-independence president (Sékou Touré, who ruled
autocratically from 1958 until 1984) wanted to leave behind. Fourth, local
forest departments acquired assets and revenues courtesy of the deforesta-
tion discourse. As the decades wore on it was, perhaps, rational to avoid
challenging this discourse: for instance, jobs monitoring illegal logging and
fire setting might be lost, so too monies from fines and logging permits.
Fifth, the late twentieth-century appearance of more systematic remote sens-
ing (by planes and satellites) did not, in fact, increase certainty about land
cover changes. This is counter-intuitive and requires explanation. Complete
the following task before reading on.
Study Task: One would think that the availability of aerial images of land
cover in rural Guinea would help to dispel any myth of deforestation. Can
you think of any reason why this did not occur?
Close examination of aerial images of Kissidougou taken in 1952, 1979
and 1982 by Fairhead and Leach confirms what Kissia and Kuranko farm
communities told them. The images revealed remarkable consistency in
forest cover and, where it was lost, was usually compensated for by increases
nearby or further afield; yet Guinea government officials and overseas
researchers, in the 1970s and 1980s, either missed or ignored these manifest
facts. Why? Feasibly, they made incorrect inferences and guesses from
strictly incomparable images. The resolution of photographic and satellite
images differed (the latter are grainier); the time of year images were taken
often varied (meaning dry and wet season vegetation patterns were being
compared); and there was a lack of personnel or will to ground truth
image interpretations by visiting enough field sites. In light of this, it was
unlikely that Guinea's forest managers would 'see' afforestation signatures
in the images available to them. Finally, by the 1990s, the considerable
international development aid and nature conservation revenues mentioned
earlier became tied, in West Africa and elsewhere, to pro-forest projects in
many cases. To challenge deforestation discourse might have reduced the
flow of such monies into a still poor Guinea after the first Earth Summit.
Since Fairhead and Leach published their research, there has, by all
accounts, been a much greater attempt by governmental agencies in West
Africa and beyond to engage more closely and sympathetically with local
land users living in or near major forest zones. For example, an impor-
tant new trend in international natural resource management since the
mid-1990s has been to facilitate 'community-based' and 'participatory'
approaches. The number of remotely sensed images has also increased and
there's greater care taken when comparing and ground truthing photo-
graphic and satellite representations of land cover.
 
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