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Reflections: on Teaching World Forest History
Nancy Langston
| SHORTLY BEFORE I came up for tenure, my department chair told me that he thought forest history was boring. Since my tenure case was based on forest history, this offhand remark brought out all the neuroses common to pre-tenured faculty—yet I secretly agreed with him. Forest historyis often tedious. Too much forest history gets mired in detail that appeals mostly to retirees who share an unusual obsession with steam donkeys and railroad lines. Or it can devolve into lists of trees cut, taxes assessed, and mills constructed. Trying to get students to register for a forest history class, I feared, would be like trying to get them to sign up for voluntary root canals. The first two times I co-taught a forest history seminar, my co-instructors and I actually invented course titles that disguised the fact that we were teaching forest history. |
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Yet, for all that forest history bores people, forests themselves are much more interesting. Students care tremendously about deforestation, and anyone with even a casual interest in the environment can reel off depressing statistics about tropical deforestation's effects on biodiversity, poverty, and global warming. Students see forests as the loci for some of the worst environmental problems in the world today. Impressed by student concern about global deforestation, I agreed to teach a seminar in world forest history, curious to see if I could convince students (and myself) that forest history was a useful way of understanding the problems facing global forests. The seminar gave me the chance to reflect on the state of world forest history: what its strengths and weaknesses are, where it is going as a field, and why we ought to care. |
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In designing the course, I wanted to capture students' passionate concern about globalization's effects on forests, and I wanted to show them that a historical approach could lead to a better understanding of both the causes and the solutions to these problems. I had two core convictions at the heart of my understanding of world forest history. First, forests aren't just about trees; we need to look at environmental history's tripartite connections between the realms of economy, ecology, and culture to understand forest change. Second, forest history has real ramifications for policy decisions. As much as historians might want to stay separate from policy, foresters and policy makers use assumptions about history to make decisions, and historians should pay attention to that process. History matters: It's not just about understanding the past; it's necessary for creating a better future. |
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The obvious structure for a world forest history course would have been chronological, and the obvious textbook would have been Michael Williams's Deforesting the Earth, a stellar work that, as the title suggests, begins in prehistory and ends with the twentieth century.1 Williams's work had not yet come out in paperback, however, so it cost too much for me to assign. While initially frustrating, this turned out to be helpful since it allowed me to avoid a chronological structure. Such a structure is most familiar to professional historians, but I found that for students, it can limit their understanding of the patterns and processes that have affected deforestation across different time periods and regions. Instead, I structured the course thematically, focusing on the interconnections between nature, culture, and modes of production. |
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With two exceptions, the students in the seminar weren't historians or foresters (historians seem to think trees aren't interesting; foresters are too busy fulfilling technical requirements to think about social issues—and both these responses are revealing). Rather, they were seniors majoring in conservation biology or master's students in environmental studies or rural sociology. They already knew a fair bit about ecological processes of landscape change, so we didn't need to spend as much time on ecology as we would have if this had been a class of historians. Their understanding of history, culture, and social processes was less convincing; by and large, they believed history meant chronology and culture was irrelevant. |
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