| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest. By Tamara Giles-Vernick. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. xiii + 293 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.50, paper $19.50.

In Cutting the Vines of the Past, Tamara Giles-Vernick reconstructs a century of Central Africa's environmental history largely through the memories of the Mpiemu, an ethnic group that inhabits the Central African Republic's Upper Sangha Basin. In order to systematize the imagery of reminiscence, Giles-Vernick aggregates her informants' individual recollections into an Mpiemu collective memory that clearly marks the past's crucial elements. In this case, where indigenous livelihoods have depended largely on natural resources, the historical markers inhabit particular places like villages, fields and, of course, forests. In a very powerful sense, this Mpiemu past still lives in the present, a phenomenon evident in the current discourses over forest conservation.

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