| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.1

Book Review

In Search of the Rain Forest. Edited by Candace Slater. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. × + 318 pp. Index. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.
Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Edited by Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. xii + 428 pp. Notes, bibliography, list of contributors, index. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.
These two edited volumes extend critiques of nature and development raised in past works such as Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton, 1996) to the discursive terrain of rain forests and South and Southeast Asia.	1
In Search of the Rain Forest, like Uncommon Ground, is a product of a seminar held at the University of California, Irvine, where an interdisciplinary group including political ecologists, anthropologists, a historian, a forester, a literary theorist, and others explored rain forests as cultural places where science, tourism, and conservation practice are tied to changing ideas of nature both among locals and more globally. In the book's introduction, Slater explains the terms "icon" and "spectacle" as organizing principles for this dialogue. The chapters that follow are loosely organized around these concepts; the first part of the book deals with problems of representation and the second more with human projects to create, preserve, or rehabilitate rain forests as spectacles of wilderness.	2
Slater initiates this study on ideas of the rain forest by comparing media coverage of two devastating fires in a slash pine forest in Florida and the Amazon forest in Brazil. She shows how this common icon of forest life can be interpreted very differently and argues that the resulting southern bioscript to "save the rain forest" legitimizes calls for outside intervention and continuing antagonism against those who live and work in these places. This sets up a recurring theme in the book that points to contradictions, or "bio ironies" as Greenough terms them, in his essay on tiger conservation in Indian forests. One of the most globally poignant ironies in his essay is the connection between the creation of core zones in biosphere reserves and the subsequent rise in lawless activity—poaching, criminal gangs, narcotics trafficking, and illicit logging—in these centers. Alex Greene focuses on a form of cultural bio-irony where a native Chicagoan follows a Mayan healer and then claims to be his only protégé, opening a gift shop, consulting business, and tourist center to spread his medicines. Sawyer's essay on oil drilling addresses the more familiar northern grounds of subterranean appropriation (oil); but she shows how industry strategies such as "invisible pipelines" mask deeper social and economic injustices.	3
The final three essays in the volume read as an interesting twist on Cronon's now-classic critique of wilderness in Uncommon Ground. Greenough transposes the "problem of wilderness" to the core zones of biospheres, showing how the removal of people has led to increases in illicit activity within—narcotics trafficking, poaching, and evasion. Peluso's essay turns the notion of wilderness external to humans on its head by showing how the Indonesian state under Suharto reinvested colonial ideas of "wildness" into Dayak people to incite racial violence and ultimately lay claim to the island's rich forests. Similarly, Charles Zerner considers how popular media portrayals of viral outbreaks such as Ebola and AIDS create a more threatening interpretation of wilderness where African rain forest threatens to invade human bodies, especially in the United States.	4
As the subtitle in Nature in the Global South suggests, this edited volume contains a more disparate collection with apparent differences in scope and subject between those specialists studying South Asia and Southeast Asia. In spite of the conceptual challenges posed by crossing disciplinary and area specialties, this volume provides a number of fresh insights into the study of nature in southern environments. Warwick Anderson starts by arguing that what we believe we know to be "tropical" (and arguably southern) is actually a term that has gone through many revisions in the colonial past. He shows how ideas of racial and climatic typologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries played into northern (and local) ideas of the tropics; this was particularly evident in European and American colonies. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's "Agrarian Allegory and Global Futures" is a provocative and well-ordered review on the subject of peasants and tribes. She argues that the identification of subjects as tribe members or peasants reflects very different terms of access to resources in the eyes of the state. In Peluso's study of one such "tribe" in Kalimantan, the Dayaks are not only subject to specific kinds of state territorial claims in Kalimantan, but they also engage in their own forms of countermapping and laying nonterritorial claims to resources.	5
Other essays in this volume are more site-specific case studies that require the reader to have more familiarity with local geography and history; however, several of them illustrate important examples where northern environmentalism and development studies themselves are subject to scrutiny or rejection by people in the global South. Amita Baviskar's "Tribal Politics and Discourses of Indian Environmentalism" highlights important contradictions and conflicts that arose several years after urban activists working from an ecological Marxist model of environmental justice and sustainable development successfully organized tribal people in Madhya Pradesh through a trade union. The limitations of this form of environmentalism are exposed when a new tribal "middle class" forms and its leaders challenge the notion that viable development in the area must stay "close to nature." Susan Darlington also offers an example of a new conservation movement in Thailand with its origins in popular Buddhism and what she calls "radical conservatism." The recent trend of monks performing ordination rituals for individual trees suggests the comparative limitations of foreign environmental ideologies outside universities and foreign assistance projects in many southern communities.	6
What both works do well is to situate a set of ideas now very familiar to students of environmental studies in less familiar territory. Where books like Uncommon Ground sparked heated yet productive debates among academics that extended outward to policy makers and activists in the United States and Europe, it is not yet clear whether these new volumes can do the same service given so many different kinds of southern places and institutions. As accounts of a field trip to an environmental theme park in In Search of the Rainforest suggest, those of us who decide to situate our research sites in southern places often must reconcile ourselves to the fact that in the eyes of local people, even some of our southern colleagues, we are often seen as tourists since we have less of a stake in the outcomes of local decisions. Both volumes continue the process of eroding an intellectual complacency common to environmental movements in the late 1980s and potentially to northern environmental studies today.	7
David Biggs is an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of California, Riverside. He is currently working on a manuscript about water engineering and the hydraulic landscape of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. He teaches courses on environmental history, Southeast Asia, and Vietnam.

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