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ABSTRACT. Exploring both ecological and political-economic histories sheds light on the long-term effects of social and environmental changes. Wetlands provide an excellent context for examining the re-working of society-nature relations in a landscape over a long duration. Wetland conditions and social-ecological dynamics show changes rapidly and visibly because they are frequently re-engineered to account for changes in both technology and social preferences. Wetlands are subject to multiple, concurrent property and access regimes that have consequences for both management and ecosystem health. We discuss the social-natural history of the Scamandre Marshes in the western part of the Camargue Biosphere Reserve using a historical political ecology approach to analyze the shifting dynamics between power relations under a variety of political-economic arrangements, and the ecology of the marsh environment. The approach highlights how historical political ecology is a means of identifying historical socio-natures and how European or national conservation actors' constructions of a place as "natural" affect its use, conservation, and management. We show that contemporary ecological dynamics are best explained by past conflicts related to property claims, access to natural resources, and their effects on the flows and composition of water in the marsh. A general model of wetland transformation stresses repeated cycles of stability and upheaval, emphasizing that the lack of historical analysis threatens both wetlands and conflict resolution. No landscape is produced locally or ahistorically. We emphasize here that history is not only a hallmark of political ecology, but a way of understanding ecological changes that can help advance biodiversity conservation science and policy.

Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today. For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstrated failings in many environments, have flourished as an art of environmental governance that we term arboreal biopolitics. We trace some of the origins and importance of the taux de boisement in such plantation efforts, typically understood as a percentage of “appropriately” wooded land within a territory. Likely first developed in France by the early 19th century, this notion was operationalized in colonial territories assumed to be massively deforested. Targets of 30–33% forest cover, the minimum assumed for European civilization, were built into French forest training and policy and exported globally. Indeed, we demonstrate here that these French colonial policies and influences were as significant in many regions as those of better documented German forestry traditions, especially in African colonial territories and in British India. We further analyze the implications of these policies, and the degree to which the concept of a taux de boisement appears to have traveled to colonial forestry in India, further shaping forest policies of the postindependence era. We provide the example of the “National Mission for a Green India,” an effort by the Government of India to increase forest/tree cover by 5 million hectares and improve quality of forest cover on another 5 million hectares of forest/nonforest lands. Ostensibly aimed at improving forest-based livelihoods, the initiative has all the qualities of past forestry efforts in India, which have historically performed a reverse role: disinheriting forest-rooted populations. Colonial forestry, we therefore conclude, continues to haunt contemporary policy, contributing pathological ecologies, especially in the drylands, often with pernicious effects on local people.

Globally, protected areas have long been the corner stone of biodiversity conservation efforts. In India's Western Ghats, small and isolated protected areas are embedded in a matrix of multiple land-uses, most of which include agroforests. These agroforests are being increasingly recognized for their supplementary role in conserving wildlife. We examined bird species richness and densities in areca (Areca catechu), coffee (Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora) and rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) agroforests in the Western Ghats. We developed a priori hypotheses, predicting that bird species richness and guild density would be highest in coffee, followed by areca and rubber agroforests. We carried out 551 point-count surveys involving 386 hours of sampling in 187 agroforests across a 29,634 km 2 area of the Ghats. We observed 204 bird species, of which 170 were residents. The average estimated richness per agroforest was higher in coffee (60.5) compared to rubber (45.4) and areca (34.1). We modeled species richness as a function of relevant biogeographic and environmental covariates. The most influential factors were tree cover, tree density and rainfall in all agroforests, but the strength of these effects varied. Coffee supported higher densities in all four habitat and three feeding guilds compared to areca and rubber. We integrated extensive field sampling with modeling that accounted for imperfect detection, while assessing bird richness and densities across multiple agroforest types. We establish that coffee agroforests are substantially richer in birds than rubber and areca, but all three agroforests play an important role in providing subsidiary habitats for birds in the Ghats. Policy decisions and markets must incorporate such biodiversity values and services provided by these agroforests to sustain and facilitate long-term biodiversity conservation.

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