Ecologies of the colonial present: Pathological forestry from the taux de boisement to civilized plantations

Abstract

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.

Plantations and pastoralists: afforestation activities make pastoralists in the Indian Himalaya vulnerable

“…India has been a global leader in implementing afforestation programs (Fleischman 2014, Davis andRobbins 2018) and thus its experience provides a model for looking at the effects of widespread afforestation that is being encouraged in other countries. Between 1950 and 2005 central government statistics reported afforestation of an area equivalent to 10% of India's land area, or just less than half of its total forest cover (Ravindranath et al 2007).…”

With Power Comes Responsibility – A Rangelands Perspective on Forest Landscape Restoration

“…One of the conspicuous features of the current FLR drives is the foregrounding of ambitious targets, which are mirrored in many national initiatives such as the National Mission for a Green India. Afforestation targets have a long history going back to colonial forestry in the 1800's, which served the dual aims of providing enough timber and supporting "civilization" by stabilizing climate, increasing rainfall and improving soil fertility in the tropical colonies (Davis, 2016;Davis and Robbins, 2018). This was epitomized by the concept of the taux de boisement normal -the percentage of forest cover in any territory required by a civilized nation, regardless of its climate or other biophysical characteristics.…”

“…This influential concept in French forestry of the late 1800's had its roots in desiccation theory, the notion that deforestation causes aridification and that reforestation increases rainfall, which had become widely accepted in Europe by the middle of the 19th century. Contemporary forest targets and their rationale (to mitigate climate and improve agricultural productivity) have changed remarkably little from their colonial origins (Davis and Robbins, 2018). They are now also based on the fallacy that a given amount of forest cover can store enough carbon to significantly mitigate climate change (e.g., Bastin et al, 2019a), a claim that has been widely refuted (e.g., Bond et al, 2019;Lewis et al, 2019;Veldman et al, 2019).…”

“…Despite this compelling win-win rhetoric of restoring ecological integrity, biodiversity and local livelihoods, the targetdriven global forest restoration initiatives reflect an enduring, target-driven colonial legacy of forest and resource governance, as well as the progressive commodification of nature and topdown planning driven by international development agencies, national governments and commercial interests (Fairhead et al, 2012, Davis andRobbins, 2018). From a rangelands perspective, two particular concerns stand out.…”

Fixing the ecosystem: Conservation, crisis and capital in Rwanda's Gishwati Forest

“…To accomplish this, LAFREC's Resettlement Policy Framework has proposed ''Significant investments in land use intensification would be offered to communities in return for restricting agriculture in the most vulnerable lands and establishing protection forests'' (World Bank, 2014: 7). As Davis and Robbins (2018) argue of tree planting in India, the afforestation program in Gishwati functions as a form of biopolitics that extends state control over territory. By apportioning households land in newly constructed terraced areas where they can practice intensive agriculture, LAFREC also dovetails with the Government of Rwanda's countrywide Crop Intensification Program (CIP), a core policy mechanism to transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture (MINAGRI, 2011).…”