Pollini 2010 - Environmental degradation narratives in Madagascar: from colonial hegemonies to...

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attachedcopy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial researchand education use, including for instruction at the authors institution

and sharing with colleagues.

Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling orlicensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party

websites are prohibited.

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of thearticle (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website orinstitutional repository. Authors requiring further information

regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies areencouraged to visit:

http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Author's personal copy

Environmental degradation narratives in Madagascar: From colonial hegemoniesto humanist revisionism

Jacques Pollini *

Department of Politics and International Relations, Mills 303B, Hendrix College, Conway, AR 72032, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 4 March 2009Received in revised form 5 February 2010

Keywords:Land degradationDeforestationPolitical ecologyNatureDiscourse analysisMadagascar

a b s t r a c t

It is recurrently argued that political ecologists, by overlooking biophysical realities, misinterpret eco-logical interactions and underestimate environmental degradation. This article investigates the rele-vance of these critiques in the case of the Malagasy highlands. It is based on an analysis of threeenvironmental narratives: a narrative developed by European colonists at the beginning of the century;a ‘‘modern” narrative developed since the 1980s by combining data from paleobotanists, archeologistsand paleontologists; and a narrative developed more recently by political ecologists. I will show thatbiophysical realities were actually investigated by political ecologists in Madagascar, but that theirinterpretation differed from those of mainstream ecologists as a result of a different way of defining,characterizing and valuing the environment. With the aim of favoring a more comprehensive under-standing of environmental degradation in Madagascar, I will propose to clarify the epistemologicalframework of political ecology, and to bring an objective nature back into its scope of enquiry. Far fromweakening political ecology, this exercise will render the discipline more resistant to the counterattacksit has received, and more powerful for building a future that will answer to both social and environmen-tal challenges.

� 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Madagascar is a threatened biodiversity hotspot that hasattracted the attention of conservation biologists for several dec-ades (Myers et al., 2000). Its fauna and flora have an exceptionalrate of endemism, with archaic groups of plants and animals notrepresented elsewhere (Goodman and Benstead, 2003). Foreignbotanists who visited the island during the colonial1 periodpointed out the fast rate of forest clearing and vegetation degrada-tion (Perrier de la Bathie, 1921; Humbert, 1927). They attributed itmostly to traditional agriculture practices, such as slash-and-burncultivation, which they regarded as uneconomic and attempted toeliminate.

Subsequent efforts to slow deforestation were inconstant andinefficient, as a result of political instability, economic crises(Brown, 2000) and misguided coercive policies influenced by prej-udices (Bertrand and Sourdat, 1998; Kull, 2004). This overall failureof conservation efforts is still manifest today. An ambitious Na-

tional Environmental Plan was launched in 1991 and is still ongo-ing, with support from the World Bank and other aid agencies(World Bank, 2004). But after 15 years and a total expenditure of450 million USD, the plan failed to significantly reduce deforesta-tion and land degradation, while communities living around for-ested areas were negatively impacted (Pollini, 2007). A reductionof the deforestation rate was observed after 2000 (Ministère del’Environnement, des Forêts et du Tourisme, 2009), but can moreconvincingly be explained by a vigorous repression campaignagainst forest clearing and vegetation burning that the MalagasyGovernment, with support from aid agencies, conducted in 2002(Pollini, 2007).

In this context, controversy has arisen regarding the appropri-ateness of conservation strategies, particularly with regard to theirnegative social consequences. The claim that traditional land usehad provoked an environmental tragedy was also put into ques-tion, mostly by scholars from the field of political ecology. Thisarticle analyzes this second controversy in the case of the Malagasyhighlands. It attempts to answer the question: to what extent ishuman-induced environmental degradation in the Malagasy high-lands a reality or a myth? The purpose is to envision whether thecontroversy about environmental degradation can be settled, toquestion the legitimacy of various actors to proceed to this settle-ment, and to propose new directions for future advancement inpolitical ecology.

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.04.001

* Tel.: +1 501 505 15 64.E-mail address: [email protected]

1 For convenience, I will restrict the use of the term colonialism to the Europeancolonization, although early Arab settlements and the subjection of minority groupsto dominant ones (such as the Merina conquest) are also forms of colonization.

Geoforum 41 (2010) 711–722

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate /geoforum


The paper will start with a critical examination of three envi-ronmental discourses or narratives2 that have been developed inMadagascar. First is a narrative, constructed by European colonists,according to which Madagascar was an ‘‘evergreen forest paradise”in a process of destruction since human settlement, as a result ofunsustainable traditional land uses. Second is a more recent narra-tive developed by paleobotanists, archeologists and paleontologists,according to which the original vegetation was a mosaic of forests,savannas and grassland whose transformation could have humanand non-human causes. Third is a narrative proposed by politicalecologists and anthropologists. It is opposed to the colonial narra-tive, and its articulation with the paleobotanical narrative is some-times ambiguous. It considers environmental degradation to be inlarge part a myth and views the Malagasy ecosystems as changingrather than degrading (strong version). Or, if they have degraded sig-nificantly, the cause is unwise policies that create conflicts over re-sources, rather than traditional land uses (soft version).

These narratives will be discussed and synthesized in order todraw a more comprehensive picture of environmental changes inthe Malagasy highlands and of the discourses associated with thesechanges. I will show that the political ecology narrative encouragesa revisionist interpretation of environmental change that wasuseful for reviving concerns about the social dimension of environ-mental changes, but that may be as detrimental to the understand-ing of ecological processes as the colonial narrative it challenges. Iwill argue that future progress could be achieved by joining theoutcomes of the three narratives and by confronting the concep-tual frameworks of the disciplines that sustain them, particularlywith regard to the meaning of the word ‘‘nature.”

2. Materials and methods

The empirical material which is studied in this article consistsof discourses elaborated by various actors tackling the issue ofdeforestation in Madagascar. Discourses are real, as are the situa-tions they attempt to depict. As for any reality, discourses cannotbe known (Popper, 1963; Bhaskar, 1978) but can be empirically ap-proached by the study of their manifestations, which can bespeeches, written documents and field activities implemented bythe institutions that carry them. I had the chance to directly expe-rience environmental discourses and the situations they depictduring the four years I spent in Madagascar, as a PhD candidatestudying the causes of deforestation (from 2001 to 2003), and asa technical advisor in forestry at the Malagasy Ministry of Environ-ment, Water and Forest (from 2004 to 2006).

Discourses will be analyzed using a method inspired by thecomplementary works of Latour (1987) and Foucault (1969,1970), which focus on agency and structures as determinant of dis-courses, respectively. Latour’s (1987) analysis of ‘‘science in themaking” enables one to disentangle the networks of actors, humanor non-human, within which knowledge emerges, while Foucault’s‘‘archeology of knowledge” allows one to travel within the inter-stices of discourses, and to identify their domains of exclusionand the common denominators upon which actors construct theirrepresentations. But to the contrary of the views that prevail in so-cial-constructionism and post-modernism, two intellectual move-ments highly influenced by these authors, I believe that thisexercise gains part of its legitimacy from the opportunity it givesto produce less subjective knowledge, through the debunking ofbiases introduced by strong social networks and pre-existing dis-cursive structures. In other words, I explicitly adopt a critical real-

ist epistemology (Popper, 1963; Bhaskar, 1978). In contrast withinfluential statements made by Foucault and Latour, I believe thatthe real world can unfold its signs under the eyes of the observer3

and that nature4 is one of the causes of the settlement of scientificcontroversies.5 The challenge of scientists is thus to listen to whatthe world tells them while maintaining distance from the forces thatdetour them from this listening.

3. Results

3.1. The colonial narrative

Scientific investigation of environmental degradation in Mad-agascar started at the turn of the 20th century, during theFrench protectorate. A Forestry Mission was sent by the FrenchMinistry of Agriculture in 1896 (Lavauden, 1934). Its objectiveswere to assess the forest resources and to prepare legislationthat would organize forest product extraction and create a ForestService (Ramanantsoavina, no date). Two forest decrees were is-sued, in 1900 and 1913, but the legislation was not significantlyenforced until a strengthening of forest services occurred, in the1930s.

Botanists influenced the elaboration of the legislation by con-ducting more thorough ecological studies. Perrier de la Bathie(1921) estimated that 200,000 hectares of forest were clearedevery year for cultivation or for establishing pastures. He arguedthat almost all the dominant species of the highlands were adaptedto fires, with a capacity to reproduce vegetatively by their under-ground parts or sexually by producing seeds under a short cycle.Humbert (1927) renewed the arguments. He toured the countryextensively, making a wealth of empirical observations about thesoil, the vegetation and their transformations. He asserted thatnine-tenths of the land was covered by degraded vegetation,mostly young fallows, savannas and grasslands of anthropogenicorigin. He elaborated the picture of an island that was completelycovered by forest, woodland or bush-land before the arrivals of hu-mans, except for swampy lands with poor drainage (Humbert,1949). He attributed vegetation change to bush fires, slash-and-burn agriculture, and abusive resource extraction. His argumentswere mostly based on the sciences of phytogeography and commu-nity ecology. He noticed that grasslands and savannahs were dom-inated by a very small number of cosmopolitan grasses, in sharpcontrast with the remaining primary ecosystem whose biodiver-sity was exceptionally elevated. He observed, in most regions ofthe highlands, forest patches whose dimension was progressivelyreduced by uncontrolled bush fires and which grew in ageomorphologic and climatic context similar to those that prevailin grasslands. As a remedy for environmental degradation, he rec-ommended the creation of a strong forest service and the estab-lishment of protected areas.

In 1928, Lavauden was appointed the new Chief of the ForestService, in charge of modernizing the forest administration andissuing new legislation. He criticized local administrators who,more aware of the rural realities, adopted flexible approaches

2 I will use the term ‘‘discourse” to refer to abstract entities such as systems of ideasthat pervade within knowledge and practices, and the term ‘‘narrative” to refer to thetelling of stories that are the concrete manifestations of discourses.

3 Foucault, to the contrary, asserted that ‘‘we should not expect the world to showus a readable image that we need only to decipher. It is not an accomplice of ourknowledge” (Foucault, 1970, p. 55). Original text in French: Il ne faut pas ‘‘s’imaginerque le monde tourne vers nous une image lisible que nous n’aurions plus qu’àdéchiffrer. Il n’est pas complice de notre connaissance.”

4 I use the term nature to name the world that is not the outcome of human agency,by opposition to the cultural world. I assume that the natural and cultural realmshave to be distinguished and characterized as a prerequisite to understanding theway they are linked to each other.

5 For Latour, ‘‘we can never use the outcome – Nature – to explain how and why acontroversy has been settled” (Latour, 1987, p. 99).

712 J. Pollini / Geoforum 41 (2010) 711–722


and contested the rules designed by the central administration(Lavauden, 1934). He proposed that Madagascar had only twobotanical regions, the oriental region covered by evergreen forestsand the occidental region covered by deciduous forests. He arguedthat evergreen forests extended across the whole island before theuplands were deforested, giving Madagascar a uniform forest cover(Bertrand and Sourdat, 1998). This created the myth of a lost ever-green forest paradise that became instrumental for justifying therepression of traditional land uses, and that still influences envi-ronmental policies today.6

The third forest decree, issued in 1930, illustrates this instru-mentalization. It put a ban on any vegetation fire, except pasturefires in certain conditions, and condemned forest clearing. Thisban was seldom enforced because of the lack of forest guardsand infrastructure, but was accompanied by the granting of landto foreigners. This created, among Malagasy people, the fear thatthe forest would be taken to them. Dispossessed communitiesceased to take care of forests and sometimes burnt them as away to dispute state or foreign appropriation. Parrot (1925, in Ber-trand and Sourdat, 1998, p. 30) gives an example that illustratesthis situation. In the Antsirabe region,

the most exalted indigenous people declared that it was betterto destroy the neighboring woods than to see them fall into thehands of others. They ignited fires secretly and thousands ofhectares of beautiful forests disappeared in a few weeks. Assoon as they belonged to the state, they were no longerprotected.

Kull (2004) analyzed in depth the resistance to the ban over for-est clearing. He showed that the persistence of the colonial narra-tive transformed the fire problem from an ecological issue into apolitical one. Fires became the main weapon of the peasant’s‘‘everyday form of resistance” (Scott, 1985), in addition to beingan agricultural tool. Despite this resistance, land and natural re-sources were captured by colonists and their clientele. Forestswere intensively logged and the most fertile land was granted toforeign investors, which pushed families of farmers to the forestfrontier (Jarosz, 1993), where they could access new land to thedetriment of old growth forests. In sum, the colonial power mayhave exaggerated the environmental degradation narrative. Itwas probably motivated to do so by its willingness to take controlover the Malagasy people and their resources. The consequencemay have been an acceleration of degradation by the ignition ofprotest fires and by the clearing of more forests on the agriculturalfrontier.

The exaggeration and instrumentalization of the colonial narra-tive, however, does not imply that environmental degradation byhumans was not real and significant, even before European settle-ment. First, fires may have been a weapon in the far past as well.Hunting and gathering groups could have ignited them to resistsubjection by agricultural societies. People from minority groupsmay have used them to resist subjection by dominant groups suchas the Merina, who conquered the whole island in the early 19thcentury. Second, fire used as an agricultural tool may also have asignificant impact on the environment, especially when ignitedon a large-scale to facilitate hunting or to develop extensive animalhusbandry. As we will see in the next section, recent researchshowed that the ancient Malagasy environment was not totallyforested, but did not contradict the fact that human activities pro-voked a large-scale change toward ecosystems with much lowerbiomass and biodiversity.

3.2. The ‘‘modern” narrative

Paleobotanical studies, coupled with archeological and paleon-tological investigations, challenged the ‘‘continuous forest”hypothesis (Burney, 1987a) of Perier de la Bathie and Humbert, en-abling us to draw a more precise picture of the Malagasy ancientenvironment and its transformation by humans. These studiesdid not suffice, however, to accurately reconstitute ancient land-scapes, as pollen spectra contain only pollen dispersed by wind.There is still much uncertainty, for example, about the density oftrees and shrubs in savannahs, about whether ancient forests7 orwoodlands had a closed canopy or not, and about the relative coverof each ecosystem. But paleobotanical studies showed that some epi-sodes of conversion of forests into grassland occurred in pre-settle-ment time, leading to rejection of the colonial vision of a totallyforested island.

According to the analysis of pollen and charcoal deposits con-ducted since the 1980s, the Malagasy highlands were subject sinceancient time to natural fires regimes, with episodes of burningaccompanied by an increase of grass pollen and a decrease of treepollen (Burney, 1987b,c). These fires may have been provoked bylightning, volcanic activities, extended droughts or other naturalcauses. During the middle Holocene era, charcoal deposits wereeven greater than those that occurred after the arrival of humans,in two sites of the highlands as well as in a site of northern Mad-agascar (Burney, 1987b,c). A pollen spectrum established at LakeTritrivakely, in the central highlands, shows levels of grass pollenin pre-settlement time similar to those encountered in presenttime (Burney, 1987c). Charcoal deposits in sediments decreasedat this same site later on, between 4000 BP and 2000 BP, whilegrass pollen decreased and tree pollen increased, revealing lowerfire intensity and/or frequency. In consequence of this complex his-tory, the highland natural vegetation was a mosaic of savannah,grassland and forest two thousand years ago, prior to human set-tlement (MacPhee et al., 1985; Burney, 1987a). Near Antananarivo,hills were ‘‘covered with a gentle patchwork of woodland, bush-land, and grassland, bounded by riparian forests along streamsand punctuated by dense forests on the seasonally wet valleyplains” (Burney, 2003). Grasslands were indeed an important fea-ture of the Malagasy landscapes since at least the late Miocene(Bond et al., 2008).

Beside these evidences of grassland expansion having noanthropogenic cause, pollen spectra also confirmed the strong im-pact of anthropogenic fires on vegetation. They showed that firesincreased beginning with the second century AD on the west coast(Burney, 1999), and since the seventh century in the central high-land (Burney, 1997; Wright and Rakotoarisoa, 1997), which is afterthe arrival of the first humans at least in the case of the coastalsites (Wright and Rakotoarisoa, 1997). These fires provoked anextension of grasslands and a decrease of forest cover, as shownby an increase of Gramineae pollen and a decrease of tree pollenin all available spectra. Charcoal sediments, however, neverreached the level they had in the middle Holocene (Burney,1987a,c), which can be explained by a different fire regime result-ing in a lack of burning material.

This correlation is not a proof of causal relation between humansettlement and the change of fire regimes. Such a causal relation, orits denial, can only be speculated on, and new studies are pub-

6 The interpretation of Lavauden’s texts by Bertrand and Sourdat (1998) wasdisputed by one of the peer reviewers. I was not able to purchase the source to verify,but observed, during the years I spent in Madagascar, that the myth of a lostevergreen paradise is still influential among decision-makers and conservation actors.

7 By forest, I mean vegetation dominated by trees that form a close canopy (such asthe Ambohitantely Forest and the Manjakatompo Forest, both in the highlands). I willuse the term ‘‘woodland” when trees do not form a closed canopy but are denseenough to limit the expansion of grassland (such as the tapia woodlands). The term‘‘savanna” will refer to grasslands with a few scattered trees, and the term ‘‘steppe” tograssland with no woody vegetation.

J. Pollini / Geoforum 41 (2010) 711–722 713


lished almost every year that show that pre-settlement landscapeswere more diverse and complex than expected.8 But beyond theseregional variations, the most plausible theory remains that of signif-icant anthropogenic transformation. According to a recent synthesis(Burney et al., 2004), paleontologists showed that ‘‘most if not all theextinct taxa [of the Malagasy megafauna] were still present on theisland when humans arrived” (Burney et al., 2004, p. 25), and that‘‘large mammal biomass decreased sharply within a few centuriesof first evidence of humans in the locality” (ibid., p. 41). New fire re-gimes emerged ‘‘immediately following this ecological collapse”(ibid), leading to the formation of less productive systems, includingdepauperate steppes (ibid). The disappearance of herbivores, ratherthan the change of fire regimes by humans, could explain these veg-etation transformations, although human settlement remains plausi-bly the trigger of these changes.

Permanent settlement in Madagascar developed during theearly second millennium, due to the establishment by Arabs of abroad trade network across the Indian Ocean (Radimilahy, 1997;Wright and Rakotoarisoa, 2003). The first known major city, Mah-ilaka, was a port established in the Ampasindava Bay in 1150 AD(Radimilahy, 1997), on the northwest cost. Wright and Burney(1993 in Radimilahy, 1997) showed that arboreal pollen decreasedsignificantly during this period while grass and shrub pollen andcharcoal sediments increased. But arboreal pollen became abun-dant again after the abandonment of the settlement, around1400 AD, making a stronger case for the anthropogenic characterof non-forest vegetation.

Concerning the central highlands, the first permanent villagesappeared in the early 13th century (Wright and Rakotoarisoa,1997, 2003). Settlement was preceded or accompanied by an in-crease of fire frequency and the extension of grasslands, as shownby a new increase of charcoal sediment and grass pollen during the12th century. Pollen of castor bean (Ricinus communis L.9), a com-mensal plant found in disturbed areas near villages, also appearedduring this period (Burney, 1987a). Groups of people settled arounda cluster of lakes and marshes, close to the present capital, Antanan-arivo. They developed irrigated rice cultivation and raised cattle(Wright and Rakotoarisoa, 1997), producing a surplus, which madepossible the formation of an organized hierarchical society and a tri-pling of the highland population between the 15th and 18th centu-ries (Ibid.). This led to the creation of the Merina Kingdom, whichbecame dominant and conquered most of the island during the19th century.

As a result of this prosperity, the whole central highlands werealmost completely deforested and transformed into grasslandbeginning in the mid-18th century (Ibid.). Warfare may haveplayed a role in this transformation, as denuded land facilitatedthe displacement of armies and control over territory. Large forti-fied bastions appeared in the 18th century and the frontier wasrepeatedly moved outward (Ibid.), which extended the scope ofdeforestation. The expansion of grassland, however, was some-times reversed. Gramineae pollen and charcoal deposits decreasedagain in a highland site about 500 years ago (Burney, 1987a),showing that a relative environmental recovery may have occurredon land deforested in the far past.

The significant impact of humans on the Malagasy environmentthus can hardly be disputed, even if no definitive demonstration ofthis causal relation can be made. This is not to say that non-anthro-pogenic causes did not play a role. The Mahafaly plateau, forexample, has an extinct fauna of aquatic vertebrate whose disap-

pearance occurred before evidence of human settlement and canbe explained by climatic changes.10 Bond et al. (2008) suggest thatgrasslands became more widespread in Madagascar after the lateMiocene, a period that witnessed a world wide expansion of C4grassy biomes. It is also quite certain that climate aridification,which started before human settlement (Burney, 1997), favoredthe expansion of grasslands, acting in synergy with anthropogenicfires. It remains impossible to determine the relative weight ofanthropogenic and non-anthropogenic causes of landscape transfor-mations, but a flora adapted to arid conditions exists in Madagascarand could have moved to desiccated regions, if natural causes hadacted alone. The fact that a decreasing fire frequency or the abandon-ment of settlement leads to the development of woody vegetation ongrasslands (case of Mahilaka) also argues in favor of a predominantlyanthropogenic degradation. Elmqvist et al. (2007) documented sim-ilar dynamics in arid Southern Madagascar. They showed that signif-icant forest regeneration can occur even in dry areas as aconsequence of outmigration, decreasing population density, or landuse change.

In sum, in light of the empirical data reviewed in this section,saying that the magnitude of environmental changes in Madagas-car significantly increased as a consequence of human settlementappears to be a more reasonable assumption than saying that itdid not. And as the direction of these changes was toward less for-est cover and less biodiversity, with entire taxonomic groups goingextinct and entire biota being depauperated, these transformationscan reasonably be qualified using the subjective concept of envi-ronmental degradation. Forests encountered in the Malagasy high-lands today can be regarded as degraded remnants, from anecological standpoint.

3.3. The political ecology narrative

The work of Christian Kull (1996, 2000, 2004) initiated a seriesof studies that disentangled the links between politics and science,or between power and knowledge, and provided additional evi-dence against the colonial myth of a pre-settlement forest para-dise. This section will present the insights of Kull’s work withregard to the reality and the causes of environmental degradation.It will then introduce a more recent study (Klein, 2004), also con-ducted in the Malagasy highlands, which gave a more radical shapeto Kull’s narrative. It will show that these scholars may encourage,if not explicitly adopt, a revisionist interpretation of environmentalchanges. By revisionism, I mean a new interpretation of reality thatis less consistent with the available empirical observations thanthe interpretation it challenges. Revisionism must not be confusedwith the paradigmatic shifts that accompany scientific revolutions,as in the later case new empirical observations lead to theconstruction of new theories which are more consistent withobservations.

3.3.1. Kull’s analysis of the tapia woodlandsKull’s (2004) research focused on a few sites investigated in de-

tail, using aerial photographs and ancient records composed byearly travelers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Kull showed,for instance, that the area covered by tapia11 woodlands at the Coldes Tapia (on the road between Antsirabe and Ambositra) did not de-crease during the last century, to the contrary of the widespread re-ceived wisdoms that current management by local people isdestructive to forests. These conclusions can be paralleled with theoutcomes of research conducted in West Africa using similar meth-ods (Fairhead and Leach, 1996, 1998). It appears clear, in light of

8 See, for example, the recent study by Virah-Samvy (2009), which showed that thefragmented character of forests in southern Madagascar is a natural, rather thananthropogenic, pattern.

9 Euphorbiaceae.

10 Information provided by a peer reviewer; reference not found in the literature.11 Uapaca bojeri Baill. (Euphorbiaceae), a fire-resistant tree.



these studies, that findings about environmental degradation duringthe past century were instrumentalized, and often exaggerated, bycolonial and post-colonial authorities who blamed indigenous peo-ple in order to assert power over them.

But Kull (2004) and Fairhead and Leach (1996, 1998) limitedtheir analysis to the past century. They based their work on thestudy of aerial photographs and other recent records. Hence thecolonial assertions that the vegetation of their study area mostlyconsisted of forest and that local land uses led to large-scale defor-estation are not contradicted by their observations. Kull is awarethat his data concern only the last century. He acknowledges therecent outcomes of archeologists and paleobotanists, which hesummarizes in the following way:

The pre-settlement highlands were a dynamic mosaic of grass-lands, savanna, heath, woodland and riparian forests, shaped bya natural fires regime, grazing megafauna, and climate fluctua-tion. As humans arrived, their fires, set to clear land for pasture,agriculture and hunting, removed most woody vegetation. Thetapia woodlands, found on certain soil types, were preservedbecause of their economic value and fire-ecological characteris-tics. Thus, the tapia woodlands should be seen as an anthropo-genic forest, shaped through a complex history to meet localsubsistence and economic needs. (Kull, 2004, p. 143)

This narrative, as we saw, refutes the colonial assertion thatMadagascar was totally forested prior to human settlement, butdoes not refute the idea that humans deforested the land and de-graded the Malagasy environment. But Kull sometimes tends toslide from the first to the second refutation in his conclusion. Bydoing so, he creates an ambiguity that may lead to misinterpreta-tion of his work. This can be illustrated by the conclusion of hischapter about the tapia forests:

the antifire received wisdom sees the tapia woodlands as‘degraded remnants’ of diverse prehuman forests, reduced byincessant burning to a fire-tolerant species that coincidentallyhad economic value to the locals. In contrast, I have argued . . .

that fire is a key management tool used by rural Malagasy inthe management of these woodlands, specifically for theirlivelihood goals tied to artisanal crafts in wild silk, trade in fruit,firewood supply, and food supplements. (Kull, 2004, p. 144)

Or, put differently:

Madagascar is well known for deforestation. However, ‘‘tapia”. . . woodlands may present a counterexample of indigenousmanagement leading to woodland conservation. Contrary tocommon wisdom that these woodlands are degraded, tapiawoodland extent and composition have seen little change thiscentury. (Kull, 2002, p. 95)

These citations contrast a narrative that relates to long-termchange on a continental scale (the ‘‘degraded remnant” thesis),with a new narrative that argues that tapia woodlands were trans-formed rather than degraded during the 20th century (the periodstudied by Kull). These narratives do not contradict, indeed donot even contrast, each other. The outcome of using fire as a man-agement tool can be precisely the transformation of prehuman for-ests into degraded remnants, from an ecological standpoint.12

Hence the tapia forest can be the outcome of a deforestation processthat was simply not pushed as far as to transform forests into grass-

lands. In another passage, Kull (Ibid., p. 132) contrasts the thesis ofGirod-Genet (1898), who ‘‘considered tapia forests as a sign of previ-ously grander forests,” with ‘‘evidence from the Col des Tapia area[that] suggests that woodland extent and composition saw littlechange from the 20th century” (Kull, 2004, p. 132). In this case aswell, the two views are not necessarily contradictory, as they referto different temporal scales.

In sum, Kull (2004) remains reluctant to see tapia woodlands as‘‘degraded remnants” in spite of his adoption of the modern narra-tive developed by paleobotanists. Kull, however, explicitlyacknowledges that

degradation – in the strict ecological sense of reduced speciesdiversity, thinning vegetal cover and undergrowth, and exploi-tation that changes the character of the woodland from itspre-settlement state – cannot be denied. (Kull, 2004, p. 118)

But he tends to fuse the ecological and cultural dimensions ofthe tapia forests in several passages, for reasons that we will ana-lyze in the next section. In the abstract of his article, for example,he states that ‘‘the creation and maintenance of the woodlandsshould not be seen as ‘degradation,’ but rather as a creative ‘trans-formation’” (Kull, 2002, p. 95). As the term ‘‘degradation” is com-monly employed to refer to ecological processes, and as Kull doesnot explicitly mention that he gives a different meaning to thisterm, his formulation can be misinterpreted and lead to ecologicalrevisionism, even if Kull himself did not adopt a revisionist stance.The same problem occurs with the work of Fairhead and Leach,which is often cited as showing that deforestation in West Africais a myth, whereas, like Kull, Fairhead and Leach only studied re-cent history in a few specific locations, and focused on the culturalvalues of the ecosystems.

3.3.2. Klein’s analysis of the Ambohitantely forest13

Klein (2002, 2004, 2007) analyzed the implementation of con-servation policies in the Ambohitantely reserve, which protectsone the last forest patches in the Malagasy highland.14 He arguesagainst the dominant environmental narrative in a way that is quitesimilar to Kull’s (2004). He challenges the idea that the countrywould have been ‘‘totally forested by the time of human arrival”(Klein, 2002, p. 191) and would be a ‘‘frightening example of the con-sequences of deforestation,” (ibid.) with its ‘‘red soils and erosiongullies” (ibid.). He justifies the rejection of these narratives by a par-adigmatic change that consists in a shift from equilibrium to non-equilibrium models in ecology. He explains by an ‘‘informationalindolence” (ibid., p. 196) the slow transfer of this new ecology intomainstream discourses.

But Klein targets a discourse that is increasingly marginal in sci-entific publications, even if it is still influential in decision-makingarenas. The myth of more or less dense forests covering the wholeisland has now been almost abandoned, in light of the latest arche-ology and paleobotanical results reviewed in the previous section.The figure of an 80% deforestation rate has been replaced by thefigure of an 80% conversion of natural ecosystems into anthropo-genic ecosystems. This new figure, which does not contradictlarge-scale deforestation and the formation of ‘‘red soils and ero-sion gullies,” is the one that now has to be put at the core of scien-tific debates. It prevails, for example, in the natural history ofMadagascar recently edited by Goodman and Benstead (2003).And it is strengthened by new empirical observations, such asPareliussen et al.’s (2006) finding that the Ambohitely forest has

12 According to a peer reviewer, the density of Uapaca at the Col de tapia isremarkably similar to that at the Ambohitantely forest, which has a closed canopy.The tapia woodlands studied by Kull could thus have been a forest with closed canopyin the far past, with only the tapia trees surviving a period of frequent fires.

13 Simsik (2002) developed an analysis similar to that of Klein about theAmbohitantely forest, but his work will not be studied here.

14 This forest is located close to Ankazobe, northwest from Antananarivo. SeeLangrand (2003), and Ratsirarson et al. (2003) for more details about this reserve.



the capacity to regenerate and expand from its edges in the ab-sence of frequent fires.

4. Discussion

4.1. The causes of dissonance

The tendency toward revisionism of political ecologists, in theirinterpretation of empirical facts, may result from the adoption ofdifferent values. It is not always clear, for example, whether Kullattributes the term ‘‘degradation” to the ecological or the economicdimension of the forest, or to both. We saw that Kull explicitlyacknowledges the reality of ecological degradation, but his writingoften tends to conflate the ecological and social dimension of eco-systems and to minimize the importance of the former over thelatter, which creates ambiguity when he challenges the degrada-tion narrative. Certainly, cultural, social, and economic dimensionsall deserve attention, and Kull’s work has the great merit ofshowing the mistakes toward which policy makers are directed ifthey overlook them. But by confusing or conflating the naturaland cultural dimensions of tapia woodlands, Kull may have endedby merely considering them as modified ecosystems, as shownby his case for using the term ‘‘transformation” instead of‘‘degradation.”

In a more recent paper, Kull (2008) is explicit about the fact thathe is interested in the human dimension of landscapes. He regretsthat an implicit picture of devastated grasslands led to overlookingthe richness and diversity of landscapes in the Malagasy highland. Ishare with him these concerns. But valuing cultural landscapesshould not lead to overlooking the ecological degradation that gavebirth to these landscapes. If a landscape is to retain its cultural andeconomic values, it also has to ‘‘work”, i.e., to be a successful adap-tation to biophysical realities. This success depends on the objec-tive structures and processes of the natural world, rather than onsubjective values attributed by humans and that may fail as wellas succeed in accounting for these structures and processes. Kulldoes not consider these issues satisfactorily, as shown by the fol-lowing ambiguous statements:

Implicit in some conservation discussions of the region . . . is animportant critique of the loss of natural environment, or a con-cern over environmental degradation wrought by the tantsa-ha’s15 landscape manipulations. Yet to the tantsaha, many ofthese changes are positive. (Kull, 2008)

The perspectives of conservationists and tantsaha, as expressedin this excerpt, do not contradict each other, as they refer to differ-ent aspects of the reality: whether some ecological functions arelost, and whether some desired goods are produced, respectively.They may appear to be at odds, but only if no distinction is madebetween concerns about how the world works on the one hand(how to achieve certain functions whose necessity results fromobjective structures and processes of the natural world) and con-cerns about what world is desired on the other (how to be consis-tent with a particular set of values produced by culture). Obviously,biophysical scientists being given the legitimacy to explain howthe world works are granted an undue power to satisfy theirown particular desires, if politics corrupts their practice of science,which it does often to a certain extent.16 But this does not changethe fact that knowledge about how the world works has to be pro-duced, and that some people, not necessarily the scientists alone,have to be in charge of producing this knowledge, in addition to ef-

forts to define and negotiate which desires have to be fulfilled. Inthe filigree of Kull’s book may be, indeed, a lack of distinction be-tween questions about how the world works and questions abouthow the world is perceived and what world is desired, i.e., betweenontological and epistemological questions, or between the naturaland cultural dimension of environmental transformation. Thisshortage may be the consequence of the absence of nature as anontological category distinct from its representation, because ofthe adoption of a social-constructivist stance. This absence leadsto overlooking the main justifications of conservation: the preser-vation of some nature. Kull is right to say that ‘‘lands could be‘saved’ not only by protected areas, but also by spades” (Kull,2008, p. 130). But it is not the same lands, nor the same thingsupon these lands, that would be saved in both cases. Nor wouldthe same objectives be achieved, between adapting to naturalnecessities and satisfying particular desires.

This conflation of cultural and ecological issues is indeed a keyfeature of an important trend in political ecology that ‘‘fuses ontol-ogy and epistemology through the belief that what can be known isprefigured in part by social, political and historical conditions”(Turner II and Robbins, 2008, p. 301). This stance17 is highly prob-lematic because it justifies a highly counter-intuitive model (the fu-sion of epistemology and ontology, whose corollaries may be thefusion of realities and knowledge about realities, and of nature andculture) on the grounds of a quite indisputable statement (the factthat knowledge is partly prefigured by social, political and historicalconditions). Epistemology and ontology are obviously linked, just asare realities and their representations. Knowledge is about beings,representations are about realities, and culture originates from nat-ure, which makes these pairs inseparable. But the term ‘‘fusion” im-plies much more than this non-separation. Merging ontology andepistemology can lead us to not knowing whether we talk aboutthe real world or about knowledge regarding the real world. Andby merging nature and culture, we may end in not distinguishingclearly, as in some excerpts of Kull, between the objective attributesof the world (which existed even before there were any humans) andits subjective attributes (which are culturally constituted).

This trend in political ecology can be explained by the stronginfluence18 of the work of Bruno Latour (1987, 1993, 1999), whoexplicitly called for putting an end to the distinction between natureand culture, and between nature and its representation. The tapiawoodlands and the Ambohitantely forest are, to use the words of La-tour (1993), hybrids of human and non-human objects, which wouldjustify abandoning the distinction between nature and culture whenanalyzing them. I would argue, to the contrary, that this hybrid char-acter is precisely the reason why that distinction should remain. TheMalagasy landscapes have a social and a biological dimension thatmust be conceptually distinguished if their links are to be under-stood, just as with understanding any system made of several ele-ments. If not, key ontological distinctions (such as betweeneconomy and ecology, desires and necessities, culture and nature)may disappear, the analytical framework may be weakened, andinterpretations may lose accuracy and clarity.

15 Highland farmers or herders.16 I refer to politics in the large sense, which includes the politics of having a

successful academic career.

17 The alternative to this stance is to abandon social constructivism, of post-socialconstructivism (the approaches derived from Latour’s most recent work), in favor ofcritical realism [by adopting the epistemology developed by Popper (1963) andBhaskar (1978)]. I believe, based on my personal and probably biased readings in thefield, that this second trend in political ecology is less influential. Latour and Harawayare much more widely cited than Popper, Bhaskar, or other critical realists, and theconflation of nature and its representation, which leads to the disappearance ofnature as an ontological domain, is still widespread, whereas it is a heresy for criticalrealists.

18 Several textbooks or other influential texts in political ecology (Braun andCastree, 1998; Robbins, 2004; Forsyth, 2003) include sections dedicated to the workof Latour.



Besides the influence of Bruno Latour, political ecology narra-tives may also be biased by an overemphasis on non-equilibriumecological models and the more or less implicit rejection of equi-librium models. It is true that ecosystems are much less stablethan was thought at the time of colonial botanists. Humbertand Perrier de la Bâthie conceived of ecosystems as being in asteady-state in the absence of human disturbance, which ledthe colonial administration to develop its vision of a closed forestcovering the whole island. This vision was refuted by the work ofpaleobotanists, who demonstrated that very significant changesoccurred during the millennia that preceded human settlement.But the notion of change is not antagonistic to the notion of equi-librium. Ecosystems can be in a dynamic equilibrium, in whichcase community composition adjusts to the progressive modifica-tion of abiotic variables. Moreover, equilibrium and non-equilib-rium models may be two facets of the same realities, and thetendency of modern ecology is to unify these two supposed par-adigms (Hubbell, 2001; Chase and Leibold, 2003). By overlyemphasizing non-equilibrium models, political ecologists wouldrisk missing one side of the coin, mirroring the attitude of earlybotanists who missed the other side. This could lead them to con-sider that the significance of environmental changes depends onlyon the meanings that humans give to ancient and new land-scapes. But the functioning of ecosystems does not depend onthe meanings given to them. Nature can give feedback to errone-ous human choices, such as what occurs when the fields of Mal-agasy farmers are flooded by heavy rains falling on barelandscapes. The emphasis on a non-equilibrium model may in-deed be a side effect of the conflation of nature and culture, ofthe rejection of an objective nature that would dictate normativebehaviors to human societies willing to adapt to their naturalenvironment.

4.2. Ecological revisionism?

These objections to the way political ecologists address bio-physical aspects of environmental changes are not isolated. Theyresonate, for example, with the position taken by Vayda and Walt-ers (1999), who argued that some political ecologists elaborate ‘‘apolitics without ecology,” and with the attempt of Walker (2005)to clarify this debate. The term ‘‘revisionism,” which implies thatecological issues are misinterpreted rather than overlooked, has al-ready been used. I borrowed it from scholars with whom I ex-changed ideas in Madagascar,19 and subsequently found it in theliterature in association with arguments similar to those developedin this article. Kaufmann (2006), for instance, accepts that the dra-matic figures of deforestation and land degradation described bybiologists, such as the estimation by Du Puy and Moat (1996) that10% of the initial natural vegetation cover remains on the island,has led to a view of humans as the enemies of nature and to exces-sively repressive environmental policies. But Kaufmann also criti-cizes the rejection, by certain anthropologists, of this mainstreamdiscourse, and uses the term ‘‘revisionist” (Kaufmann, 2006, p.187) to qualify this answer. For Kaufmann,

the two ‘sides’ of academic anthropology . . . had hardened intoideologies of otherness . . . It was as if two people, after walkingover the same ground, described their trek as occurring in alter-native universes. (Ibid., p. 180)

In order to escape this tension, Kaufmann (Ibid., p. 187) wants to‘‘redress romanticized assumptions of peasants being naturally

good stewards of the land.” He refers to the works of Kottak andCosta (1993) and Bloch (1995), who showed that ‘‘culture may aseasily abuse nature as not” (Kaufmann, 2006, p. 187). He defendsa middle-ground position that could help to ‘‘avoid the tendencyto treat Malagasy people living in local environments as eitherexternal to conservation, or, if they are internal, as either demon-ized or valorized agents” (Ibid., p. 188). This methodological shiftwould lead to ‘‘listen[ing] to all sides” and would ‘‘introduce usto Malagasy voices who accept their responsibility in degradingtheir environments but who lack the means to do otherwise(Feeley-Harnik, 1995; Bloch, 1995; Walsh, 2005)” (Kaufmann,2006, p. 189). During my stay in Madagascar, I indeed consistentlyheard the voices of farmers for whom there is no doubt that defor-estation and erosion occur as consequences of their economicactivities, and who believe that this degradation will continue, un-less support is provided to develop alternative ways to sustaintheir livelihoods.

In a more recent work, however, Kaufmann (2008) was seducedby the work of Latour and fell into the trap of conflating cultureand nature, which weakens his argument. He uses Latour’s fashion-able vocabulary (‘‘crossover”; the ‘‘swapping of properties”) to de-fend the trivial and hardly disputable argument that theenvironment shapes culture as much as culture shapes the envi-ronment. But he also follows Latour in his highly disputable prop-osition that the relationships between societies and theenvironment are symmetrical. In such a symmetrical model, thefact that humans make choices, which implies that they can beright or wrong and raises moral questions as to the definition ofwhat is right and wrong, is not contrasted with the fact that nature,on the other side, does not make choices and has no morals. La-tour’s symmetrical model hence leads to overlook the differencesbetween human agency and natural processes. This leads Kauf-mann to the same ambiguities and analytical weaknesses as thoseencountered in the work of Kull and Klein.

Coming back to the counter-attack against revisionism, Gade(2008) rejects in a more virulent way the political ecology narra-tives and proposes an explanation for the revisionist attitude. Hesees confusion between what he calls ‘‘material narratives” and‘‘discursive narratives.” He explicitly targets the work of JorgeKlein and the classic work of Fairhead and Leach that inspiredit, and criticizes Kull for overlooking the negative economic andecological effects of traditional land burning over long periods oftime. He also criticizes Jarosz’ work for ignoring the ‘‘submergedhistory” in favor of ‘‘conspicuous history,” an attitude which‘‘has suited those with sociopolitical agenda to explain povertyin Madagascar in colonialist terms” (Gade, 2008, p. 101). In sum,Gade accuses these authors of producing new social constructionsconsistent with their scholarly interests, or with ‘‘the systems ofthought that dominate their epoch” (ibid.) or their discipline (suchas the ‘‘sympathetic understanding of peasant households” andthe ‘‘justifying of [an] . . . anti-colonialist stance” [ibid.]). The useof expressions such as ‘‘hegemonic discourse” and ‘‘receivedwisdom” would be an ‘‘intimidation tactic to reinforce the socialconstruction of environmental meanings” (ibid., p. 107). The ambi-guities found in Kull’s writing can now be better understood. Theycould result from tensions between the political agenda that polit-ical ecologists support and the will to conduct research work thatfollows the best scientific standards and that sticks to empiricaldata.

Revisionism, however, is not necessarily detrimental to socialadvancement, according to the context within which it occurs, asit could be a better alternative than the status quo. Kaufmann’sidea of ‘‘alternative universes” reveals that revisionism may infact be the logical consequence of the excessive focus that hasbeen put on ecological issues since colonial times, and of the biasintroduced, in the process of knowledge production, by strong

19 Thanks to Frank Muttenzer and to Georges Serpantie, for the informal discussionswe had on this subject.



networks of institutions more concerned with control overresources than with conservation. In this context, revisionismmay have been socially and politically beneficial. It may havebeen necessary to answer the exaggeration of colonial discourseswith a reverse exaggeration. After having been overly blamed fortheir land uses, local communities needed to be overly idealized,as a prerequisite to a return to more balanced discourse.But in the absence of synthesis, which the outcomes of paleobo-tanists help to achieve, the scientific debate could be trans-formed into a political battlefield opposing (in a very roughsimplification) radical conservation biologists with radical politi-cal ecologists.

4.3. Which nature?

The fragmentation of knowledge among disciplines and theexistence of parallel networks of scholars, each having their ownjournals, societies, and communication tools, will render difficultthe elaboration of more neutral and comprehensive interpretationsof environmental changes. As a consequence of the existence ofstrong epistemic communities, the divides between mainstreamecologists and political ecologists are also a matter of language.Both of these fields address the relation of human beings to thebiophysical world within which they live, but they define quite dif-ferently key concepts such as nature and the environment. AsWalker (2005, p. 78) puts it, it is ‘‘in questioning what constitutes‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ that one finds the nub of thedisagreement.”

For most field ecologists, the environment consists of ecosys-tems that need to be objectively understood if the services theyprovide are to be properly managed. The links between ecosystemsand local cultures, i.e., between ecosystems and the desires of com-munities whose livelihood depends on them, are mostly ignored.Keller (2008) reveals this ignorance in the case of Madagascarand shows how it leads to poorly designed environmental educa-tion and conservation programs.

For many political ecologists, to the contrary, the environmentthat matters is socially constructed: it is the environment that isdeemed desirable by human societies. The consequence, symmet-rically, is that the dimension of the environment that exists inde-pendently of human agency, which is commonly called nature, isignored. Attention thus shifts from a nature with possible intrin-sic value (the main object of study of biologists) to a second nat-ure, or a ‘‘social nature” (Castree and Braun, 2001), whose valueis subjective. Braun and Castree (1998, p. 33) explicitly adopt thisagenda. They assert that the ‘‘desire to save nature is deeplyproblematic, since it reaffirms the ‘externality’ of a nature ‘withand within which human societies are inextricably inter-meshed.’” Instead, they suggest that humans should create ‘‘thefuture natures that [they] wish to inhabit.” This suggestion re-flects the fusion of ontology and epistemology discussed earlier.It confuses the externality of nature as a physical entity withthe externality of nature as a concept. We can experience everyday that nature as a physical reality is not external to humansocieties, and that we are ‘‘inextricably intermeshed” with it, asshown by the multitude of hybrid objects which Latour helpedus to discover. This justifies the adoption of an epistemology that‘‘co-studies” the social and the natural realms. But conceptually,the natural and the cultural dimensions of the physical world canstill be distinguished, and need to be, because they each havespecific rules that need to be understood. For instance, choicesare made by actors of the social world, which implies that theyadopt some set of subjective values. Nature, conversely, doesnot make choices, has no moral; and assessments about theway it functions should not be value-laden. By considering thesocial ‘‘nature,” which is desired, as being the only one that mat-

ters, political ecologists render conceptually impossible theobjective assessment of nature as a distinct ontologicalcategory.20 What they call ‘‘social nature” is indeed simply theenvironment, and nature is a dimension of it that they do not con-ceptualize. As a consequence, the questions of how this social nat-ure (the environment we construct for ourselves) differs from thefirst nature (the environment where we are ‘‘born,” or that is outof our control), which is also the question of whether we have thecapacity to wisely choose, and to successfully design, the worldwithin which we live, is eluded. We can then ask, using a formu-lation slightly different from that of Walker (2005): where is nat-ure, or where is the dimension of the world that is not theoutcome of human agency, in political ecology?

4.4. Which epistemology?

Behind the debate over which nature we are talking about arefundamental epistemological questions that may never be settled,but that need to be discussed here. The narrative of early botanistswas produced by scientists adopting classical empiricism (Bhaskar,1978), commonly called positivism, a paradigm that has domi-nated the natural sciences since the Enlightenment. Classicalempiricists believe that science should be committed to under-standing specific processes and analyzing these processes in closedsystems, as far as this is possible. They conduct experiments ormeasure correlations between variables and give paramountimportance to control procedures aimed at provoking an artificialor virtual closure of the investigated system. They tend to believethat the patterns of events that they discover in these closed sys-tems also exist in the real world, and that they can deduce the nat-ure of beings from their empirical observations and discovery ofpatterns. They claim that they produce certain knowledge but thisis indeed not true, because the world is made of open systems.According to Bhaskar (1978), only the tendencies that generatepatterns of events should be considered real, and only imperfectversions of these patterns can be generated by these tendenciesin the real world, which is cause of a gap between the world asit is represented by classical empiricists and the world as it is.

Paleobotanists adopted a modern version of this paradigm, of-ten called post-positivism, which basically uses similar methodsbut, being confronted with more complex systems, is less proneto the essentialization of patterns observed in particular settingsand less vocal in its claim to produce certain knowledge.

Political ecologists wisely criticized classical empiricism. Theyunderstood that the patterns observed by classical empiricistsare contingent, and that claims to produce true knowledge aboutan objective nature lead to hegemonies. They argued for recogniz-ing diverse subjective views about nature, which led them to leantoward idealist epistemologies, where subjective imaginaries aregiven comparatively more weight than empirical observationsand the essentialization of patterns of events. This may explainwhy they rejected the essentialization of an external nature. Atthe same time, many political ecologists were aware of the risksof falling into the trap of relativism if they leaned excessively to-ward idealism, i.e., if they adopted a subjective theory of truth.Therefore, once they argued that nature is socially constructed,and that the nature that matters is the one that humans desire,many of them continued to use the same methods as classicalempiricism in order to understand this social nature, as exempli-fied by the works of Kull (2004) and Fairhead and Leach (1996),

20 Certainly, such an objective assessment of nature is practically impossible,because the act of knowing objects is always conducted by subjects. But this isprecisely the reason why subjects have to be committed to this objectivity, if theywant to maximize the objectivity of their knowledge about nature.



and by burgeoning collaborations with Land Science Scientists(Turner II and Robbins, 2008). I believe that here lies the funda-mental epistemological problem that political ecologists, and withthem many other branches of the social sciences, still need to solve.It may be that classical empiricism and other realist epistemologiesare inseparable from the adoption of a naturalist ontology; i.e.,from the explicit recognition of nature as an ontological categorydifferent from culture. This assumption deserves more than a par-agraph but it is worth drafting a few arguments in order to feed theconclusion of this article.

In the social world, some events exist that are the outcome ofhuman choices, which are themselves based on pre-existingknowledge. They are mostly driven by what we commonly call‘‘culture.” But there are also events that are not the outcomesof human choices, and are not determined by knowledge systems,as they belong to the unknown and/or the uncontrollable. Theyare mostly driven by what we commonly call ‘‘nature.” Eventu-ally, there are events that are the outcomes of nature and cultureacting together, and no event can be the outcome of culture with-out at the same time being the outcome of nature, although thereverse is not true. It may be in the essence of any realist (non-idealist) epistemology to make a distinction between these twotypes of events, and hence between nature and culture, becauseif this distinction disappeared, it could then be argued that theonly world that matters is the one that is known or desired, i.e.,the one that is represented or constructed: the so-called empiricalworld and the creations that result from its reification. Whatwould happen, then, to the world that is not represented? Whatif the representation went wrong, and if the world we designedto fulfill our desires did not fulfill them in the end? How to con-ceptualize that possibility of being wrong, if not by referring to a‘‘natural” world that follows its own laws, and that we do not en-tirely know?

It is significant, indeed, that the conceptualization of nature ap-peared when it became conceivable, for the first time, that societiescould fail for external reasons, as a consequence of tendencies cre-ated by mechanisms that they did not design themselves. This oc-curred when the limits of the external world were experienced:when colonists settling on oceanic islands faced the desiccationof the ecosystems that sustained their livelihood (Grove, 1995);when forest frontiers were closed on a continental scale (Marsh,1965 [1864]); and when humans discovered the physical limit oftheir planet from outer space. Significantly, the branch of the socialscience that is currently putting into question the social-construc-tivist approach of environmental issues is the sociology of disaster(Murphy, 2004), probably because it also investigates nature at itslimits. In other words, there may be a biophysical root in the notionof nature. This is not to deny that the notion of nature has politicalroots, as argued by Latour (1998). But there might be something atthe core of the concept that was not generated by politics alone.The notion of nature (but not nature itself) would thus be co-pro-duced by nature and culture, and saying provocatively that ‘‘ecol-ogy has nothing to do with taking account of nature,” as Latour(1998) argued, may only lead to more ‘‘fashionable nonsenses” (So-kal and Bricmont, 1998).

The distinction between nature and culture, in sum, may be thecorollary of the distinction between two ontological domains: thatof the real (which will not cease to exist if we stop thinking aboutit) and that of the empirical (which exists only in our mind, as aconsequence of our interaction with reality, even if the empiricaldomain can match the real world, to a certain extent). Bhaskar(1978) argued that the absence of distinction between the realand the empirical is an ‘‘epistemic fallacy” committed by both clas-sical empiricists and idealists. The difference is just that in the firstcase, the empirical world is assumed to reflect the real world (theontology is realist), while in the second case, the real world would

be the reflection of its representation (the ontology is idealist). Thecausal relation between realities and representation is reversed,but as the two tend to be equated, the final result is invariablythe production of closed systems of knowledge, as an outcome ofempirical observations in the first case, and of imagination in thesecond case.

What could be, then, the next step for political ecologists andother scientists committed to understanding the relations betweenhumans and their environment? I am not proposing that we returnto the original paradigm of classical empiricism, by adopting bothits methods and its ontology. I suggest, rather, that we accept theontology of classical empiricism but reject its method; or, at least,acknowledge the limits of its methods. The main limitation of clas-sical empiricism may result from its assumption that scientificknowledge is relevant only if it concerns closed systems, whichare artificially or virtually created by control procedures aimed atrendering patterns of events visible. Many scholars from the socialsciences and the humanities, including many political ecologists,already disputed this assumption. Instead of collecting and pro-cessing data in controlled conditions, they describe thick realitiesusing a narrative mode. A justification for their method is foundin a third possible epistemology: critical realism.

Popper (1963) and Bhaskar (1978) made the two key steps set-ting the base of critical realism. Popper showed that the discoveryof patterns of events is not a sufficient condition for the establish-ment of scientific laws, because laws that generate patterns ofevents can be refuted by a single observation. Popper’s most classicexample is the refutation of the law ‘‘crows are black” by the obser-vation of a single white crow. The consequence, for Popper, is thatknowledge advances mostly through refutation, is intrinsicallyuncertain, and has to remain open. Observing a white crow, whichrefutes a former statement, is the first step toward a more compre-hensive theory about crows’ color, whereas observing more blackcrows, which verifies the same former statement, reinforces con-viction about an incomplete theory, which can lead to obscuran-tism. Popper’s conception of science gives legitimacy to mythsand commonsense statements to be regarded as constituents ofknowledge, as they are the substratum upon which science ad-vances, through refutation. But for Popper, only the outcome of ref-utation is scientific knowledge, a normative stance that will bejustly criticized.

Bhaskar (1978, p. 12) went further by showing that ‘‘not only isa constant conjunction of events not a sufficient, it is not even anecessary condition for a scientific law.” This is because a scientificlaw is not a pattern of events, but is the generative mechanism ofthis pattern. Hence the statement ‘‘crows are black” is not a scien-tific law. It is the consequence of a law that can still be operatingeven if some crows are white, and is thus not refuted by the factthat some crows are white. This generative mechanism, whoseunderstanding is the purpose of science, can indeed operate andbe universal even if only a minority of crows are black. It just doesnot work alone, because it operates in an open system: the realworld. We can see, then, the advantages and danger of closingsystems when producing knowledge. By controlling the variablesthat result in having white crows, they bring attention to themechanisms that generate black crows, which helps to discoverthem, but they also encourage a confusion between patterns ofevents and the generative mechanisms of these patterns, i.e., aconfusion between laws, which are universal, and the outcomesof these laws, which are not universally realized. They displaceessentialism from the domain of the real (where the generativemechanisms operate) to what Bhaskar called the domain of the ac-tual (where pattern of events are observed). As a consequence ofthis misguided displacement, universalism encounters critique,which paves the way for falling into the trap of ontologicalrelativism.



Interestingly, political ecologists are often unclear about theirposition with regard to critical realism. Turner II and Robbins(2008, p. 301), in their attempt to create synergies between theirfields (land-science change and political ecology, respectively)argue that political ecology is ‘‘skeptical of post-positivism,” a ‘‘sci-entific method” that critiqued ‘‘logical positivism,” ‘‘foremostthrough the adoption of critical realist ontology.” But they assertat the same time that one of the two mainstreams of political ecol-ogy, which they call the structuralist approach, ‘‘employs criticalrealism.” Turner and Robbins may refer to different versions of crit-ical realism and accept one while rejecting the other, but their briefepistemological discussion reflects the excessive bipolarity of epis-temological and ontological discussions, with positivism and real-ism (classical empiricism) on one side, and relativism and idealism(transcendental idealism) on the other, critical realism occupyingan unclear middle-ground. Beyond simplistic but never ending de-bates that confront realist and idealist ontologies, the questions ofwhether science should study closed or open systems, and of howit should handle the increasing uncertainty that results from work-ing on open systems, i.e., in real-world settings, are not addressedsatisfactorily.

Attempts to develop a science of open systems have alreadybeen explored, however, by some scholars who have been themost vocal critics of political ecology but who share with it theintellectual legacy of cultural ecology. Vayda and Walters (1999)proposed a methodology that consists of ‘‘evaluating causal linksbetween events” (Walters and McCay, 2008, p. 68) and avoids, asfar as possible, making a priori assumptions about which eventshave greater explanatory value. With this ‘‘event ecology, researchis guided by open-ended questions about why specific environ-mental changes” have occurred (ibid.). The a priori closure of thesystem under investigation, which results from the adoption ofreductionist methods in the case of ecologists who lean towardclassical empiricism, or of imagined blueprints that guide theinvestigations in the case of scholars influenced by idealists’ ontol-ogies, can be avoided by the open character of this event ecology.The objective is indeed to provide ‘‘some – but not ‘complete’ –information about the causal histories of those events” (Vayda,2008, p. 340). Sequences of events, which have the advantage ofbeing directly observed, by a direct contact with the real world,are preferred to processes, or systems, which usually require theadoption of particular methods, procedures or blueprints. Vaydaand Walters’ (1999) event ecology is thus a possible point ofdeparture for the development of a critical realist political ecology,as revealed by their terms ‘‘open-ended question” and ‘‘not com-plete information.”

Some caution is required, however. First, a focus on eventscould lead to the same excessive focus on patterns that character-izes classical empiricism. An event ecology thus has to stateexplicitly that it is interested in the generative mechanisms ofevents, and should develop its methods accordingly. Second,and this is indeed a different formulation of the same problem,a focus on events should not be confused with a shift from a focuson structures to a focus on agency. Events are the manifestationof agency, but agency is itself constrained by structures (and isgenerating new structures). The attention to discourses, whichpolitical ecologists brought into the debate about the relation-ships between humans and their environment, rendered visiblecertain social structures of paramount importance, such as thestructure of knowledge and of the geometries of power, whichcan more easily be ‘‘imagined” out of life experience than mea-sured through the pattern of events they generate. Hence a ma-ture event ecology will have to carry the heritage of politicalecology and combine analyses of structures and agency (Doveet al., 2008), or, stated more practically, analyses of ‘‘billiard-ballcausation” and ‘‘mental causation” (Vayda, 2008). The open sys-

tems that constitute the social world may indeed be ‘‘powered”by this dialectic between structures and agency, as shown bythe work of Pierre Bourdieu.

5. Conclusion

The production of knowledge about the Malagasy environmentand its transformation by humans was biased by the excessive fo-cus on some aspect of the problem, as a consequence of the prefer-ence for methods inherited from classical empiricism, or of anideological framing within colonial or anti-colonial imaginaries.Botanists of the colonial period and political ecologists all closedthe systems under investigation. This closure was mostly the con-sequence of methods in the first case, and of imaginaries in the sec-ond case. In between, paleobotanists developed a more completeunderstanding that refutes some statements made by early bota-nists, that remains open to future finding, and that needs to be bet-ter articulated with the work of political ecologists. A morecomprehensive account of the Malagasy environment could beachieved by further opening these systems of knowledge, the firststep being their fusion.

I believe that in order to achieve this ecumenical science, twofundamental principles should be adopted. First, uncertaintyshould be more explicitly accepted and should not even be re-garded as the universal measure of ‘‘good” knowledge. This is anessential condition for producing open systems of knowledgeabout open systems, i.e., about real-world systems. Second, a newmeasure of the advancement of knowledge has to be found. It wasfound already, indeed, by Popper (1963), who showed that theoriesadvance mostly by increasing their content, often to the detrimentof certainty. Popper proposed the concept of verisimilitude, whichcombines certainty and content, as a criteria for measuring thegrowth of knowledge. Under the influence of positivism and reduc-tionism, certainty has been overly favored by science, to the detri-ment of content. The consequence is that the knowledge producedby science is incredibly detailed, is excessively fragmented be-tween academic disciplines and epistemic communities, is decon-textualized, and is overly normative as a consequence of thisdecontextualization. More scientists now need to commit them-selves to content (by developing more comprehensive theories),rather than certainty (by verifying existing theories), if the frag-mentation and the normative character of knowledge are to beremedied. In this march toward comprehensiveness, scientists willhave to open themselves to adjacent disciplines and distancethemselves from their epistemic communities. This process is al-ready engaged by many interdisciplinary scholars. But it is stilllimited in scope, probably because it is antinomic to the way thesocial activity of science works (Latour, 1987). When new areasof research are open, disciplines are eventually created at the inter-section of existing disciplines (conservation biology and politicalecology are two examples), which recreates strong social networksthat quickly become committed to verification rather than falsifi-cation, as a strategy of defense against the attacks of other disci-plines. A genuine increase in the scope of inquiry (an emphasison content over certainty) can exist during the first years of thecreation of new disciplines, as is shown by early political ecologystudies conducted during the 1980s (Watts, 1983; Blaikie andBrookfield, 1987). But the crystallization and institutionalizationof new disciplines later lead to the creation of ‘‘domains of exclu-sion,” to use the words of Foucault (1969). The world that is notthe product of human agency, which I called nature in this article,is one such domain in the case of political ecology.

Concretely, and coming back to environmental degradation inthe Malagasy highlands, there are three narratives about the Mal-agasy environment that currently challenge each other. First is the



myth of the green forest paradise, which is unfortunately still usedto justify control over local communities but is quite out of fashionin the scientific community. Second is the reconstruction of dy-namic ancient ecosystems based on recent research outcomes inpaleobotany, paleontology, and archeology. Third is a nascent mythaccording to which the negative or positive character of environ-mental changes depends on human values and choices. I believethat the unification of these narratives is necessary if we are to pro-vide working answers to the social and environmental challengesposed in countries such as Madagascar. It may lead to producinga theory with less certainty but more content, i.e., a theory that willbe more apt to reflect the open systems that constitute the realworld.

Advancing toward such theories with higher verisimilitudewould mean that (1) the narratives of conservation biologistsshould be considered for their ability to talk about the world thatis not the product of human agency (i.e., that is not an outcomeof culture) and for their ability to predict the consequences of hu-man agency on this biophysical world; that (2) the narratives elab-orated by paleobotanists, palontologists and archeologists shouldbe considered for their ability to describe objectively ancient envi-ronmental changes and their causes; and that (3) political ecologynarratives should be considered for their ability to talk about thecultural, social and political causes and consequences of recentenvironmental changes, and about the cultural, social and politicalfactors that bias the production of knowledge.

Political ecology is well-positioned to proceed with this unifica-tion, because of its commitment to pay attention to both empiricalobservations and imaginaries, on both local and global scales. But itwill need to engage a critique of its own imaginary, in order to cor-rect its own biases about the way it addresses ecological processes.It will have to explicitly clarify its position regarding objects thatare not the outcome of human agency, whether we call these ob-jects nature or not. The critical realist epistemology may enableto do so without falling back into the traps of classical empiricismor idealism. If they achieve this, political ecologists may play a stillmore significant role in helping humans decide to which extentthey should conserve some nature in their environment.

I will finish by proposing a tentative theory with high verisimil-itude. I would argue, referring to the narrative elaborated by pale-obotanists, that the extent to which anthropogenic environmentaldegradation has occurred in Madagascar is elevated. The account ofenvironmental transformation by Gade (1996) appears to be themost plausible, while early colonial narrative and the counternar-rative by political ecologists may be politically biased, in asymmetrical fashion. Uncertainty still remains and more archeo-logical and paleobotanical surveys will be required to further sub-stantiate this conclusion. But given the current state of knowledge,it appears to be the most plausible. A new landscape, less naturaland more cultural, with less biomass and less biodiversity, at leastlocally or regionally, has been created by Malagasy people, follow-ing a pattern also encountered in other regions of the world (Stew-art, 1956; Simmons, 1989; Turner II et al., 1990; Ponting, 1991;Pyne, 1991, 1995; Redman, 1999; Williams, 2006). A relative envi-ronmental recovery may occur in some places, through a recoloni-zation of the land by invasive trees or through the creation ofintensively cultivated landscape by farmers, but this recovery hassome limits. In the new landscapes that Malagasy people construct,the original biodiversity may be lost forever unless it is conservedin some places, before the closing of the last frontiers. Whether thisbiodiversity does matter, materially and/or spiritually, we still donot know, which may be the main justification for its conservation.

Some doubts remain about the anthropogenic character of thesechanges, as decreasing rainfall may have also played a significantrole. But a correct practice of science does not need theories tobe proved in order to be accepted. A theory, if debated by unbiased

scientists, just needs to better match with available observations tobe accepted. For this reason, its acceptance is never definitive andthe debate about the causes of environmental degradation in Mad-agascar remains open. Policy makers, however, cannot wait. Thecontroversy about environmental degradation should thus be ten-tatively settled at any point in time, for practical reasons. But nat-ure is not the outcome of this settlement. Nature remainsunknown or uncertain, and the impact of our decisions will latertell us if our knowledge was right, i.e., if the outcome of this settle-ment matched with the nature of things.

Acknowledgements

The author is very thankful to Professor James P. Lassoie, Profes-sor Ronald J. Herring and Dr. Steven A. Wolf, who provided himwith a stimulating environment to conduct this research; to TorA. Benjaminsen and W. Dean Hively, for their friendly review; tothe anonymous reviewers; and to his family and friends, for theencouragements they always provided.

References

Bertrand, A., Sourdat, M., 1998. Feux et Déforestation à Madagascar: RevuesBibliographiques. CIRAD/ORSTOM/CITE, Antananarivo.

Bhaskar, R., 1978. A Realist Theory of Science. Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex.Blaikie, P.M., Brookfield, H.C., 1987. Land Degradation and Society. Methuen,

London and New York.Bloch, M., 1995. People into places: Zafimaniry concepts of clarity. In: Hirsch, E.,

O’Hanlon, M. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspective on Places andSpaces. Clarendon, Oxford, pp. 63–77.

Bond, W., Silander, J.A., Ranaivonasy, J., Ratsirarson, J., 2008. The antiquity ofMadagascar’s grasslands and the rise of C4 grassy biomes. Journal ofBiogeography 35 (10), 1743–1758.

Braun, B., Castree, N., 1998. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. Routledge,London and New York.

Brown, M., 2000. A History of Madagascar. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton, NJ.Burney, D.A., 1987a. Late holocene vegetational change in central Madagascar.

Quaternary Research 28 (1), 130–143.Burney, D.A., 1987b. Late quaternary stratigraphic charcoal records from

Madagascar. Quaternary Research 28 (2), 274–280.Burney, D.A., 1987c. Pre-settlement vegetation changes at lake Tritrivakely,

Madagascar. Palaeoecology of Africa 18, 357–381.Burney, D.A., 1997. Tropical islands as paleoecological laboratories: gauging the

consequences of human arrival. Human Ecology 25 (3), 437–457.Burney, D.A., 1999. Rates, patterns, and processes of landscape transformation and

extinction in Madagascar. In: Macphee, R.D.E. (Ed.), Extinction in Near Time:Causes, Contexts and Consequences. Plenum, New York, pp. 75–87.

Burney, D.A., 2003. Madagascar’s prehistoric ecosystems. In: Goodman, S.M.,Benstead, J.P. (Eds.), The Natural History of Madagascar. University of ChicagoPress, Chicago, pp. 47–51.

Burney, D.A., Burney, L.P., Godfrey, L.R., Jungers, W.L., Goodman, S.M., Wright, H.T.,Jull, A.J., 2004. A chronology for late prehistoric Madagascar. Journal of HumanEvolution 47 (1–2), 25–63.

Castree, N., Braun, B., 2001. Social Nature. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, USA andOxford, UK.

Chase, J.M., Leibold, M.A., 2003. Ecological Niches: Linking Classical andContemporary Approaches. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago andLondon.

Dove, M.R., Mathews, A.S., Maxwell, K., Padwe, J., Rademacher, A., 2008. The conceptof human agency in contemporary conservation and development. In: Walters,B.B., McCay, B.J. (Eds.), Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in HumanEcology and Ecological Anthropology. Altamira Press, Lanham, New York,Toronto and Plymouth, pp. 225–255.

Du Puy, D.J., Moat, J., 1996. A refined classification of the primary vegetation ofMadagascar based on the underlying geology: using GIS to map its distributionand to assess its conservation status. In: Lourenco, W.R. (Ed.), Biogeographie deMadagascar. Editions ORSTOM, Paris, pp. 205–218.

Elmqvist, T., Pyykönen, M., Tengö, M., Rakotondrasoa, F., Rabakonandrianina, E.,Radimilahy, C., 2007. Patterns of loss and regeneration of tropical dry forest inMadagascar: the Social Institutional Context. PLoS ONE 2 (5), e402.

Fairhead, J., Leach, M., 1996. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecologyin a Forest-Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Fairhead, J., Leach, M., 1998. Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and LocalRealities: Studies in West Africa. Routledge, London and New York.

Feeley-Harnik, G., 1995. Plants and people, children or wealth: shifting grounds of‘‘choice” in Madagascar. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 18 (2), 45–64.

Forsyth, T., 2003. Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science.Routledge, London and New York.

Foucault, M., 1969. L’Archéologie du Savoir. Gallimard, Paris.



Foucault, M., 1970. L’Ordre du Discours: Leçon Inaugurale au Collège de FrancePrononcée le 2 Décembre 1970. Gallimard, Paris.

Gade, D., 1996. Deforestation and its effects in highland Madagascar. MountainResearch and Development 16 (2), 101–116.

Gade, D., 2008. Considering Madagascar’s deforestation story in paradigmatic andreflexive terms. In: Kaufmann, J.C. (Ed.), Greening the Great Red Island:Madagascar in Nature and Culture. Africa Institute of South-Africa, Pretoria,pp. 93–112.

Girod-Genet, L., 1898. Renseignements forestiers, tournée du chef de service desforêts de Tananarive, Antanifotsy, Ambositra, Fianarantsoa. Journal Officiel deMadagascar 294, 2349–2350.

Goodman, S.M., Benstead, J.P., 2003. The Natural History of Madagascar. Universityof Chicago Press, Chicago.

Grove, R.H., 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens andthe Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Hubbell, S.P., 2001. The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography.Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Humbert, H., 1927. La Destruction d’une Flore Insulaire par le Feu; PrincipauxAspects de la Végétation à Madagascar, Documents Photographiques et Notices.Imprimerie Moderne de l’Emyrne G. Pitot et Cie., Tananarive.

Humbert, H., 1949. La dégradation des sols à Madagascar. Mémoires de l’Institut deRecherche Scientifique de Madagascar 1, 33–53.

Jarosz, L., 1993. Defining and explaining tropical deforestation: shifting cultivationand population growth in colonial Madagascar (1896–1940). EconomicGeography 69, 366–379.

Kaufmann, J.C., 2006. The sad opaqueness of the environmental crisis inMadagascar. Conservation and Society 4 (2), 179–193.

Kaufmann, J.C., 2008. Agency in a Mahafale Pastoralist landscape. In: Kaufmann, J.C.(Ed.), Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture. AfricaInstitute of South-Africa, Pretoria, pp. 113–136.

Keller, E., 2008. The banana plant and the moon: conservation and the Malagasyethos of life in Masoala. American Ethnologist 35 (4), 650–664.

Kottak, C.P., Costa, A.C.G., 1993. Ecological awareness, environmentalist action, andinternational conservation strategy. Human Organization 52, 335–343.

Klein, J., 2002. Deforestation in the Madagascar highlands – established ‘truth’ andscientific uncertainty. Geojournal 56 (3), 191–199.

Klein, J., 2004. Fiddling while Madagascar burns: deforestation discourses andhighland history. Norwegian Journal of Geography 58, 11–22.

Klein, J., 2007. Conservation, development, and a heterogeneous community: theCase of Ambohitantely special reserve, Madagascar. Society and NaturalResources 20, 451–467.

Kull, C.A., 1996. The evolution of conservation efforts in Madagascar. InternationalEnvironmental Affairs 8 (1), 50–86.

Kull, C.A., 2000. Deforestation, erosion, and fire: degradation myths in theenvironmental history of Madagascar. Environment and History 6 (4), 423–450.

Kull, C.A., 2002. Madagascar aflame: landscape burning as peasant protest,resistance, or a resource management tool? Political Geography 21 (7), 927–953.

Kull, C.A., 2004. Isle of Fire: The Political Ecology of Landscape Burning inMadagascar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Kull, C.A., 2008. Saving land with a spade: human landscape transformations inhighland Madagascar. In: Kaufmann, J.C. (Ed.), Greening the Great Red Island:Madagascar in Nature and Culture. Africa Institute of South-Africa, Pretoria, pp.113–136.

Langrand, O., 2003. Réserve Spéciale d’Ambohitantely. In: Goodman, S.M., Benstead,J.P. (Eds.), The Natural History of Madagascar. University of Chicago Press,Chicago, pp. 1472–1476.

Latour, B., 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers ThroughSociety. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press,Cambridge, MA.

Latour, B., 1998. To modernise or ecologise? That is the question. In: Braun, B.,Castree, N. (Eds.), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium. Routledge,London and New York.

Latour, B., 1999. Politiques de la Nature: Comment Faire Entrer les Sciences enDémocratie. La Découverte, Paris.

Lavauden, L., 1934. Histoire de la législation et de l’administration forestière aMadagascar. Revue des Eaux-et-Forêts 72, 949–960.

MacPhee, R.D.E., Burney, D.A., Wells, N.A., 1985. Early holocene chronology andenvironment of Ampasambazimba, a Malagasy subfossil lemur site.International Journal of Primatology 6 (5), 461–487.

Marsh, G.P., 1965 [1864]. Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography as Modified byHuman Action. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Ministère de l’Environnement, des Forêts et du Tourisme (MEFT), 2009. Evolutionde la Couverture de Forêts Naturelles à Madagascar: 1990–2000–2005. USAID,Conservation International and MEFT, Antananarivo.

Murphy, R., 2004. Disaster or sustainability: the dance of human agents withnature’s actants. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41, 249–266.

Myers, N., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A.B., Kent, J., 2000.Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403, 853–858.

Pareliussen, I., Olsson, E.G.A., Armbruster, I., 2006. Factors limiting the survival ofnative tree seedlings used in conservation efforts at the edges of forestfragments in upland Madagascar. Restoration Ecology 14 (2), 196–203.

Parrot, A., 1925. Déboisement et reboisement à Madagascar. Bulletin Economique,Numéro Spécial du Gouvernement Général de Madagascar et Dépendances.Imprimerie de l’Imérina, Antananarivo.

Perrier de la Bathie, H., 1921. La Végétation Malgache. Annales du Musée Colonialde Marseille, 1.

Pollini, J., 2007. Slash-and-burn cultivation and deforestation in the malagasy rainforests: representations and realities. Unpublished Ph.D, Department of NaturalResources, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

Ponting, C., 1991. A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapseof Great Civilizations. St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Popper, K., 1963. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.Routledge and Paul Kegan, London.

Pyne, S.J., 1991. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia. University of WashingtonPress, Seattle and London.

Pyne, S.J., 1995. World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. University of WashingtonPress, Seattle and London.

Radimilahy, C., 1997. Mahilaka, an 11th to 14th century Islamic port: the firstimpact of urbanism on Madagascar. In: Goodman, S.M., Patterson, B.D. (Eds.),Natural Change and Human Impact in Madagascar. Smithsonian InstitutionPress, Washington, DC, pp. 342–363.

Ramanantsoavina, G., no date. Histoire de la Politique Forestière à Madagascar,Antananarivo.

Ratsirarson, J., Edwards, M.E., Olsson, E.G.A., Armbruster, W.S., Pareliussen, I., Réau,B., 2003. Forest restoration and biodiversity conservation in the centralhighlands: The case of the Réserve Spéciale d’Ambohitantely. In: Goodman,S.M., Benstead, J.P. (Eds.), The Natural History of Madagascar. University ofChicago Press, Chicago, pp. 1476–1480.

Redman, C.L., 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The University ofArizona Press, Tucson.

Robbins, P., 2004. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Blackwell Publication,Malden, MA.

Scott, J., 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. YaleUniversity Press, New Haven.

Simmons, I.G., 1989. Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History.Blackwell, Oxford and New York.

Simsik, M.J., 2002. The political ecology of biodiversity conservation on theMalagasy highlands. Geojournal 58, 233–242.

Sokal, A., Bricmont, J., 1998. Fasionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuseof Science. Picador, New York.

Stewart, O.C., 1956. Fire as the first great force employed by man. In: Thomas, W.L.,Jr. (Ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth: An InternationalSymposium Under the Co-Chairmanship of Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates, LewisMumford. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 115–134.

Turner II, B.L., Clark, W.C., Kates, R.W., Richards, J.F., Mathews, J.T., Meyer, W.B.(Eds.), 1990. The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and RegionalChanges in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Turner II, B.L., Robbins, P., 2008. Land-change science and political ecology:similarities, differences, and implications for sustainability science. AnnualReview of Environmental Resources 33, 295–316.

Vayda, A.P., Walters, B.B., 1999. Against political ecology. Human Ecology 27 (1),167–179.

Vayda, A.P., 2008. Causal explanation as a research goal: a pragmatic view. In:Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J. (Eds.), Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition inHuman Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Altamira Press, Lanham, NewYork, Toronto and Plymouth, pp. 317–369.

Virah-Samvy, M., 2009. Ecosystem management in Madagascar during globalchange. Conservation Letters 2 (4), 163–170.

Walker, P.A., 2005. Political ecology: where is the ecology? Progress in HumanGeography 29 (1), 73–82.

Walsh, A., 2005. The obvious aspects of ecological underprivilege in Ankerana,Northern Madagascar. American Anthropologist 107 (4), 654–665.

Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J., 2008. Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in HumanEcology and Ecological Anthropology. Altamira Press, Lanham, New York,Toronto and Plymouth.

Watts, M., 1983. Silent Violence. Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria.University of California Press, Berkeley.

Williams, M., 2006. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, AnAbridgment. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

World Bank, 2004. Madagascar Third Environment Program Support Project: ProjectAppraisal Document. The World Bank, Washington, DC.

Wright, H.T., Burney, D., 1993. Travaux Archéologiques et Paléo-Ecologiques auxCôtes de la Baie d’Ampasindava (Nord-Ouest de Madagascar): 1991–1992.Unpublished report on file at the Musée d’Art et Archéologie, Antananarivo,Madagascar.

Wright, H.T., Rakotoarisoa, J.A., 1997. Cultural transformations and their impact onthe environments of Madagascar. In: Goodman, S.M., Patterson, J.P. (Eds.),Natural Change and Human Impact in Madagascar. Smithsonian InstitutionPress, Washington, DC, pp. 309–329.

Wright, H.T., Rakotoarisoa, J.A., 2003. The rise of Malagasy societies: newdevelopments in the archeology of Madagascar. In: Goodman, S.M., Benstead,J.P. (Eds.), The Natural History of Madagascar. University of Chicago Press,Chicago, pp. 112–119.


Pollini 2010 - Environmental degradation narratives in Madagascar: from colonial hegemonies to...

Documents

Transcript of Pollini 2010 - Environmental degradation narratives in Madagascar: from colonial hegemonies to...