Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth century—from French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economics—as the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has rarely been about ecology or conservation for nature’s sake, but about managing citizens and society, a process Pamela McElwee terms “environmental rule.” Untangling and understanding these practices and networks of rule illuminates not just thorny issues of environmental change, but also the birth of Vietnam itself.
Pamela D. McElwee is associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. She is the coeditor of Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America.
Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan PrefaceAcknowledgmentsVietnamese TerminologyAbbreviationsIntroduction | Seeing the Trees and People for the Forests1. Forests for Profit or Posterity? The Emergence of Environmental Rule under French Colonialism2. Planting New People: Socialism, Settlement, and Subjectivity in the Postcolonial Forest3. Illegal Loggers and Heroic Rangers: The Discovery of Deforestation in Đổi Mới (Renovation) Vietnam4. Rule by Reforestation: Classifying Bare Hills and Claiming Forest Transitions5. Calculating Carbon and Ecosystem Services: New Regimes of Environmental Rule for Forests Conclusion | Environmental Rule in the Twenty-First CenturyNotesReferencesIndex
"McElwee’s description of environmental rule in Vietnam helps readers look beyond simplistic explanations of environmental policy to see the more complex processes at play in defining and intervening in various social and environmental issues. . . McElwee’s book will be of great interest to those who focus on environmental policy and the interplay of social-ecological systems. Recommended."