Forests Are Gold

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."(Choice) "Forests Are Gold offers a timely analysis that will appeal to scholars far beyond Southeast Asia. . . . It should inspire upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars to rethink assumptions about the virtues of environmentalism by showing us how such reasoning has never been just about trees.—"- Allison Truitt (American Anthropologist) "A wonderful and timely addition to the literature on political ecology. . . . In presenting the dilemmas and projects of forest conservation over the last century, she convincingly demonstrates that if forests can and do act beyond humans, the generativity of these activities is lost on those who seek to more efficiently administer them."- Nikhil Anand (American Ethnologist (AE))