Misreading the African Landscape

• Introduction; 1. Convictions of forest loss in policy and ecological science; 2. Forest gain: historical evidence of vegetation change; 3. Settling a landscape: forest islands in regional social and political history; 4. Ecology and society in a Kuranko village; 5. Ecology and society in a Kissi village; 6. Enriching a landscape: working with ecology and deflecting successions; 7. Accounting for forest gain: local land use, regional political economy and demography; 8. Reading forest history backwards: a century of environmental policy; 9. Sustaining reversed histories: the continual production of views of forest loss; 10. Towards a new forest-savanna ecology and history.

'This is a bold and important book, an analytical tour de force. It mounts a forceful attack against the received wisdom on deforestation and the spread of the desert.' Wendy James and Richard P. Werbner Amaury Talbot Prize 1997