The lie of the land: challenging received wisdom on the African environment,
edited by Melissa Leach & Robin Mearns. Oxford : International African Institute
in association with James Curry ; Portsmouth, N.H. : Heinemann, c1996.
[important case studies exploring how current understandings of human impact
on the environment have proven wrong, and colonial and post-colonial policies
on resource use and environmental governance have been misguided. It
illustrates how empirical research can debunk conventional wisdom and
demonstrate the soundness of local knowledge and indigenous land use
systems.]
Misreading the African landscape [electronic resource] : society and ecology in a
forest-savanna mosaic. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach; Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [A very important demonstration of the
difficulties of grasping long-term trends in environmental degradation, through an
examination of how population concentrations affected forestation in West Africa
… positively, by stimulating reforestation; this case stands with the myth of
sahelian rangeland degradation as important challenges to casual environmental
analysis.]
Environment, scarcity, and violence. Thomas F. Homer-Dixon. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, c1999. [the book examines whether population
increase and resource scarcity results in environmental degradation and
increased conflict and violence, primarily in Africa; it systematically pursues this
thesis, and in fact ends up with a highly qualified answer. Since the connection
between the environment and security is increasingly raised, this book is an
important comment on the state of this area of research]
Environmentality : technologies of government and the making of subjects. Arun
Agrawal. Durham : Duke University Press, 2005. [Regarding conservation of
resources, one key question is how the values of environmental sustainability are
internalized; Agrawal examines the “making” of “environmental subjects” in the
context of state and community managed forests of India, using some useful
ideas of Foucault.]
Mortimore, M., Roots in the African Dust: Sustaining the Drylands, Cambridge
UP, 1998. [The state of the African drylands and the question of how pastoral
and agropastoral livelihoods impact on rangeland environments has been a key
research question. The “new rangeland ecology” is used by the author to shed
light on rangeland dynamics in non-equilibrium systems, where the greatest
factor impacting the environment is rainfall rather than land-use.]