TROPICAL RESOURCES
The Bulletin of the Yale Tropical Resources Institute
Foreword from Outgoing TRI Director Michael R. Dove.
30th Anniversary Special Issue, 2014, pp. v–vii
Tropical Resources Institute
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
301 Prospect St., Office 202
New Haven, CT 06511
environment.yale.edu/tri
Foreword to the Anniversary Edition
Outgoing TRI Director, Michael R. Dove
This special issue of the Bulletin of the
Tropical Resources Institute commemorates
the 30th anniversary of the founding of TRI.
It offers an apt moment to reflect on three
decades of support by TRI of research in the
tropics by F&ES students. These have been
enormously important decades for tropical
peoples and environments. Over the course
of these three decades, human degradation
and conservation of the tropics both became
prominent topics in global science and the
popular imagination. This period saw the
rise of tropical deforestation and biodiversity
loss as major global environmental discourses. Anxiety was fed by the first great conflagrations striking the forests of Sumatra and
Kalimantan and enveloping the entire Southeast Asian region in smoke. During this time
the global community saw for the first time
differentiation within tropical countries as
locals battled fellow nationals for control of
their own lands and resources, as in the famous Penan blockades of logging roads in
Malaysian Sarawak, and in the rise of the
rubber tappers’ movement in the Amazon,
whose charismatic leader Chico Mendes was
assassinated in 1988. Such movements led
to the development of completely novel
global linkages, which involved non-tropical
peoples in tropical affairs in new ways, as in
visits of political support by the rock musician Sting to the Kayapo in the Brazilian
Amazon. This period saw the development of
completely novel economic and policy mechanisms to try to help conserve tropical forests
— such as timber boycotts and certification
— and at the same time assist communities
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living in these forests — by means of extractive reserves, the marketing of rainforest
products, and collaboration with native peoples to identify plants with medicinal properties.
In short, these were three decades with
profound consequences for the peoples and
environments of the global tropics, and the
conservation and development science and
policy devoted to them. During this period
TRI came into being and grew into its current status as the most important source of
funding at Yale for student field studies in
the tropics. We might say, indeed, that over
these three decades, TRI, the tropics, science,
and policy all co-evolved — as also suggested
by Emeritus Professor William Burch Jr., the
first Director of TRI, in his own wonderful,
lyrical essay in the pages to follow.
A review of the authors reporting on
their research in the TRI Bulletin over this
three-decade period reads like a ‘Who’s
Who’ of tropical studies. Many of today’s
leaders in academic and policy circles were
early contributors to the Bulletin, including
several current Yale faculty. The topics studied evolved over the years, in keeping with
trends in the academic and policy worlds (as
discussed in the following article “Reflections on Reading 30 Years of TRI Bulletins”,
by the TRI Program Assistants Dana Baker,
Sarah Tolbert, and Emily Zink). But they all
have one thing in common, which perhaps
reflects the mission of TRI’s home institution, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. F&ES occupies an unusual niche in North American academia, in
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Michael R. Dove (2014)
purposively linking both natural science and
social science, and theoretical study and application or practice. Just as F&ES is dedicated as an institution to crossing these sacrosanct academic boundaries, so too do we see
in these articles an analogous effort to cross
boundaries or borders. The fundamental dynamic of the research in all of these studies
from the Bulletin is based on crossing lines,
on linking things that are not usually linked
—places, disciplines, topics, methods, observer and observed, nature and culture —
and in all cases this becomes a source of special insight.
Thus, in the 1980s we have both Ramachandra Guha and Mark Ashton crossing
geographic borders, drawing unusual comparisons between South Asia (India and Sri
Lanka, respectively) and North America.
Crossing disciplinary borders, we have a pioneering study of urban political ecology in
Kathmandu, Nepal by Anne Rademacher,
and a study of lemurs in Madagascar by Eleanor Sterling and Betsy Carlson, the former
being one of the first candidates in the
unique joint doctoral program between
F&ES and Yale’s Anthropology Department.
We also have studies of hybrid topics, which
bring together in a single study subjects not
typically combined, like Andrew Mathew’s
study of the political intellectual history of
both the forest service and forest communities in Mexico, and Janet Sturgeon’s study of
the performance under Chinese governance
of social forestry approaches developed under very different political regimes.
Perhaps the most common boundarycrossing represented by the studies in this
issue is that between different methodologies, producing hybrid methods. While nearly all of the studies reprinted here do this to
some extent, there are several especially clear
examples: thus, Laura Snook combines local
oral history with silvicultural techniques to
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date and study stands of mahogany in Mexico; Richard Chávez melds the application of
GIS techniques with the Universal Soil Loss
Equation; and Hui Cheng brings real-world
evidence and insights to bear on her laboratory modeling of a shrimp farm. Other examples involve one of the most recent additions to the list of topics studied at F&ES,
which currently dominates the school in
some respects, global climate change: William Collier combines approaches from anthropology and history to examine the impact of climate change on agriculture in Kenya; and Stephan Wood combines insights
from economics and anthropology to examine the same topic in northern Guinea and
southern Senegal.
Most of the studies look at both nature
and culture, but some do this systematically:
Angela Quiros, Dora Nsuwa Cudjoe, and
Maureen DeCoursey each examine impacts
(from ecotourism, craft production, and the
medicinal plant trade, respectively) on both
the environment and the human community.
Some of the earlier articles in the Bulletin
laid the basis for extremely influential later
work by the scholars involved by legitimizing
the study of environments showing both
natural and cultural influences — that is, ‘anthropogenic’ environments — the study of
which is commonplace today but was not a
generation or two ago. Thus, we have Daniel
Nepstad’s study of pastures that have been
cut out of the Amazonian forest and then
abandoned; Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez’ study
of traditional management of forests in the
Peruvian Amazon; and Hugh Raffles’ study
of human-made waterways in the Amazon
estuary.
Finally, some of the studies presented
here reflect the increasingly blurred boundaries between observer and observed that
F&ES students and professors alike now encounter in the field: thus, Erin Kellogg writes
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Michael R. Dove (2014)
about an environmental NGO that she
worked for in St. Kitts-Nevis in the Caribbean; and Doolittle discusses the varying expectations from her own work of the NGOs
and local communities with whom she collaborated in Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Taken as a whole, the body of work presented here shows the potential benefits of
de-naturalizing the boundaries of tropical
studies — asking new sorts of questions, exploring them with new sorts of methods,
with new sorts of ends in mind.
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