Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia
ISBN: 9789047444206
Platform/Publisher: BRILL / BRILL
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Authors Austrian;

Descriptions of the late 1800s landscape in the Ovambo floodplain in north-central Namibia closely match the area's late 1900s appearance, suggesting that little change occurred between the pre-colonial baseline and the postcolonial outcome. Yet, paradoxically, colonial conquest, population pressure, biological invasions, new technology, and economic globalization caused both dramatic deforestation and reforestation in less than a century. The paradox stems from the fact that the prevailing global environmental models obscure and homogenize the process of environmental change: different and contradictory interpretations are dismissed as alternative readings or misreadings of the same process. Deforestation and Reforestation , however, argues that the paradox highlights the need to reframe environmental change as plural processes occurring along multiple trajectories that may be dissynchronized and asymmetrical.


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