Forest Futures: Global Representations and Ground Realities in the Himalayas

In the 1970s and 1980s, struggles over forest rights in the Garhwal Himalayas drew worldwide attention via the Chipko movement.  to a large extent, this also entailed a subsuming of local experiences under global discourses: many of the messages and meanings of the Chipko movement’s varied struggles were homogenized, changed, and rewritten.  Antje Linkenbach persuasively argues that global representation took away narrative control from local actors and removed Chipko from the specificity of its locale, from its village contexts.  Her attempt is to relocate forest issues and struggles by revisiting the perspectives of leading activists and local residents.  She discusses prominent representations of Chipko in relation to local histories of resistance, local representational contestations, and local forest practices-all set against a backdrop of local reflections on Chipko and its aftermath.  She argues that the issues of forest control and sustainable forest use have to be seen in the context of concerns about social and economic development, regional autonomy, and imaginations of preferred futures among people actually resident in the region.  Built on animpressive edifice of fieldwork, this book will interest ecologists, environmental historians, social anthropologists, and political scientists.