Cutting the Vines of the Past offers a novel argument: African
ways of seeing and interpreting their environments and past are not
only critical to how historians write environmental history; they
also have important lessons for policymakers and conservationists.
Tamara Giles-Vernick demonstrates how various outsiders intervening
in African land-use practices have repeatedly met failure because
of their inability or unwillingness to understand how Africans see
their land and their pasts.
Giles-Vernick takes as her focus doli, the environmental and
historical perceptions and knowledge of the Mpiemu people in the
Central African Republic. She argues that Mpiemu opposition to a
modern environmental conservation project--the Dzanga-Ndoki
National Park and the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve--derives from
the people's interpretations of their past experiences with
environmental interventions imposed by concessionary companies,
colonial officials, other Africans, Christian missionaries, and the
postcolonial state. At the same time, Mpiemu people associate these
contemporary conservationists with the bosses and Christian
missionaries of the colonial past, viewing them as sources of jobs,
consumer goods, and other support.
Giles-Vernick's argument will interest conservationists and
policymakers as well as environmental historians. By examining
Africans' environmental and historical ways of seeing and knowing,
and by revealing how these have changed, Giles-Vernick offers a
fresh perspective on the writing of environmental history.
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