In the US South, wood-based bioenergy schemes are being promoted and implemented through a powerful vision merging social, environmental, and economic benefits for rural, forest-dependent communities. While this dominant narrative has led to heavy investment in experimental technologies and rural development, many complexities and complications have emerged during implementation. Forests as Fuel draws on extensive multi-sited ethnography to ground the story of wood-based bioenergy in the biophysical, economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of this region. This book contextualizes energy issues within the history and potential futures of the region's forested landscapes, highlighting the impacts of varying perceptions of climate change and complex racial dynamics. Eschewing simple answers, the authors illuminate the points of friction that occur as competing visions of bioenergy development confront each other to variously support, reshape, contest, or reject bioenergy development. Building on recent conceptual advances in studies of sociotechnical imaginaries, environmental history, and energy justice, the authors present a careful and nuanced analysis that can provide guidance for promoting meaningful participation of local community members in renewable energy policy and production while recognizing the complex interplay of factors affecting its implementation in local places.

We live in a world of wide pendulum swings regarding management policies for protected areas, particularly as they affect the involvement of local people in management. Such swings can be polarizing and halt on-the-ground progress. There is a need to find ways to protect biodiversity while creating common ground and building management capacity through shared experiences. Diverse groups need to cooperate to manage forests in ways that are flexible and can incorporate feedback. Biological Diversity: Balancing Interests Through Adaptive Collaborative Management addresses the problem of how to balance local, national, and global interests in preserving the earth's biological diversity with competing interests in the use and exploitation of these natural resources. This innovative book examines the potential of adaptive collaborative management (ACM) in reconciling a protected area's competing demands for biodiversity conservation, local livelihood support, and broader-based regional development. It clarifies ACM's emerging characteristics and assesses its suitability for a variety of protected area situations. Features Presents a better understanding of an emerging new management paradigm for balancing interests in biodiversity conservation and livelihood sustainability Provides interdisciplinary analysis and strategies for success involving social and biological scientists, natural resource practitioners, policy makers, and citizens Includes cases from around the world that illustrate how effective conservation programs can be developed though the use of adaptive management and social learning

Tropical forest conservation is attracting widespread public interest and helping to shape the ways in which environmental scientists and other groups approach global environmental issues. Schelhas and Pfeffer show that globally-driven forest conservation efforts have had different results in different places, ranging from violent protest to the discovery of common ground among conservation programs and the various interests of local peoples. The authors examine the connections between local values, material needs, and environmental management regimes. Saving Forests, Protecting People? explores that difficult terrain where culture, the environment, and social policies meet.