ABSTRACT
Editors’ note In this chapter James Fairhead and Melissa Leach challenge some of the commonly held beliefs about forest change in West Africa. Like William Beinart (Chapter 8), they show the dangers of considering past change only in terms of destruction and show how the influence of people can produce what the Western-based environmental movement would perceive as a ‘good’ environment (in this case a more woody landscape). Their study highlights a divergence between research on people-vegetation relationships, which tends to be based on short (decade) time-scales of analysis, and research on climatevegetation relationships, which takes longer (millennial) time-scales of analysis. They take a different approach and advocate analyses that examine the dynamic and complex interrelationship between people, climate, and vegetation; in order to do this they suggest that a century time-scale perspective is most appropriate (see also Jean Grove, Chapter 3). There are some interesting parallels between this analysis and the discussion in our conclusion (Chapter 12) comparing the conceptualisation of time in models of the physical world and models of society.
