ABSTRACT
Each of the country cases considered in Chapters 2 to 7 has highlighted different issues in the study of vegetation change. The case of Côte d’Ivoire underscores how the misuse of statistics can produce catastrophic, but erroneous, assessments of forest loss. Moreover, foresters (and even socio-economists) have premised their analyses on an assumption of minimal Ivorian populations in the nineteenth-century forest zone, overlooking far more complex population-resource dynamics and important instances of forest expansion in certain times and places. The Liberia case emphasises how a unilineal vision of forest conversion at a ‘frontier’ can take hold in academic consciousness across a range of disciplines, yet is probably a fundamentally misleading model for understanding vegetation dynamics, and obscures important aspects of Liberian history. In Ghana, influential international analyses have produced an image of the entire bio-climatic forest zone as having been covered with ‘original’ forest at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet there is strong evidence that much of today’s forest is of relatively recent, and perhaps even anthropogenic, origin. In Benin, scientists and policy-makers have interpreted forest islands, isolated forest trees, baobabs in secondary forest thicket, and the presence of extensive palm groves to indicate degraded tropical forest. Yet the weight of evidence suggests that inhabitants past and present may have established each of these vegetation formations in open savanna country. Easy deductions cannot therefore be made. The Sierra Leone case exemplifies how a faulty analysis of technology and socio-economic change, framed by and reinforcing views of deforestation, can spread and become magnified within academic consciousness. Whereas the supposed role of the timber trade has dominated analysis in Sierra Leone, in Togo other technologies—iron smelting and intensive agriculture—have been blamed for deforestation. Yet re-evaluation of the evidence provided suggests that historical iron smelting might have been more sustainable than recent analysts have considered it to have been. Intensive agriculture involving forest clearance in certain areas is shown to be responsible for forest establishment elsewhere.
