ABSTRACT
The major concern of this paper is to situate scientific forestry (the technical term for which is sustained yield management) as it is practised in Malaysia, within a historical context. In the contemporary period, scientific forestry (sometimes referred to as colonial forestry) has been criticized for the narrowness of its scope. Contemporary criticisms of sustained yield 2 management practices in Malaysia in many ways reflect a more generalized discontent with scientific forestry in the rest of the world. Since the contemporary critique of sustained yield management has been dealt with in more detail elsewhere, 3 a brief mention should suffice for the purpose of this paper. In a nutshell, debates about scientific forestry have centred on sustained yield practices, specifically the way they have privileged industrial production over subsistence and local use (Westoby, 1989); the manner in which the well-being of forests is treated as separate from (if not less deserving than) that of forest dwellers (United States Congressional Staff Study Mission to Malaysia, 1989); and the way complex tropical forests are regarded as resilient in the long term (Keto, Scott, and Olsen, 1990), (so that logging could proceed if the proper techniques were applied).
