ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the production of knowledge about long-term environmental change and human interactions, and considers the policy implications of particular understandings. It starts with the conceptualization of culture in global change research, focusing on two elements of Proctor’s (1998) critique; first, the myth that culture is separable from other human dimensions and can be analysed independently; second, the myth of externality, that research is not itself a cultural process. The example of climate change illustrates several issues in the cultural production of knowledge: internationalization of research and the use of analogy in applying the long-term record. Two different critiques of the narratives of deforestation from Africa and India are used to illustrate both the production of knowledge and the policy implications. A final example takes the discourse of cultural landscape itself, and examines its application in Norwegian landscape administration.
