Bangkok Post : Seeing the forest for the trees

Review

Thailand's environmental movement blossomed during the late 1980s. A significant event lending confidence to this movement was the January 1989 cancellation of logging concessions in the country, hot on the heels of the previous year's successful campaign to stop construction of the Nam Choan Dam. The media played a significant role in bringing to public attention environmental concerns and grievances of villagers affected by rampant development and natural resource exploitation.

An aerial view of the logs that were washed down from Yod Luang Mountain in Nakhon Si Thammarat, crushing two villages in Lansaka district. The logs were believed to have been illegally felled some time ago and were left abandoned on the mountaintop.

One of the outstanding environmental journalists of the time was a young Thai-Canadian reporter, Ann Danaiya Usher. In 1990 Usher went on to receive the Thai Reporters' Association's first ever award for environmental reporter of the year. Far from resting on her laurels, or those of the environmentalists' apparent successes, Usher continued to follow the seeking of profit in the name of forestry under different guises, more often than not swathed in the environmental cloak of "reforestation". More recently she has been monitoring "aid" to the forestry sector and its connection with big business and the vested interests of Scandinavian countries whose development assistance is the target of her watchdog magazine Development Today.

After a decade and a half away, Usher has now published a history of Thai forestry. The history pulls no punches. It is a scathing critique of the forestry profession and bureaucracy, and more widely of those who arrogate "science" to their cause and practice state-making that serves bureaucratic and vested interests rather than those of the common people.

Usher's fast-moving yet detailed critical review spans more than a century, includes a multitude of players and covers a period during which Thailand was transformed beyond recognition politically, economically and ecologically. It also details three main periods in Thai forestry: teak extraction, plantation development and conservation through establishment of wilderness-inspired protected areas. Despite the richness and complexity of the material, there is nevertheless an astounding consistency to the story, with two basic recurring themes.

The first theme in Usher's critical history of forestry in Thailand is the foresters' dogged pursuit of simplicity and conformity where there is natural diversity and - to the forester's mind - untidiness. This is not a feature unique to Thailand. Indeed, it is the combination of British colonial interests and influence, on the one hand, and German inclination for "improvement" of tropical forests, on the other, that lay behind the obsession with single-species, evenly aged stands of timber - notably teak, and later eucalyptus - as the forester's goal.

THAI FORESTRY: A critical history By Ann Danaiya Usher Silkworm Books, 238 pp, 625 baht ISBN 978-9749511732

For much of the first half of the 20th century, forestry in Thailand was dedicated to the extraction of teak. In retrospect, this was an entirely unsustainable enterprise that failed even in its own narrow terms. Despite a "scientific" approach to forestry based on long rotations, in which forests were to be logged selectively in alternate 30-year cycles that would prohibit a return to any given area for two generations, within less than half a century the average size of felled timber had been reduced from more than 2 metres girth (circumference at breast height) to less than 1m. By the time the European companies' concessions expired in the mid-1950s, most of northern Thailand's best teak had been removed. Forestry had failed to achieve its objective of an indefinitely harvestable timber resource, which is not to say that its main commercial instigators were left without a hefty profit! Indeed, statistics show that these foreign owned companies went hell for leather to extract as much as possible in the final years of their leases during the 1950s.

The simplification of Thailand's magnificently diverse forests, a diversity celebrated in this book and whose loss in the face of forestry the author bitterly regrets, did not end with the decline of teak. It did not end either with the cancellation of logging concessions in 1989. For the "reforestation" that was the forester's next project was similarly based on creating a "scientific" and economically optimum forest, measured in terms of annual raw material output per unit area. To this end, eucalyptus, and most notably the species Eucalyptus camaldulensis, has been promoted as a monoculture over wide areas.

There was also simplification in the mission of the forest bureaucracy, which is forest conservation. Rather than basing conservation on the complex social ecology of long-standing forest use and occupation by farmers applying their cultural knowledge and practices to create complex resource systems, the revitalised mission of the Royal Forest Department as it reinvented itself as a protection agency has sought to create a simplified separation between forest and local people. On the other hand, the foresters' continued obsession with making a buck - or a baht - has meant that conservation has been heavily oriented towards, and undermined by, provisions for tourists and golfers.

The second recurrent theme in the history of Thai forestry is the displacement by forestry of villagers and their livelihoods in favour of commercial and industrial interests. In the early pursuit of profits from the teak forests of northern Thailand, foresters saw local farmers, and especially swiddeners, as enemies of the forest - primitive, inefficient and illicit users of a treasure too valuable to be left in unprofessional hands. From early in the 20th century, foresters were alarmed at the use of valuable teak forest lands for agriculture. They saw fire as a threat, and human occupation was entirely to be discouraged.

Legislation during the 1960s saw the creation of national parks and forest reserves, which enshrined the illegality of farmers' occupation of lands that many had farmed for generations. During the 1970s, the Thai state was reluctant to evict forest-dwelling communities for fear of alienation and delivery into the hands of the communist movement. But come the 1980s, such reluctance dissipated, and schemes such as the notorious khor jor kor at its peak threatened the eviction of up to six million poor farmers under a scheme whose expanded acronym ironically translates as, "Land Resettlement Programme for the Poor Living in Degraded Forest Reserves". The setting of targets to "reforest" land seen as "degraded" in order to achieve targets of 40 percent of the national territory under trees gave foresters, and the forest bureaucracy, a new imprimatur in the post-logging-ban era. The use of eucalyptus, a tree with a voracious appetite for water and a unique efficiency in converting it to industrial fibre, only added to the regressiveness of plantation forestry.

The story is the same for national park and wildlife sanctuary expansion. In six years after the 1989 logging ban, the area gazetted under national parks expanded by one-third. Inspired by the North American wilderness ideal, there was no room in the foresters' minds for people to live within park boundaries or subsist from renewable timber or non-timber forest products upon which their livelihoods had previously depended. Usher's most interesting point on this now well known and widely critiqued adoption of wilderness-inspired conservation is that it is not simply an inappropriate adoption of a model that "worked" somewhere else (the western US) but is inappropriate for Thailand. On the contrary, Usher presents us with an account of the dispossessions of Native Americans that were part and parcel of the early conservation efforts of the US parks system. In the person of forester George Ruhle, nemesis of Native Americans living in areas declared national parks and who later helped shape Thailand's protected area system and its approach to inconvenient pre-occupiers, Usher shows us how these ideologies and practices have been applied in Thailand with similar effects of dispossession and racially-based "forest cleansing" - a term borrowed from environmentalist Larry Lohmann.

Yet there is another part to Usher's story, one that ultimately leaves us with a sense of optimism. That is the dissent from without - and occasionally within - the forestry profession, which has tempered the worst excesses. Opposition by villagers to evictions has helped to set limits, and indeed the shift away from extractive forestry was triggered by the galvanising of social forces fed up with the greed and devastation involved in concession-based forestry. Within the profession, even Royal Forest Department founding director General Herbert Slade expressed reservations at the single-minded control of fire and the overcutting of the country's teak forests under his administration. Moreover, Veerawat Dheeraprasart has criticised the foresters' obsession with single species and has helped promote community forestry and more inclusive approaches to conservation. The more serious of the forestry researchers such as Pitaya Petmak sought to find ways for smallholders to benefit from fast-growing trees of large scale monoculture plantations, but found their work being applied in unintended and unfounded ways by those promoting large-scale industrial tree monoculture.

This is far from a story of Thai forestry in isolation. From the influence of German forest science and British commercial interests in the latter part of the 19th century, to Scandinavian influence both in terms of expertise and the multinational forestry conglomerate Jakko Poyry, the remote forests of Thailand have been reshaped under global forces of knowledge and capital. Many parts of this story have been told before, but Usher's book does a great service in bringing the parts into a single narrative. It is a journalist's narrative, and one with a mission and an impassioned critique to boot, but the extensive research behind it makes this a convincing and highly informative piece of work.

In her short concluding chapter on the future of Thai forestry, Usher sees something of an overdue paradigm shift away from the search for simplicity in favour of a more nuanced ecological approach. She also sees at long last a fruition of efforts towards a more socially inclusive forestry, as community forestry becomes enshrined in legislation, however flawed. Ironically, while these moves have come substantially from within Thailand, they are consistent with a recent nuancing of European and North American forestry, evident in the introduction of more ecologically inspired curricula of former bastions of conventional forestry education, notably University of Freiburg and Utah State University.

There is one significant shortcoming in the book, an ironic one which may be a product of the author's modesty. Usher underplays the role of her own profession in shaping events such as the logging ban. The media in Thailand has played a crucial role in helping articulate villagers' and NGOs' concerns on the national stage, but rather little is said of this between the covers of this volume. This complaint notwithstanding, Ann Danaiya Usher's highly readable and wide-ranging book is to be recommended for those interested not only in Thailand's forests, but also in fields as diverse as environmental thought and practice, the history of state-civil relations and the politics of science and bureaucracy.