Fenner School Public Seminar
1-2pm Thursday 25th March 2010
Fenner School Forestry Lecture Theatre, Forestry building 48

Dispossession and Forest Conservation

John Dargavel and Edwina Loxton
Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU.

Dispossession is the obverse, the hidden face of forest conservation and the struggles to create national parks and protect forest biodiversity in special reserves. In this seminar, we sketch its presence from mediaeval Germany and imperial India to the impacts of global environmentalism in Tanzania and the Sundarbans, and to the national parks and wild rivers movements in present-day Australia.

Dispossession has led to peasant wars, encroachments and protests, and attempts in Australia to offset the impacts with structural adjustment payments. The history of the intimate relationship of forest conservation with dispossession displays the increasing and extending scale of state power.