Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam by Pamela D. McElwee (review)

Pamela McElwee and I both started working in Vietnam in 1996, a time when “forests were on everyone’s mind” (p. xi). We started studying two sides of the same coin, or rather, two sides of the “same” piece of (high)-land: I researched agricultural colonization in Lam Dong; she was looking at deforestation and forest management in Ha Tinh. Her book is based on extensive fieldwork and archival research both in France and in Vietnam, as well as on various government, grey, and academic literature in Vietnamese, English, and, at times, French. Thus, Forests are Gold is the product of a long (20 years!) maturing thought on what is going on in Vietnam around “Trees, People” and forests. This book deservedly won the 2017 EUROSEAS (European Association for Southeast Asian Studies) Social Science Book Prize. Unlike so many books published worldwide, it represents so much more than a collection of past articles published in journals and assembled to sell a book. Actually, McElwee has never before used in her publications a concept that constitutes the thread of her book: “environmental rule.” During all these years, she witnessed processes of deforestation, afforestation, land use transformations, protected areas creation, and migration of lowland Kinh (majority Vietnamese people) through the implementation of various government programs, from sedentarization in the 1990s to the more recent “payment for ecosystem services” (PES), and all the impacts on the lives and identities of ethnic minorities. What connects the dots? According to McElwee, it is “environmental rule.” It “occurs when states, organizations, or individuals use environmental or ecological reasons as justification for what is really a concern with social planning, and thereby intervene in such disparate areas as land ownership, population settlement, labor availability, or markets” (p. 5).

To make her point, McElwee uses various theoretical tools, including the concept of governmentality (Foucault), the scope of which she broadens through the use of the actor-network theory: it “gives us a more complete picture of how environmental rule happens than governmentality alone” (p. 23). Her study “falls . . . into a field known as political ecology” (p. 12), though the task (to political ecologists), quoting Bruce Braun, is “to understand ‘the underlying processes through which particular global assemblages of nature and society are produced’” (Bruce Braun, “Environmental Issues: Global Natures in the Space of Assemblage.” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5: 644–54, at 647). I dare say: this is the bread and butter of geography! Regardless of the discipline to which her book contributes the most—her endeavors are clearly multidisciplinary—what is important is that throughout five chapters, McElwee tracks how knowledge is produced and valued. Through what she calls the “knowledge networks” (p. 182), she tracks how it creates and defines problems, how it shapes politics and programs, and how it sways “individual subjectivities” at all levels. That is where you can find power relations and their systemic organization. To understand its evolution since the 1990s, McElwee puts forest management into historical perspectives, tracking the emergence of environmental rule through the vagaries of colonialism during the French era (1858–1954) (Chapter 1), the communist management period (1945–86) (Chapter 2), and the đổi mới era that started “market socialism” in 1986, which eventually developed into neoliberalism after the end of the U.S. embargo. During the last thirty years or so, environmental rule in Vietnam has followed the quick pace of socioeconomic transformations. Changing definitions, changing rules, and changing management have contributed to the “emergence of ‘deforestation’” (Chapter 3, p. 100), the switch of focus on reforesting the “bare hills” (Chapter 4), and eventually, the view of trees as carbon accumulators (Chapter 5).

In the end, it seems that what I would call the “complex geographical system” of environmental rule changes through the course of time more in response to market stimuli than any other power, even when it is filtered through the state apparatus. But given the...