In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Building Forestry in Mexico: Ambitious Regulations and Popular Evasions Over the last 200 years, governments all over the world have taken up the burden of knowing, managing, and protecting nature, accompanied by the task of developing economies and caring for citizens. Most citizens , of First or Third World countries alike, now take it for granted that the state is responsible for preventing environmental degradation and developing natural resources in the national interest. This is a relatively new event, a massive expansion of state presence that is manifested through towering glass and steel office buildings in capital cities or more modest offices in state capitals, through government technicians who travel through the countryside, and through the publication of national statistical reports on such matters as deforestation, timber production, or areas of forest fires. The state has become accountable as a certain kind of thing, as a more or less enduring, solid, and unitary knower of an environment that it is supposed to act on and protect. In this sense, the history of forestry in Mexico over the last century is similar to the efforts of other nation states around the world: governments from the United States (Worster 1979) to India (Sivaramakrishnan 2000), attempted, within their means, to control, develop, and protect agriculture and forests. New state institutions drew on internationally circulating scientific theories about forests and climate, scientific forestry (silviculture), and representations of fire and fire users as barbarous, dangerous, and uncontrollable. It would be easy then to see the Mexican case as yet another instance of a global environmental discourse arriving in a particular place, an overly familiar story, too often told. The local details of history and culture, the precise details of who was president and which official lost his job, may seem irrelevant to readers who are concerned with distant countries or not particularly interested in forests and the environment. Environmental policies move rapidly: Forestry is no longer the cutting edge of state environmental science, and readers 32 Chapter 2 may be more interested in biodiversity protection or perhaps with the promise that forests may store carbon and help reduce climate change. In this chapter, I will try to convince you that thinking about how forestry science came to Mexico and came to drive a regime of bureaucratic control is important to anyone who is interested in how states, bureaucracies , and technical knowledge come to affect each other. New regimes of bureaucratic control and technical knowledge are proposed for emerging technical and environmental problems of all kinds, from the problem of global climate change to the recent oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. How do such regimes get made and how do they acquire their stability? How does a scientific regime become embedded in collective imaginations and stabilized as a public fact and with what kinds of consequences? The particular history of Mexican forestry institutions helps us understand how making scientific knowledge and state-making go side by side, how the uneven, patchy, and particular spatial expansion of the Mexican forest service has brought relatively weak officials into encounters with indigenous forest dwellers who speak for relatively stable, enduring, and legally recognized forest communities. The history of Mexican forestry, therefore, has much to tell us for the larger questions of how states at other places and times have tried to tame knowledge and perform their authority, and to help us understand how a globally mobilized scientific knowledge is translated from the laboratory into distant places. Scientific knowledge does not travel smoothly into people’s daily lives: As we shall see, the political culture of Mexico, with its history of revolution, land reform, and environmental crisis, has powerfully influenced how scientific knowledge about forests and public understandings of the Mexican state have come to be produced. The details of government documents and reports, the precise content of forestry regulations, and the histories of government offices and model forests have influenced the credibility of official knowledge and the authority of the state. Particular places and documents, offices, and biographies are not necessarily small: On the contrary, it is by asking how these particulars are folded into what we ordinarily take to be large-scale categories that we can begin to see why local environmental and institutional histories may affect the destinies of states and of scientific knowledge. Mexican forestry starts from particular places: humble buildings, particular government offices, and geographical locations. These beginnings have powerfully affected what it means to imagine and claim control of forests in the...

Share