- Forest, Field, and Fallow: Selections by William M. Denevan ed. by Antoinette M. G. A. WinklerPrins and Kent Mathewson
Forest, Field, and Fallow: Selections by William M. Denevan.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021. xxii + 451 pp. Tables, illustrations, notes, references, and index. $169.99 cloth (ISBN 978-3-030-42479-4); $129.00 electronic (ISBN 978-3-030-42480-0).
This anthology captures much of William M. Denevan’s lasting contributions to our understanding of the geography of Latin America and the Caribbean. The editors have selected two or three of Denevan’s publications for each of eight thematic sections: Historical Demography, Agricultural Landforms, Cultural Plant Geography, Human Environmental Impacts, Indigenous Agroecology, Tropical Agriculture, Livestock and Landscape, and Synthetic Contributions. Those seventeen reprints include ten journal articles, six book chapters, and an excerpt from a monograph that together, while only a small fraction of Denevan’s corpus of more than 100 publications, convey his most salient research. Besides the editors, nine contributors have written brief introductory essays for the eight sections to provide insights into how each reprint fits into the scholarly context of its time and retains continuing significance. One of the authors of those essays numbers among the many doctoral students Denevan supervised at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all but one of the dissertations on Latin America or the Caribbean, signaling a second aspect of his lasting intellectual impact on our field. Other former doctoral students contribute four additional essays—from the volume introduction and a biographical sketch though a pair of more personal reflections on Denevan as a scholar and mentor—that reveal other ways he impacted our field, including his role in CLAG (the Conference of Latin American Geography). A complete chronological bibliography (1956–2019) and thorough index complete the volume.
On the one hand, the publication of this anthology should surprise no one. Denevan has made significant contributions to several of the major research problems of geography and allied disciplines. His scholarship typically marries long-term empirical field research with methodological innovation in order to address problems of major theoretical interest. For example, his research on Indigenous peoples of the Amazon from precolonial times through the present resulted in his seminal role in reconceptualizing [End Page 222] their relationship to nature, replacing a Eurocentric belief in primitive peoples eking out an existence in a primaeval forest with a better understanding of how their sophisticated cultural ecologies have shaped vegetation, biodiversity, and soils. Moreover, several of his twenty doctoral students went on to produce many more PhDs focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, an intellectual lineage by now four generations deep and approaching 150 members. His support for them and an even larger number of graduate students and young scholars ensures continuing interest in his scholarship.
On the other hand, the daunting challenge of capturing Denevan’s broad scholarly impact in a single volume renders the appearance of this anthology somewhat shocking. The editors have nonetheless succeeded and, moreover, devised an elegantly alliterated, memorable title—Forest, Field, and Fallow. The editors might not have included the full breadth of Denevan’s scholarship, one omission being his publications on the history of geography, focused on Carl O. Sauer, the Berkeley School, and CLAG. And they might have included one relatively minor theme that, no matter how much appreciated by those who specialize in Livestock and Landscape, never formed a leading aspect of his research program. Nevertheless, the editors included the key themes that encompass Denevan’s contributions and a selection of publications for each that allows readers to appreciate their significance, here summarized under the rubrics of forest, field, and fallow.
Forests early and persistently preoccupied Denevan, especially the Amazon rainforest. In a 1973 Professional Geographer article reprinted in the section on Human Environmental Impacts, he became one of the first scholars to call attention to its deforestation. Moreover, he correctly diagnosed the cause as misguided development projects that involved road building and cattle ranching. Although he had first seen the Amazon less than two decades before, as a reporter for the Peruvian Times of Lima, he already recognized how the ongoing destruction...