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Society & Natural Resources: An

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A Review of: “Greenough, Paul, and

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Nature in the
Global South: Environmental Projects in
South and Southeast Asia”
a
Reviewed by Marla R. Emery
a
Northern Research Station , USDA Forest Service, Burlington,
Vermont, USA
Published online: 23 Nov 2006.

To cite this article: Reviewed by Marla R. Emery (2006) A Review of: “Greenough, Paul, and Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing. Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia”,
Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal, 19:10, 939-940

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ISSN: 0894-1920 print=1521-0723 online
DOI: 10.1080/08941920600903458

Book Review

Greenough, Paul, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Nature in the Global South: Envir-
onmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003. 428 pp. $24.95 (paper), $89.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8223-3149-7.

Reviewed by Marla R. Emery

Northern Research Station
USDA Forest Service
Burlington, Vermont, USA
Downloaded by [Selcuk Universitesi] at 06:15 12 January 2015

Modernist development projects often do great violence to the environments in

which they are implemented. Environmental projects frequently disregard the wel-
fare and livelihoods of human communities where they are realized. Since the release
of the Brundtland Report in 1987, sustainable development has been the buzz word
for an approach that seeks to reconcile concern for human well-being with concern
for the environment. The discourse of sustainable development has become a ubiqui-
tous feature of project descriptions emanating from entities as diverse as interna-
tional lending institutions and local nongovernmental organizations. However,
critical scholars question the possibility of arriving at socially and ecologically
benign outcomes while development remains a central objective. Such critiques are
countered with the objection that they reflect, at best, the naive romanticizations
of privileged individuals in the North who would consign the global South to a con-
tinued position of poverty and disadvantage.
Nature in the Global South enters this debate by examining environmental pro-
jects and the production of nature in South and Southeast Asia. Greenough, Tsing,
and their contributors trace the history of nature–culture relations in the two regions
and describe recent environmental projects. In particular, they present the entrances,
exits, and recastings of discourses and practices from colonial-era scientific manage-
ment to the current sustainable development paradigm. Questions of scale and
agency are central as several authors examine the ways in which global forces
encounter national and local actors, with attention to the accidental and intentional
ways in which resistance and negotiation by all parties alter the terms of engagement.
The production of actual landscapes, populated by particular floral and faunal
assemblages, is a decidedly secondary theme for the volume as a whole but plays
a central role in a few of the essays.
Greenough and Tsing introduce the edited volume by imagining a ‘‘Museum of
Human Welfare,’’ through which they narrate a historicized grand tour of environ-
mental struggles in South and Southeast Asia in the late twentieth century. Delving
beneath the narrative, they briefly summarize Foucault’s power–knowledge concept
and establish the centrality to the book of perspectival knowledge (that is, knowledge
that is partial and positioned). The book is then divided into two parts, each with
paired thematic sections. The three essays that comprise the ‘‘Tropical Knowledges’’
section document the ways in which colonial science defined, demarcated, and
disciplined the two regions and nature–culture relations within them in ways that still

939
 940 Book Review

echo through contemporary discourses and practice. In a section entitled ‘‘Rural

landscaping,’’ three papers explore the processes by which discourses produce and
legitimate the power to change landscapes, as well as the means to resist those
changes. The second part of the book, ‘‘Toward Livable Environments: Compro-
mises and Campaigns,’’ begins with three case studies of resistance to state and glo-
bal power–knowledge complexes, stressing the ways in which these are continuously
negotiated and remade. In the final section, ‘‘Uneasy Allies,’’ three authors deepen
the examination of the ways in which variously positioned actors participate in
the ongoing production and construction of the terms of engagement in environmen-
tal struggles.
Nature in the Global South develops detailed case studies in a strong theoretical
context. As such, it would make an excellent reader for graduate seminars. It also
will be of interest to critical scholars of nature–culture relations, development, and
natural resources management, as well as those who specialize in South and South-
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east Asia. Papers addressing joint forest management in South Asia will be of inter-
est to students of community forestry and adaptive forest management in the global
North, as well.
Readers should be forewarned that the habitual density of discourse analysis
makes some chapters hard slogging. However, other chapters present their argu-
ments in a clear and engaging manner, demonstrating that work in the Foucaultian
tradition does not require a tortured writing style. More substantively, Greenough
and Tsing state in their introduction that nature, too, is an actor in environmental
struggles. However, nonhuman nature has very little presence in this collection of
essays. Given the long-noted and virtually ubiquitous nature of this oversight in
the political ecology literature, perhaps it can be viewed as a general challenge for
the field rather than a lack in this particular book.
Nature in the Global South is a solid piece of scholarship that interrogates the
concept of sustainable development in South and Southeast Asia. It is also a guard-
edly hopeful project, joining the ranks of literature that documents agency within
structured processes. The editors’ distrust of ideological solutions, combined with
convictions about perspectival knowledge, prevents them from offering any simple
prescriptions for meeting ‘‘the linked challenges of environmental integrity and
social justice for local resource users’’ (3). Indeed, Greenough and Tsing seem to
foresee an ongoing process of ‘‘destroying ecologies and communities with an equal
vigor’’ (3). However, they, together with their collaborators in this volume, highlight
emerging voices and strategies that are creating new, if not, just possibly, improved
ways of addressing the tensions inherent in contemporary environmental dilemmas.