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Forest Land-Use Legacy Research Exhibits Aspects of Critical Physical Geography

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The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between two emergent and related areas of interdisciplinary scholarship: forest land-use legacy (LUL) research and Critical Physical Geography (CPG). We review the peer-reviewed literature on LULs, provide a focused analysis of studies exploring LUL effects in forest ecosystems, and explore the relevance of this research to CPG. Specifically, we analyze the use of biophysical and human data in forest LUL research and the presence of intellectual tenets of CPG, namely, transdisciplinarity, reflexivity, and power and justice. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how adoption of a CPG approach can inform future research on forest LULs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although scholarly use of the term “land-use legacies” is relatively new, interest in human-landscape agency has long been pursued in environmental history, ecological anthropology, paleoecology, and geography. Awareness that environmental conditions are products of past societal interactions is also a unifying theme in historical ecology (McClenachan et al. 2015) and land change science (Turner et al. 2007).

  2. 2.

    All Web of Science article searches were conducted on May 6 2016. Studies were defined as having a substantive focus on land-use legacies if the term and its variants (e.g. [“land-use” OR “land use”] AND [“legacies” OR “legacy”]) appeared in the article title or topic.

  3. 3.

    Studies were determined to have a forest focus if the study site was currently or formerly heavily treed, vegetation status was part of the study, or forest was a major land cover assessed.

  4. 4.

    No overlap existed in the 20 most frequently cited articles which were published between 1994 and 2014, and the 20 most recent articles which were published between 2014 and 2016.

  5. 5.

    Criteria for analyzing reflexive research practices in LUL scholarship are restricted to the researchers’ positionality. This is a narrower conceptualization of reflexivity than that discussed by Tadaki et al. (2015), who appeal for the development of a reflexive critical disposition toward the politics of knowledge production in physical geography more broadly, and not just within an integrative Critical Physical Geography subfield.

  6. 6.

    Although positivistic assumptions also underpin research in the social sciences (della Porta and Keating 2008), post-positivistic practices like reflexivity emerged as a response to positivistic research practices. Social theory-informed approaches are now common in the social sciences where the degree to which the world, “is real and objective, endowed with an autonomous existence outside the human mind and independent of the interpretation given to it by the subject (della Porta and Keating 2008, 22),” has received greater attention than in the natural sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, NY, USA

    David Robertson & Steve Tulowiecki

  2. Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Chris Larsen

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  1. David Robertson
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  2. Chris Larsen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Rebecca Lave

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Christine Biermann

  3. Université de Lausanne, Gryon, Switzerland

    Stuart N. Lane

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Robertson, D., Larsen, C., Tulowiecki, S. (2018). Forest Land-Use Legacy Research Exhibits Aspects of Critical Physical Geography. In: Lave, R., Biermann, C., Lane, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_11

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