This is another crumb on the forest path begun a few days ago. [via A&L Daily]

I was lucky to be at Rackham’s debut, at a conference 30 years ago. He was a shy young Cambridge botanist then, and was addressing the seemingly uncontroversial subject of The Oak Tree in Historic Times. But his paper turned out to be a bombshell, a clinical demolition of foresters’ paternalism and an awesomely evidenced account of the fact that, for most of human history, trees had been regarded and used as a self- renewing resource. He described how he had measured all the main timbers in the original part of his college, Corpus Christi (there were 1,249, mostly small squared trees about 7ins in diameter), and calculated how frequently such a building could have been created from the renewable oaks of an ordinary Cambridgeshire wood. He blew away the notion that felling trees destroyed woodland.

In the half-dozen books he has written since, he has revolutionised our understanding of historical ecology. In sharp and exquisite English, and with a historical intuition as strong as his scientific rigour, he has laid waste the conventional wisdom of foresters, the ideologies of theoretical naturalists, the “pseudo-histories” of historians. His simple — and to him sacrosanct — precept is that the final arbiter in all arguments about woodland must be the trees and woods themselves, in all their dynamic, mutable, particular detail.

In the foreword to Woodlands he lays out his credo — that trees are not “merely part of the theatre of landscape in which human history is played out, or the passive recipients of whatever destiny humanity foists on them . . . (they are) actors in the play”, with multiple interactions with time, and all other organisms, including people — then concludes, disarmingly, “For good or ill, I have no particular theory to promote.” Well, if that is not a theory, or at least a manifesto, I do not know what is.

This is from a review of WOODLANDS by Oliver Rackham. I'm reminded of the work of James Fairhead and Melissa Leach discussed a bit in the old post Mystified Obscurity

This paper examines the contrast between the formulation of problems in development policy, and the perspectives of villagers whose views have been subjugated and everyday activities criminalised, within this formulation. We attempt to identify the conditions in which certain demonstrably false ideas about environmental change have come to acquire validity in policy circles, while others, more correct and espoused by inhabitants, have been excluded from consideration and investigation.

Fairhead and Leach point out how the false narrative evolved, beginning with the narrow interests of colonizers in selected exportable resources such as rubber, followed by a series of poor governance and education practices that were also urban based and driven primarily by the needs of those urban people for power, prestige and money. Once that system developed it was self-perpetuating, a classic example of the destructive combination of consensus and the sunk cost fallacy. They were wrong but all in agreement, and so incapable of thinking contrary thoughts that threatened their existence.

Left as an exercise for the imaginative is the application of the combination of consensus and the sunk cost fallacy to other current issues. In each case we would do well to be suspicious of consensus, and gleefully cut our losses when it is clear that this is rational. Group consciousness - though created with great effort and cost, and a comfort for the timid and dim - is always a threat, a wreck looking for a place to happen.