Wildfires as legacies of agropastoral abandonment: Gendered litter raking and managed burning as historic fire prevention practices in the Monte Pisano of Italy.

Agropastoral practices that historically reduced the flammability of Mediterranean landscapes are poorly understood due to state prohibitions and lack of scientific interest. Oral histories, analysis of agronomical writings, transect walks, and ethnographic study of fire managers and community members in the Monte Pisano of Italy, find legacies of traditional agropastoral practices in present-day landscapes. Forest leaf litter raking, largely carried out by women, combined with fire wood cutting and burning to greatly reduce fire risk.

Scandals, audits, and fictions: Linking climate change to Mexican forests.

Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction - Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation policies collapsed in the face of politicized audits and stories about corruption; markets for environmental services continued with little criticism, stabilized in part by the charisma of Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation policies.

Unlikely alliances: encounters between state science, nature spirits, and indigenous industrial forestry in Mexico, 1926-2008.

Indigenous community leaders and conservationists in Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that deforestation causes streams to dry up and threatens rainfall, authorizing popular mobilizations against industrial logging. This belief was produced by a combination of indigenous beliefs in nature spirits and early-twentieth-century state-sponsored desiccation theory, which was brought to the Valley of Mexico in the 1920s. Desiccation theory acquires political significance because it allows rural people to build political and epistemic alliances that bypass industrial forestry institutions and find sympathetic urban audiences and environmentalist allies, undermining state claims to reason and scientific authority.