Pauline von Hellermann

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Anthropology

In August 2006 the chief of Udo, a small town in Edo State, Nigeria, was deposed and the town taken over by the ‘youth’. This event presents the classic fall of a ‘big man’ who had lost support, but also involved long-standing chieftaincy rivalries, electoral competition in the run up to the 2007 elections, and conflict over a nearby oil palm and r...

Repeat photography has emerged as a popular tool for visualizing climate change yet has been employed relatively little by visual and environmental anthropologists. Based on research in Tanzania’s South Pare Mountains, this article shows how repeat photography can be a powerful method for environmental anthropologists both practically and epistemol...

In July 2019, Eastbourne Borough Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Eastbourne carbon neutral by 2030. In order to achieve this, citizens together with Council created a unique model of council-citizen collaborative climate governance, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EAN). EAN’s main strategy has been the setting up of...

Despite thousands of higher education institutions (HEIs) having issued Climate Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to ‘business-as-usual’. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so severe as to threaten the persistence of organized society, and thus HEIs themselves. This paper explores why a...

In response to high-profile activist campaigns raising public awareness of the destructive effects of large-scale oil palm plantations on tropical rainforests, wildlife and local communities, the palm oil sector has put considerable effort and resources into ensuring "sustainable", "deforestation-free" palm oil production (and thereby countering ne...

This entry outlines the three main contributions that anthropology has made to the understanding of deforestation since the 1980s: an appreciation of varying local perceptions of and experiences with deforestation; a revision of the understanding of the causes and extent of deforestation; and a critical engagement with deforestation narratives and...

This paper explores the trees that shape the Pare landscape in Tanzania, and the multiple meanings attached to them by local people. Three main groups of 'symbolic' trees are identified. First, indigenous trees that constitute hundreds of sacred groves dotted across the landscape symbolising communal identity, history, and belonging. Second, fast g...

Governance failure and corruption are increasingly identified as key causes of tropical deforestation. In Nigeria's Edo State, once the showcase of scientific forestry in West Africa, large-scale forest conversion and the virtual depletion of timber stocks are invariably attributed to recent failures in forest management, and are seen as yet anothe...

When examining the records of colonial foresters in Southern Nigeria today, one is struck by the diversity of their views on forest ecology, and in particular on the impact of farming on forests. On the one hand, foresters repeatedly describe the destruction caused by shifting cultivation, so widely condemned in colonial circles at the time. On the...

Governing Africa's Forests in a Globalized World. Edited by GermanLaura A., KarsentyAlain and TianiAnne-Marie. Pp. 413. (Earthscan, London, 2010.) £65.00, ISBN 978-1-84407-756-4, hardback. - Volume 43 Issue 2 - Pauline von Hellermann

It is generally assumed that the coastal forest zone one finds in vegetation maps of West Africa was, indeed, covered by forest, until 20th century population increase and development caused rapid deforestation. This assumption has been challenged in recent years, with palynological, archaeological, ecological and historical research pointing towar...

Colonial forest reservation in the Benin Division of southern Nigeria was remarkably extensive, with reserves taking up almost 65 per cent of the Division by 1937. This paper explores both the various strategies employed by the colonial government in order to bring about large scale reservation and the role of reservation in changing land politics....

Environmental degradation in Africa is often linked to management failure and political decline. One example of this is the dominant understanding of the unfolding of Taungya farming in Southern Nigeria in recent decades. An agro-forestry method of afforestation introduced by the colonial Forest Department in the 1920s and widespread by the 1960s,...