ABSTRACT:
Wholesale anthropogenic removal of the forest cover through fire, exacerbated by low biotic resilience, still forms the best explanation to account for the landscape of Madagascar's denuded highlands. That construction must include a plant cover before human settlement tht was punctuated with non-forested expanses caused by episodic non-human disturbance. Human entry into the region, accompanied later by their cattle, constituted the major motivation for transforming the forest into grassland just as it is today. Use of fire in that transformation was dominant over any other means of clearing. It is what paleotechnic humans ahve done everywhere and what Malagasy continue to do. Burning has been as integral a part of Madagascar's ecological system, as it was in the North American prairies. A different vision for that soil that developed under those artificially created grassy swards of the Midwest appeared in the nineteenth century. Although the grassland soils of Madagascar are much poorer, there is no reason why the Malagasy cannot also effect their own land sue transformation.
Landscape change in Highland Madagascar has two kinds of narratives: material and discursive. Both sides of that debate have framed it in terms of either a predominant forest cover or as a forest savanna mixture. My research, which combined a sdtudy of the historic documentation as well as the patterns and processes observed in the field, has interpreted a process of deforestation over a millennium. Discursive analysis offers reflection on the researcher's own practices and self-justifying rhetoric mroe than it provides enlightenment about causation. Since factual data is incomplete and subject to varying interpretation, general assumptions have taken hold that previous understandings were wrong. Colonialist mentalities and the Clementsian climax have been brought to bear to explain why these "old views" could have prevailed. These disparagements, less based on actual research but on what must be correct because it is the prevailing idea, have led to a kind of tyranny expressed in teh recurring allusions to "hegemonic discourse" and "received wisdom." Use of those expressions form an intimidation tactic to reinforce the social construction of environmental meaning. A peculiar aspect of how humans think is that most scholars and scientists reinforce the systems of thought which dominate their epoch. In due time that mix of ideas will also be contested, overturned, and its own idées reçues discarded as hopelessly obsolete. If, on the other hand, there is the will to maintain a coexistence of paradigms, a more fertile trans-generational and cross-disciplinary information exchange on competing claims about reality might result. My aim in this paper has been to introduce that multivocality into the debate. The nature/culture interplay is too important to insist on one acceptable way of thinking. Instead, the special insights of every age can be juxtaposed to constitute the best of what we can learn and to temper biased assertions.
