Forests Are Gold

"McElwee’s description of environmental rule in Vietnam helps readers look beyond simplistic explanations of environmental policy to see the more complex processes at play in defining and intervening in various social and environmental issues. . . McElwee’s book will be of great interest to those who focus on environmental policy and the interplay of social-ecological systems. Recommended."

"Forests Are Gold offers a timely analysis that will appeal to scholars far beyond Southeast Asia. . . . It should inspire upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars to rethink assumptions about the virtues of environmentalism by showing us how such reasoning has never been just about trees.—"

"A wonderful and timely addition to the literature on political ecology. . . . In presenting the dilemmas and projects of forest conservation over the last century, she convincingly demonstrates that if forests can and do act beyond humans, the generativity of these activities is lost on those who seek to more efficiently administer them."

"Mirroring what the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously said about war, McElwee shows us that ‘environmental rule’ is politics by other means. Deeply informed by archival knowledge, intensive fieldwork, a knowledge of elite discourse, and a gift for theory, McElwee is, by turns, a consummate historian, botanist, sociologist, economist, and anthropologist. Inspiring, path-breaking, and sophisticated, Forests Are Gold will make big waves in Vietnam and in political ecology more generally"

"Forests Are Gold takes us on a historical trek through different eras of 'environmental rule' influencing Vietnam’s little-known forest histories. McElwee deftly demonstrates the articulations of local and transnational forest imaginaries, socio-natural histories, and entanglements of culture, nature, and power."

"Very interesting and thought provoking, Forests Are Gold presents fascinating details about forest politics in Vietnam. This book will be a source of reference on Vietnam for some years."

"This meticulously documented and groundbreaking study reveals the ways in which the classification of forests is tied in to regimes of power, which in turn frames the political and economic meaning of what we so often assume are righteous ecological and environmental improvement projects."