This book engages debates on the timing and location of the agricultural revolution by focusing on the process of enclosure in the southern English counties of Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, and Wiltshire.

In an era when federal ownership and control of natural resources is under suspicion, conservation trusts have emerged into the policy limelight after more than a century in the shadows. This book asks whether conservation trusts can live up to their promise as an efficient and responsive environmental protection policy.

Through a series of ethnographic studies that range from Papua New Guinea to Siberia, Brazil to Namibia, Ethnographies of Conservation argues that the problem is not the disappearance of “pristine nature” or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, critical attention would be better turned on discourses of “primitiveness” and “pristine nature,” so prevalent within conservation ideology.

This book examines the various practices—social, discursive, and political—through which Canada’s West Coast forests have been given meaning and made the site of intense political and ideological struggle.