The author seeks to bring together environmental anthropology and history to frame the place of forests in humans’ lives, from a political ecology point of view. He does this by reflecting on his personal experiences in Northeast India, Kenya, and Sweden.

Drawing on interviews with the managers of 56 internationally adjoining protected areas in 18 countries in the Americas, the study focuses on the link between land use change and environmental change, and on three adaptation strategies, namely diversification, pooling, and out-migration. It suggests that the impact of adaptation depends on the adaptation strategy chosen.

Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.