Customer Reviews

Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests

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This book examines the potential for sustainable hunting in tropical rainforests. It's an important question, since these forests face the threat of being cut down, their wildlife hunting out of existence, and their people turned into urban slum-dwellers. Though the editors give it the old college try, however, this book doesn't really succeed in telling us how to improve the prospects for sustainable hunting in such cases, to say nothing of dealing with the external threats such as deforestation, global warming, and urbanization and industrialization.

The introduction is really very good, and usefully explores the key question of sustainable hunting. The authors are very careful to think about analytical categories and definitions, and they make a strong case that we need to consider the social context of hunting: traditional hunting versus hunting with modern technology, sport hunting versus hunting out of necessity, and subsistence hunting versus commercial hunting.

The conclusion, also written by the editors, also makes a very helpful contribution. The core of the conclusion summarizes in about 50 points the main conclusions of the contributors. These are organized by categories such as the social-cultural, institutional, and economic influences on sustainable hunting in tropical forests.

Unfortunately, what makes the conclusion helpful is what weakens the book as a whole. It lacks a strong analytical framework or theory, which forces the authors to cobble everything together at the end. It consists overwhelmingly of single cases, with no apparent attention to case selection issues. The authors of each chapter give no evidence of having read the other chapters, even those on the same topic. The editors work valiantly to summarize the findings, but these are pure summaries of facts not attempts to bring them together and make sense of the patterns.

The book also does not make many concessions to other scholars who don't do the same kind of work, whether biological or economic modeling for example. The book is very ethnographic and anthropological in its sensibility, even in those chapters written by biologists. In addition, most of the chapters are not very policy oriented, despite the apparent focus of the book. (In fairness, some studies of the Congo explicitly consider possible policy responses, as do a few other chapters.)

In sum, I was impressed by the editors' written contributions but it's evident that they were unable to whip their contributors into shape. There are a *lot* of contributors - - 1000 pages spread among 25 chapters - - so that makes much of the book a long slog in details about this or that forest scattered around the world.

For anyone interested in wildlife conservation and habitat destruction - this book is a must read! The crisis in bushmeat in Africa is mounting - and among other things this book gives the reader a view from the inside, on the ground in Africa.