The Dictionary of Human Geography

Los Angeles, that adopted Fordist principles
at an early stage (see Christopherson and
Storper, 1986); and also a gendereddivision
of labour, in which the place of men was seen
to be the factory and women the home
(McDowell, 1991). jf

Suggested reading
Murray (1989).

forecast The construction of an estimated
value for an observation unit, where the obser-
vation might be for a place, region, individual
or time-period. The forecast may be generated
by several quantitativemodelsand methods
(see prediction), and the term is usually
employed for estimates applying to observa-
tions outside the group used in the model’s
calibration: it is an ‘out-of-sample’ estimate,
most likely for a future time-period, or, in
a ‘spatial forecast’, for a region not included
in the estimation process (see space__time
forecasting models). lwh

forestry Most commonly, forestry refers to
the development and application of knowledge
and practices aimed at managing forests for
human use. The word has a scientific conno-
tation befitting the evolution of specialized,
increasingly technical and professionalized
knowledge about trees and forests aimed at
their intentional manipulation, and of the par-
ticular emergence of silviculture as the science
of growing trees. As a science, forestry
emerged largely from German and French
antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, from Japanese and Chinese prece-
dents in the intentional growth and manage-
ment of forests for wood, and from early-
twentieth-century Scandinavian contributions,
particularly in the areas of provenance, seed
source and the intentional cultivation of seed
stock for plantation forestry (Boyd and
Prudham, 2003). This ostensibly technical
field of knowledge, widely institutionalized
under the auspices of forestry departments
and programmes in universities and colleges,
as well as in state agencies at variousscales
from local to national, and propagated via
scientific journals, is part of what is conveyed
by the term ‘forestry’. However, several ques-
tions arise in the very invocation of this
specialized term, not least: What is a forest
(and is it merely a collection of trees)? Which
particular human uses dominate in shaping
the trajectory of forest management? These
ostensibly simple questions lead to the realiza-
tion that forests and forestry, whatever else

they are, comprise sites of struggle where

interacting and contending processes of social

and ecological reproduction are partially

constituted. For instance, the management

of forests emphasizing the reproduction of

commercially valuable tree species, resolved

primarily at the localized level of discrete

stands of forests, has been the dominant prac-

tice of scientific forestry in the European tradi-

tion (epitomized by the German notion

ofNormalbaum). This approach was widely

institutionalized in botheuropeand North

America between the mid-nineteenth and

mid-twentieth centuries, and has increasingly

been exported around the world. However,

critical examination of thisparadigmreveals

that it is hardly ecologically or socially inno-

cent, prescribing the elimination of older trees,

for instance, as well as biological organisms

whose existence depends on habitat com-

promised by conversion to plantations (e.g.

the northern spotted owl in western North

America), while at the same time privileging

commercial timber interests over competing

human values (e.g. hunting, fishing, trapping,

gathering,recreation, agriculture etc.). All

of this reinforces the need to avoid reifying

apolitical renderings of forests that would

naturalize them as non-human landscapes.

Rather, as works such as E.P. Thompson’s

Whigs and hunters (1975) demonstrates, it

was not so long ago even in English history

that forests were decidedly populated and

contested, not least by conflictingproperty

claims. Thus, as Willems-Braun (1997) more

recently argued in the context of First Nation

struggles in British Columbia, Canada, the

apparently empty lands typical of scientific

forestry representations are often sites of past

and ongoing forced removals and exclusions.

In short, despite its technical connotations and

widespread professionalization, forestry is a

complex categorical invocation of attempts to

manage complexpolitical ecologies,where

trees, humans and other organisms interact,

and where human attempts at intentional man-

agement rely on constructions of what is desir-

able and useful that can be (and are) politicized

all the way down to the level of what constitutes

a tree, and what does and ought to count as

forest cover (Robbins, 2001). sp

Suggested reading

Demeritt (2001b); Scott (1998).

foundationalism The assumption that

knowledge claims must be grounded in a

source of certainty that cannot be called into

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_F Final Proof page 261 31.3.2009 1:20pm

FOUNDATIONALISM