The New Forester (Paperback)

In general, subsistence economies in developing countries are biomass economies. Housing itself, energy, furniture and utensils are still biomass products. The yield of trees and shrubs provides thatch, fodder and a host of other products which serve each family household. Woody biomass yields food for people and animals.;Deforestation is an erosion of local entitlement to subsistence resources as well as being an environmental problem that destroys local, national and global common property resources. The challenge for foresters and other rural development professionals is to build new landscapes which provide a range of biomass products to local users. This text will contribute to that task by helping professionals see new ooportunities by working with, not against, local people.;Foresters have traditionally increased wood supplies with large scale approaches that favoured monoculture plantations and the policing of forests and woodlands to address wood removal. Their rationale has been to plant as many trees as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, and all too often, decisions to spend large sums of money planting trees have been taken without considering other options. Fortunately a re-thinking of the biomass problem is under way, and this new thinking and its options are what this book describes.;This text is, of course, addressed to foresters, but its practical approach is worth the attention of all rural development practitioners, as well as individuals within a range of professional backgrounds from engineering to sociology.