The Relationship between Resource Definition and Scale: Considering the Forest

In The Commons at the Millennium, eds. Dolsak and Ostrom, MIT Press, forthcoming

We cannot only visualize, but actually see, images of the entire global with the help of satellite technology. Through models of global climate change we can predict what will happen if there is deforestation of the tropical moist rainforests. Armed with the knowledge of the global benefit of the forests, individuals, groups, and governments from the Northern Hemisphere have exerted pressure on countries in the Southern Hemisphere to preserve a resource (rain forests) to which the North has no authoritative claim, or do they? Is there now a global scale authoritative aspect to defining tropic rain forests as global resources of biodiversity and carbon sequestration? I assert that these demands are a function not just of scientific knowledge, but of the expansion of our knowledge of scale to the global level. From the smallest village where women gather firewood from a grove of trees to the Amazon Rainforest, called the "lungs of the world" (Foster 1990:36), forests exist across all scales. This chapter examines the implications of scale for forest definition and management.