The Magna Carta Manifesto,* a book written by Peter Linebaugh, has spurred all sorts of thoughts. Primary among those is simply my learning that a companion volume to the Magna Carta itself exists. The Magna Carta is a central and well acknowledged statement of western philosophy about political and human rights ‘issued’ in 1215 by King John of England under pressure from his feudal barons. It is a document that has had vast influence on human thinking about governance and rights (though Linebaugh sees its benign influence sadly falling away). The companion volume, of which I have never before heard,** is called the Great Charter of the Forest. Linebaugh’s book examines this Charter in detail, translating the strange English of the 13th century into modern day usages, and explaining/interpreting the significance of its contents.
As I read—and I have not yet finished the book—I find fascinating attention to gender issues, a topic rarely, until quite recently, addressed within the forestry community. The Charter speaks of people’s, including explicitly women’s, rights to take ‘estover’ (‘necessaries allowed by law’ or ‘subsistence wood products’) from forests. The Charter’s words make explicit a variety of rights to forests and products that have been conveniently ignored throughout the world—despite widespread reference to the rights acknowledged in the more famous, Magna Carta.
Although, of course, there is no logical reason that other countries should take notice of an English document written so long ago, the equally illogical global acceptance of western forest management and regulation has been noted by many. The elite-friendly, male-oriented and timber-focused approaches that formal European and American forestry adopted in more recent centuries have spread far and wide. What a shame—though not a surprising shame—that the subsistence rights specified in this forest Charter, many so vital in the lives of forest peoples everywhere, have been so consistently and conveniently ignored.
The significance of subsistence uses of forests has been a particular rallying cry of my own. Living for long periods with forest peoples, whether Uma’ Jalan Dayaks of Borneo or the loggers of North America’s Pacific Northwest convinced me of the importance of the day to day uses to which people put forests—economic, aesthetic, spiritual and cultural. Subsequent involvement over two decades in international comparisons of tropical forest peoples in Africa, Latin America and other countries of Asia reinforced these observations. Yet, even in my own institution, the Center for International Forest Research (CIFOR), I have often been unable to convince colleagues of the significance of subsistence uses. One huge global comparative study, for instance, focused almost exclusively (and purposely) on commercial use of non timber forest products, despite my repeated pleas for attention to subsistence uses. Thankfully, a recent CIFOR study (part of the Poverty and Environment Network or PEN), which involved cross-country comparisons of a quantitative nature, has demonstrated that in these contexts, “Both women and men collect predominantly for subsistence use” (Sunderland et al. 2012; http://www.slideshare.net/CIFOR/myths-and-realities-about-men-women-and-forest-use). Perhaps these findings—phrased in and dependent on widely-loved quantitative methods—will convince the reluctant colleagues.
But I stray from my main point, which is that insofar as we see value in improving the lives of forest peoples, perhaps we should look to this ancient Charter of the Forests (as urged and interpreted by Linebaugh).*** It is peculiar that we have neglected it, given our global attention to other European historical documents and preferences. There seems to be something of wider value there.
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* 2008, Berkeley: University of California Press
**This is rather significant in itself—unless I must conclude that I am a remarkably ignorant researcher—given that I have been enmeshed in the intersection of people and forests for nearly four decades.
***Special care must be taken to read the document with the associated glossary, as many familiar words (like afforestation) have unfamiliar and quite different meanings. For instance, “[t]o disafforest meant to remove from royal jurisdiction; it did not mean to clearcut timber or destroy the trees” (Linebaugh, p. 31).
References
Sunderland, Terry, Ramadhani Achdiawan, Arild Angelsen, Ronnie Babigumira, Amy Ickowitz, Fiona Paumgarten, Victoria Reyes-García and Gerald Shively. 2012. Myths and realities about men, women and forest use: A global comparative study. Presentation at CIFOR’s Annual Meeting (October). Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR Annual General Meeting. [more to come in a special issue of World Development]