Post-utilitarian forestry: What's place got to do with it?

Abstract

Place ideas take a more holistic and embedded view of socio-ecological reality and have begun to influence many aspects of resource management, from ecosystem management to community-based collaboration. The flux we might call post-utilitarian forestry can be understood as a renegotiation of a long-standing dialectic tension in Western thought between universalist and particularist views of knowledge. This paper proposes that post-utilitarian forestry seeks to balance the universalist-particularist dialectic by re-placing resource management in three ways: providing a broader and more spatial consideration of landscape meanings, embracing critical pluralism in the conduct of science, and pursuing a placed and pragmatic approach to the ordering of values in natural resource decision making.

Citation

Williams, Daniel R. 2002. Post-utilitarian forestry: What''s place got to do with it?. In: Proceedings of the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources in the West Conference; October 18-21, 2002; Alta, WY. Fort Collins, CO: Human Dimensions Unit, College of Natural Resources, Colorado State University. p. 114-123.