Book Presentation “Forests Are Gold”

   Vietnam's forests spent the twentieth century being governed as much as grown: people were resettled, loggers were criminalised, whole hillsides were reclassified as bare land and replanted. The scholar who traced that century is presenting her book in person in Thảo Điền, across the Saigon River from District 1, and the format is announced as a presentation with a moderator, so you follow the reasoning instead of just collecting a conclusion.

   “Forests Are Gold” was published by University of Washington Press in 2016, in the Culture, Place, and Nature series. The full title — “Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam” — states the case plainly: 312 pages on how the state managed Vietnamese forests, from French colonial administration through to the market economy of Đổi Mới. The book's central idea is environmental rule: forest policy, the author argues, has rarely been about ecology for nature's own sake and almost always about governing citizens and society. In 2017 it won the EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize from the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies.

   Pamela D. McElwee is an anthropologist and human ecologist at Rutgers University in the United States, and co-editor of “Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America”. Five chapters carry the reader from French colonial forestry, through socialist resettlement in the forest and the era of illegal loggers and heroic rangers under Đổi Mới, to reforestation campaigns and the classifying of “bare hills” and, finally, carbon accounting and payments for ecosystem services. The session is moderated by Minh Nguyen.

   The talk closes a three-month exhibition, “miền trung dung | precious forest”, made by Dogma with the Đà Nẵng-based collective A Sông. The title comes from the Confucian trung dung, the doctrine of the Mean — as a curatorial frame it stands not for neutrality but for the capacity to hold several stakes and positions on ecological and cultural preservation at once. The show looks at the greater Đà Nẵng region — a land rich in resources, cultures and worldviews that construction and touristification are redrawing in real time, from the Katu (Cơ Tu) people of the western mountains to the Kinh of the coastal city centre. On show: work by six contemporary artists and four Katu master artisans, plus wartime field sketches from the collection's own archive, with Toom Sara Đà Nẵng as partner.

   This one is for readers who take Vietnam seriously — students and researchers of Southeast Asia, people working on conservation and climate projects, translators and editors, and the regulars of Saigon's gallery circuit. You get the author of an academic book on Vietnamese forests first-hand rather than second-hand, in a room where artists are making a related case by other means.

   One practical note: the gallery has announced the date but not the starting hour, and Dogma's own site lists the space as open by appointment. It is worth writing to [email protected] to confirm when the presentation begins.

   If you have ever wondered how policy grows out of trees, this is the conversation to cross the river for — and come with time to spare, because it is the last day the exhibition can be seen.