Global Forest Visualization

This book project examines global forest monitoring as a means to understand the promises and problems of global visualization for climate management. Specifically, the book focuses on Global Forest Watch, the most developed and widely available forest-monitoring platform, created in 1997 by the World Resource Institute. Forest maps are always political as they visualize power relations and form the grid within which forests become commodities. This dislocation of the idea of the forest from its literal roots in the ground has generated problems for forest visualization efforts designed to empower local communities. This book takes a critical humanistic approach to this problem, combining methods from the fields of rhetoric and media studies to suggest solutions to these problems for designers and users of platforms like the Global Forest Watch. To explain why global views of forests can be disempowering, the book relies on biopolitical and rhetorical theories of panopticism and how these views unfold a different violence on different regions of the Earth in relation to colonial history. Using this theoretical framework, the book explains the historical process by which forests came to be classified, quantified, and mapped on a global scale. Interviews with end-users of global forest visualization platforms reveal if and how these platforms support local action. Lastly, the book provides rhetorical solutions to articulate global and local views of forests without reducing one view to the other. These solutions involve looking to forests themselves for clues about how to generate more broadly effective and resilient visualizations. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of forest studies, climate change, science communication, visualization studies, environmental communication, and environmental conservation

Data Visualization and Analytics · Land Use and Ecosystem Services · Species Distribution and Climate Change

• Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy

  Open Access•M Walter, Tahu Kukutai et al.•Indigenous Data Sovereignty and…•2020

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• Capitalism in the web of life

  Jason W Moore•Capitalism in the web of life•2015

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• A thousand plateaus

  Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze•A thousand plateaus•1987

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• Fear Won't Do It

  Open Access•Saffron O''Neill, Saffron O'Neill et al.•Science Communication•2009

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• Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia

  Open Access•Nancy Lee Peluso•Antipode•1995

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• Metaphors we discriminate by

  Open Access•Elisabeth El Refaie•Journal of Sociolinguistics•2001

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• La Terre vue d'en haut - L'invention de l'environnement global

  Open Access•A Gillet•Geographica Helvetica•2015

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• Seeing Like a State

  James C Scott•Seeing Like a State•2017

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