How to Decipher a Forest

Nancy Peluso had a tradition in her political ecology class. Every semester, she’d walk into the second or third class armed with an Indonesian machete (parang) and a globular, pungent, spiky fruit. In front of her transfixed students, she’d slash through the well-protected rind and dig out the creamy white or yellow flesh inside. The odor of the durian fruit, which can weigh up to eight pounds, is so intensely sulfurous that several Asian countries have banned it on public transportation and in hotels. (Those that make it to the United States have had much of the smell bred out of them.) When she handed out pieces of the surprisingly floral-tasting fruit, a flavor beloved across Southeast Asia and China, “everyone was always excited,” she says. But Peluso, who retired in 2024 after almost three decades as a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), wasn’t just serving up an exotic snack. 

Peluso is a renowned figure in political ecology, a subdiscipline of geography and part of environmental studies programs around the world. The field is concerned with the ways power relations shape environments and how social and environmental processes, in turn, influence power relations. Studying the ways that human and nonhuman worlds are entangled, political ecologists trace connections between everything from global market forces and Indigenous communities to logging companies and local governments—and even between forest dwellers and trees. They examine the interactions between national governments, environmental activists, local people, and transnational supply chains. Untangling these intricate webs, they may then try to find strategies for protecting the environment and the rights of those who live on the land. 

“The politics of land control and resource access are intense and hugely profitable for various interests,” says Peluso, whose works focused on Indonesian forests are considered foundational texts in the field. “So, if you don’t understand the cultural politics and social histories of these spaces and their conflicts,” she continues, “you’re not going to be able to change things.”

To a political ecologist like Peluso, the durian is far more than a fruit. It’s a window into the way social, political, and natural worlds collide. The forests of Kalimantan where the fruit grows may look like patches of preserved, untouched wilderness, but these verdant landscapes have been engineered by people over centuries. They have more in common with Jakarta or Bandung—two of Indonesia’s complex, vibrant cities—than one might think. “I don’t believe there are untouched forests,” says Peluso. “Everything is in some way socio-natural.” 

In Kalimantan, the durian trees—which can grow up to three arm-spans wide—form an organic historical archive. They harbor family histories and tales of local dealings and conflicts. These trees live for seven to ten human generations, maybe more” says Peluso. “They’re full of spirits and stories.”

But how do you get the trees to give up their stories? How do you decode a forest? 

Global connections

Peluso’s long connection with Southeast Asia began by chance. She grew up in Connecticut in a nonacademic family, but always had an urge to explore the world. “I didn’t know that there were jobs where you could get paid to travel and live in different places,” she says. “I just had no idea.”

She attended a Quaker-run college in New York state, called Friends World College (FWC). Now a part of Long Island University called LIU Global, the program sent students to its centers across the world to learn by doing. Besides seminars during the first month in each place, there were no classes. Peluso’s first stop was San Francisco, where she focused on visual anthropology.

After a year of work, Peluso grew restless. In 1973, while interning with a photographer in Paris as part of her FWC program, she decided to make her way to Asia. “A woman I knew had a boyfriend who was in Borneo; he had sent pictures of longhouses and forest-dwelling people,” she said. “I thought, ‘that’s what I’d really like to do.’” After another year of work in San Francisco, her advisor directed her to Java, “as more cosmopolitan,” he said. Two years later, Peluso wrote an undergraduate thesis about the daily lives of landless women market traders. After graduation, she stayed to teach English and figure out her next steps. 

Four and a half years after arriving in Java, Peluso was offered an opportunity to join a research team funded by the Man and the Biosphere Programme, which UNESCO had launched in 1971. The team would study relationships between people and tropical forests. Peluso relocated to East Kalimantan, the still lush forests of Borneo. “My task was to travel around and meet with small-scale traders and collectors of rattan, resins, birds’ nests, and other nontimber forest products,” she says. She became fascinated with the ways people not only made their livings from the forest but were also involved in creating those forests. 

Wishing to expand her knowledge of the ways resources were distributed in the forests, Peluso applied to graduate school in 1980. She earned her master’s degree and PhD at Cornell University in what students began to call natural resource sociology. The term political ecology was still rarely used at the time. Peluso helped pave the way for what the field would become with a pioneering doctoral dissertation about long-term conflicts in Javanese teak and nonteak forests. 

In Java, colonial and post-colonial government forest managers had severely curtailed the access of millions of rural people living beside the forests and in forest-locked enclaves. 

The teak forests had been claimed by the Dutch colonial rulers in the early 19th century and monopolized by the state toward the century’s end. Forest villagers were forced to work them. After Indonesian independence, the boundaries of political forest lands and all forest species were declared state property, with the new state accepting colonial boundaries as national law. 

Peluso’s research showed that restricting local people’s access to the forest resources claimed by the state took away their livelihoods. Violent encounters between foresters and villagers were rampant. This lack of forest access, except on the terms of the Indonesian Forestry Department, was leading to poverty and conflict.  

In 1992, Peluso’s book Rich Forests, Poor People was published—a groundbreaking study that analyzed the relationships between Javanese peasants and state forest politics over 300 years. Peluso suggested changes to locally relevant and national forest management policies, with the aim of giving peasants a greater voice in these decisions.  

The text made waves, and it was widely read in Indonesia. “It was the first book about these forests and their history, and how policies during colonial rule formed the basis of the post-colonial reality,” says Suraya Afiff, PhD ’04 ESPM. Now a professor of anthropology at the University of Indonesia and the President of the Indonesian Anthropological Association, Afiff read the book while working for one of the first Indonesian environmental NGOs, and it propelled her to study with Peluso at UC Berkeley. 

According to Afiff, Peluso’s long-term commitment to the people and places she studies is uncommon among Western academics. “For many scholars, you get the funding and you travel, and that’s that,” she says. Peluso’s practice is antithetical to “parachute science,” in which researchers from rich countries arrive in parts of the Global South to extract data, often sidelining the work of local researchers. “Nancy considers these villages part of her family,” says Afiff. “She gets invited to weddings. She works with local colleagues. She keeps in touch with forest communities via WhatsApp.”

These close relationships have allowed Peluso, across 11 books and almost 100 articles, to develop rich and detailed accounts of Indonesia forest-dwellers’ worlds. Through long conversations with the people she works with, and many years of close collaboration, she is still intrigued by the ways that conflicts over resources shape so many people’s lives. “I always live with the villagers with whom I am engaging,” she says. “I try to learn how to see things from their perspectives, however limited my view will be. There are so many intangible rewards, from working with them, learning their stories, and understanding how they fit themselves (or don’t) into a world in which their environments and their lives are changing all the time.”

It’s an approach that has rubbed off on her students. Ten years ago, Peluso accompanied then graduate student Juliet Lu, PhD ’20 ESPM, on a fieldwork trip to Yunnan, China. Lu was exploring the way the Chinese government was using rubber plantations as a means of extending state power. “You could just tell she was an expert at building new relationships,” says Lu, who is now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). “We spent a lot of time with one of the main connections I had, having meals together, visiting their homes and meeting their family members, taking time to just be slow and see how people lived.”

The care and creativity with which Peluso fosters relationships extends to her students, too. In 2012, Peluso was awarded UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, and many of her students have gone on to become celebrated political ecologists. For Catherine Corson, PhD ’08 ESPM, Peluso’s political ecology class was life-changing. “I learned how to ask really important questions about power and access to natural resources,” says Corson, who is now a professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College. “And now, I use a lot of things I learned in that class with my own students.”

At ESPM, Peluso directed the Land Lab, a collective of political ecology researchers working on issues relating to environmental conflict and land and resource access. For Lu, Peluso’s group was so important that she decided to create a similar collective at UBC. “It’s a way of approaching academia as a communal practice,” says Lu. “It’s been really transformative for a lot of our students.” 

Peluso’s work emerged from a rich network in ESPM, particularly in the departmental division of Society & Environment. She has collaborated with other trailblazing ESPM faculty, many of whom were the first generation of women researchers in their fields, including professors Louise Fortmann, Sally Fairfax, Lynn Huntsinger, Barbara Allen-Diaz, and Carolyn Merchant, among others. “That group was so amazingly inspiring,” says Peluso. “It used to be hard for women, especially social scientists, to be heard in the department, but it was easier for me, and soon after, my colleague Kate O’Neill, thanks to the pathways they opened.” In 2009, Peluso succeeded Fairfax as the Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor in Forest Policy. And in 2021, 35 of Peluso’s former students and colleagues successfully nominated her for one of the highest accolades in her field: the Distinguished Career Award from the American Association of Geographers’ Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group. 

Peluso’s peers lauded her “deep, grounded, longitudinal” empirical research in Indonesia. But the decision to maintain such close links with her field sites over a long period of time was also practical. Balancing fieldwork with raising a young family in the US, Peluso couldn’t spend more than a month or so at a time in Indonesian forests and villages. So she kept going back to the same place, after shifting her focus to a base in West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). “I always returned to the same village, lived with the same families, and largely engaged with friends over years of visits without research assistants,” she says. It was during these repeated trips, year after year, that she learned about the social lives of durian trees, rubber trees, and eventually, gold mines. 

Theory and real life

The durian trees of West Kalimantan, Peluso has argued, are key to the forest’s history, as well as to the social histories of the people who planted, cared for, and lived among them. The social relations around the trees and the ways families managed access to the fruits opened a library of information about the socio-natural worlds of the people she worked with in this new research site. Durian trees told stories of the ancestral forests that they anchored. They told about kinship and landscape histories. “The trees all have names,” says Peluso. Sometimes, the name is taken from the person who planted the tree. But individuals or communities also renamed trees to mark events that took place nearby, such as disputes between family members contesting each other’s rights to the fruit. “Every tree contains a family history.”

When a heavy fruit crashes to the floor of a forest garden, there are intricate systems in place for deciding who gets to immediately eat or keep the treasure. “If my friend Apong planted the tree, it’s his tree, and he gets to decide who has rights to harvest the fruit—by waiting in shelters built nearby,” she says. But the question of how to divide the resource becomes more complex in subsequent generations. Apong’s children might rotate waiting in the mountain shelter. Or he may assign specific trees to specific children or other family members and friends for a certain period. In the third human generation, the tree becomes a “grandparent tree,” and all the grandchildren of the planter have rights to the fruit. “All these cousins have to figure out how to rotate access.” For much older trees, though, understanding who has rights can be difficult— but still, there are usually systems in place for dividing the harvest. 

Before Peluso’s close observations on access to these iconic fruit trees, and those of her colleagues from the New York Botanical Garden studying tropical fruit tree domestication in roughly the same region, these details about the durian forests as ancestral, created forests were not widely understood beyond the forest settlements. 

Peluso’s work is also renowned for its development of theory and concepts based on the contexts, experiences, and practices of everyday life. After passing the Indonesian Basic Forestry Act of 1967, government and timber industry advisors mapped large areas of forest across Kalimantan. Unsurprisingly, these maps failed to represent the rights that Indigenous people had as longtime residents on the land. In response, forest dwellers and activists made maps of their own, which incorporated their long histories of forest use and their customary management of access. 

In 1995, Peluso called the concept counter-mapping, and scholars have since documented examples of the practice all over the world, from the Arctic to Namibia. Indigenous peoples turn mapmaking into a form of resistance—a way of subverting the official cartography that seeks to erase them and their claims, quite literally, from the map. 

Since then, Peluso has continued innovating theoretical concepts that have become important political ecological ideas. Collaborating with the political ecologist Peter Vandergeest, Peluso introduced the concept of the political forest. Forests have always been produced, converted, and protected through politics, often contentiously and sometimes violently. Regulating peoples’ access to resources, providing recognition and legitimacy to some while excluding and criminalizing others, are political acts. 

The political forest idea also led Peluso and Vandergeest to think deeply about the concept of territory and state territorialization—the ways states used coercion to lay claim to land. Their respective, long-term research in Indonesia and Thailand created opportunities to make comparisons of forest politics and territorializing practices. There is a disconnect, they argue, between people’s experiences of space and the abstract, empty grids that governments impose on areas they hope to control, erasing at the same time pre-existing territorialities and claims. Understanding this tension between lived and abstract space can help shed light on the causes of conflicts between forest dwellers and government actors. 

What unites each of these concepts is the idea that things that might seem solid and reliable—like maps, territories, landscapes, and forests—are created through social processes and practices. These processes can take place at a distance, involving flows of money and resources that crisscross the globe. In an ongoing research project, Peluso has been studying the ways that rural Javanese women, who work as caregivers and housekeepers in cities such as Hong Kong, are reshaping their home forests in Java as they send money home to their families. These cash remittances from foreign currencies are then invested in rural resources, directly and indirectly changing the composition of and claims on mountain forests. “Migration,” says Peluso, “is a political forest maker, too.”

Conceptually sophisticated, Peluso’s ideas remain grounded in the detailed empirical study of environmental change and conflicts. “These theoretical concepts emerged from what I witnessed on the ground or thought about with collaborators. I thought, ‘how do you describe this? Is there a word for it?’” says Peluso. “I always try to teach my students that theory comes out of real life.”