Managing a rebel landscape: Conservation, pioneers, and the revolutionary past in the U Minh Forest, Vietnam

While environmentalists and conservation groups have typically described resistance in modern economic terms, this essay considers the ways that resistance to conservation efforts reaches back into a deeper revolutionary and colonial past. The recent fires may be seen not only as a failure in specific management technologies today but also as a failure to accommodate U Minh's past into relatively new and foreign models of forest conservation. It is important that sites such as this be approached not only as forests but also as intensely memorable places configured in the recent past by traumatic events. The forest was not just a convenient shelter for guerrillas from 1932 to 1975 but over this time it became a familiar lived-in landscape produced by successive generations of rebel communities, secret lines of communication, and physical modifications including bunkers and concrete structures.