Did you ever worry about how you should refer to a specific grouping of trees or tree-like plants, when you were out for a walk? What counts as forest is pretty obvious, isn’t it? In cases of doubt you may have been trusting other people to make the distinction for you. However, even experts disagree what a forest is.
Forest in place names
Being familiar with your surroundings and its toponomy is one way for you to know what counts as forest. Toponomy is the systems of words we use to refer to specific places: for example, names for cities, mountains, streets and … forests. So, if you know about the toponym Sherwood forest from the legendary Robin Hood, you may use a map or look up online where this specific forest is located and where its territory ends. Turns out that it is a landscape park somewhere in Nottinghamshire in the UK. This forest used to be much bigger than it is now and parts of it aren’t very foresty anymore. In fact, where would Robin Hood hide today? It is tricky to decide which parts of Sherwood forest count as proper forest and which as glades or meadows. Some parts of it are recognisable as artificial landscape park. This example shows that even toponyms which consist of the word forest aren’t exactly an indicator for what actually counts as a forest.
How much of the Earth is forest?
It is easy to imagine that classificatory problems get more complicated when they are upscaled. In fact, scientists disagree to a large extent what percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered with forest (Sexton et al., 2016). Surprisingly, this lack of knowledge isn’t caused by lacking data – though it certainly is complicated to collect data of the whole Earth in sufficient quality to make a judgement. When looking closer at this problem, it turns out that uncertainty is primarily due to ambiguous and competing scientific definitions of forest. This seems puzzling because we are used to thinking that forest is a pretty clear category.
Consequences of improper forest classifications
Ambiguous forest definitions may not seem like a problem that is relevant to our daily lives. We all survive even if we cannot tell with certainty whether the ensemble of trees and bushes that we see on a walk counts as forest or not. However, it makes a difference for land owners like farmers who may or may not be able to cultivate the land or use the wood, depending on the official classification of their territory. When you hear reports about the rapid pace the Amazonian rainforest is disappearing, you may wonder how these measurements are made. It is clear that we depend on forests as an integral part of our ecosystem and therefore, they need to be protected. Thus, knowing about the existence of forests and how (human) animals interact with them is important for appropriate protection strategies.
Interdisciplinary solutions for classificatory problems
Research in linguistics and anthropology showed that members of different linguistic and cultural communities think of and categorise the environment in different ways: What counts as forest for one community may be something else for others. For example, the indigenous Takana who live in the Bolivian rainforest have been cultivating patches of land according to their communities‘ needs. This means that they can return to cultivate land that traditionally belongs to their family – theirbarbecho as they call the fallow – after several years. However, their traditional practice is disturbed by administrative bodies which classified the fallow as rainforest in the meantime (see Wartmann & Purves, 2018). Apparently, social and cultural context is important for useful landscape definitions. Strategies that aim to assist the people need to take into account their behaviour rather than rely purely on measurements which are characteristic for the hard Sciences. Recently, I published an article to argue that classificatory problems like the forest example can be tackled with interdisciplinary collaboration (see Striedl 2024): E.g. linguists, geographers and computer scientists need to work together to develop better strategies how to manage our landscapes in a sustainable manner.
Arguing for the relevance of linguistics
The above examples illustrate the relevance of linguistics for other scientific domains and for society. This fact is easily overlooked because language, the object of linguistic research, is always present in scientific discourse, but it is rarely treated in its own right. Linguistics is a comparatively young discipline that extends to many subfields and is relevant for most scientific approaches: it is essentially about the words and symbolic strategies we use to refer to the world and how we order our experiences with categories. If you want to find out more about the importance of linguistics, here’s an open letter by Lesley Jeffries who argues against budget cuts at UK universities that affect linguistics and disciplines that usually create no immediate economically measurable value: http://www.linguistics.ac.uk/university-of-kent.html
Literature
Sexton, J. O., Noojipady, P., Song, X.-P., Feng, M., Song, D.-X., Kim, D.-H., Anand, A., Huang, C., Channan, S., Pimm, S. L., & others. (2016). Conservation policy and the measurement of forests. Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 192–196.
Striedl, P. (2024). Forest: 0 or 1? Interdisciplinary challenges and methods for the classification of landscape data. JournaLIPP, 9, 77–98. https://doi.org/10.5282/journalipp/4906
Wartmann, F. M., & Purves, R. S. (2018). ‘This is not the jungle, this is my barbecho’: Semantics of ethnoecological landscape categories in the Bolivian Amazon. Landscape Research, 43(1), 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2016.1269882