Mountain forests provide important ecological services, and essential
products. This book focuses on the importance of mountain forests in
Cameroon for the local people who depend most directly on them, and have
often developed a wealth of indigenous knowledge on plants and
sophisticated institutions for managing limited plant and animal
resources. Such knowledge and institutions have often been threatened,
or even destroyed, by centralization and globalization; yet there is
increasing recognition that community-based institutions are the best
adapted to ensuring that mountain forests continue to supply their
diverse goods and services to both mountain and other people over the
long-term. The book provides a useful combination of case studies on
ethnobotanic analysis and cultural values of plants, community-based
ecological planning for protected area management and eco-cultural
tourism development. It provides an unusually useful combination of
overviews and synthesis of theory and experience with in-depth case
studies of montane forest-adjacent communities and protected areas.
Throughout the book there are good summary tables, case study maps, and
diagrams that are relevant to the themes in question. Finally, the book
addresses the possible mutual benefits of indigenous knowledge and
modern science, indigenous peoples and the development of eco-cultural
tourism in protected areas, indigenous peoples and ecological planning
in protected areas. It therefore emphasizes cooperation based on
partnerships amongst indigenous people, governments and the global
conservation community, in the interest of effective conservation. This
is a valuable book for land managers, environmental scientists,
environmental biologists, natural resource managers and students reading
subjects such as geography, biology, forestry, botany and environmental
science.
