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ECWG Dinner: “Wild Mushroom Harvesting and Forest Management: Observations from Yunnan, China”
March 9, 2024 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Explorers Club members, member’s guests, associates, & friends are cordially invited to the March 2024 dinner & presentation by Dr. Madeline Brown, to be held at the Cosmos Club on Saturday, March 9th, 2024 at 6:00 PM.
Can wild mushroom harvesting and forest conservation go hand-in-hand? Narratives of wilderness-based conservation – where human presence on the land is seen solely through the lens of destruction – remain powerful, yet increasingly contested, forces in contemporary conservation. Turning to local ecological knowledge and traditional land management practices offers an alternative, more nuanced view of human relationships with the land. This talk explores one such local ecological knowledge and management system centered around wild mushroom harvesting in Yunnan, China. This is an area of rich biological and cultural diversity, as well as a place of shifting forest values and livelihood opportunities. In addition, scholars estimate that there are up to 700 edible species of wild mushrooms in Yunnan province (Mortimer et al. 2012). Here, we explore how local wild mushrooms are named and gathered, as well as the social aspects of community-based forest governance.
About Our Speaker Dr. Madeline Brown
Dr. Madeline Brown is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on human-environment interactions across a variety of spatial scales, from community-based forest management in China to large landscape conservation in North America. Dr. Brown completed a BA in Anthropology at Brown University and a MA and PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University.
Dr. Brown’s long-term fieldwork is focused on cooperation and resource access among wild mushroom harvesting communities in southwest China. This work combines ethnography with social network and spatial analysis to understand complex natural resource governance dynamics. She is also currently involved in the NSF-funded Economic Network Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (ENDOW) project, where she contributes to research in a Yi community in China. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Human Ecology, Ecology and Society, and Conservation and Society.
In North America, Dr. Brown has ongoing interests in research integrating cultural and natural resources for large landscape conservation planning and management. A recent project in this area involves investigating the ethnoecology of trail work.
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