This is my favourite paper, and exists in article and essay versions. The one posted here was published in Geographical Research in 2008. It clearly refutes the notion that the sawmilling and specialty timbers communities are 100% supportive of exploitative industrial logging, and offers is a dramatic corrective to accepted wisdoms in my island’s ongoing hemorrhaging over the fate of the forests.
The paper reports ethnographic research I carried out in the sawmilling communities of the Upper North Esk. I loved these gentle, passionate people – and when you read the quotations embedded in the paper you’ll know why. I’d really like my old mate, George Harris, to read this – though I know he won’t.