[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - boundary=forestry(_compartment) relations (Was "Feature Proposal - RFC - boundary=forest(_compartment) relations")

[David Marchal]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Le dimanche, 14. février 2021 18:48, Bert -Araali- Van Opstal <bert.araali.afritastic at gmail.com> a écrit :

> 2. As mentioned in 1. the term as it is presented in this proposal seems discriminating to me. Let me explain with an example: large parts of forests in Africa and South-America are harvested, maintained using similar management strategies as in forestry by indigenous tribes and communities., however they are not considered forestry areas. Forestry, especially how it is described in your proposal, is a term introduced by the western world. I know there is lots of confusion about the landuse=forest tag but we should avoid to introduce an alternative which caused a lot of objection and anger in the non-western world.
> When people started mapping on OSM in Africa, these were mostly Western expats and Western NGO workers. Africans started mapping tree covered areas as forest, since that was the most common "western English language" term they were used to. They were corrected in terms that we should generally use natural=wood with the justification that most of our forests are not managed or maintained. You can see were the commotion started, yet another western culture interpretation, that indigenous people who live in and from the forest and many communities surrounding them don't manage their forests. They do, for ages and very successfully. It would be to bold to say better and more successfully then in the western world.

You seem to know them better than me, so please tell me if my reasoning is wrong. I would say that such use cases are not encompassed by the proposal. You are right when you explain that the exposed forestry notion is a westerner concept. As you say, these cultures are very different of western ones; forestry, as a western concept, is about long-term, (often acutely) planified management of resources. It is often about obtaining more wood from wooded areas than they would produce if left wild, and prevent an exhaustion of forest resources.

This approach, AFAIK, is void in such cultures, which are mostly holistic and do not have the "nature vs. humankind/culture" manicheism the westerners have: such cultures consider themselves not separated of the surrounding land and respect it like they respect other humans. Consequently, they often only take from the forest what they need, and this harvest is typically too small to exhaust or unbalance the forest ecosystem. Consequently, they do not need forestry as westerners understand it. In addition, it is likely that the wooded areas they use have no materialized limit. I think they just go in the forest and take what they need, without caring about the concept of limit, which is void if the forest is a common land. That point alone prevent the application of the proposal to such cases.

Ultimately, I think it is up to the mapper to decide if the proposal is applicable to common customs; as it seems it is not the case, I assume there is no problem with the proposal itself. There may be with mappers trying to apply the proposal to such cultures, but, then, the problem is with the mapper incorrectly trying to apply western concepts to non-western cultures; the western concept (her, forestry), is not wrong; the problem lies in how the concept is (mis)used.

> 3. It promotes the use of tagging a specific managed area combined with other purposes, f.i. a managed wood through forestry with a protection class of a different category. This is in contradiction with the philosophy that we need to tag each mapped feature separately. In case their is overlapping use or duplicate use of the same area, it is better practice to map and tag them separately so we support the broadest range of data consumers and renderers.

Remember that forestry is not a goal, it is a mean. It can perfectly be used for protection, wood production, general public access, and all that in one single area. One problem of the current OSM customs is that it it tries to have one tag for each landuse purpose (farmland, industrial, residential), but forestry does not work this way. As it is only a mean, it can be used for one or more, maybe concurrents, goals, and these goals are intricated.

When you decide to forbid the use of heavy machinery when logging, you may do that for environmental protection (prevent soil compression), social acceptance (in France, the use of such machines is contested, and is discouraged when logging takes place on exposed areas or near roads/walking paths) or economical reasons (too costly), but these factors are intricated: even if you only choosed that forbidding for economical reasons, it will de facto have a protection and social effect. Such intricate decisions are routinely taken in forestry, at different levels, maybe multiple times in the same operation on the same piece of land, and, unless you are the decision maker, you simply can't tell the whys. Even foresters are often not able to precisely guess the exact reasons and effects of such decisions, so we cannot expect general audience (mappers) to be able to do that. I think that, even if we could so, forestry is simply too complex to allow such separation of goals.
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