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Wildfire prevention advertisements featuring Smokey Bear represent the longest-standing and most successful government advertising and branding campaign in U.S. history. As the public face of U.S. fire control policy, Smokey Bear uses mass media to influence the attitudes and behavior of U.S. citizenry in order to accomplish particular outcomes related to wildfire prevention and suppression, forest protection, and resource management. Smokey Bear can therefore be viewed as a governmental instrument that simultaneously targets the behavior of the U.S. public and the biophysical materiality of combustible forests. Examining the evolution of Smokey Bear and related wildfire prevention media, we explore connections between state management of people, territory, and flammable landscapes. Borrowing from Nigel Clark (2011), we use the term pyropolitics to describe the resulting more-than-human assemblage of citizenship, fire suppression and forest ecology. Importantly, this pyropolitical assemblage has substantive and recursive impacts on state practice. Through aggressive wildfire prevention and suppression that include and extend beyond Smokey Bear, the U.S. state has transformed fuel loads, species com- positions, and ecosystem dynamics across North America. One result is a heightened propensity toward catastrophic wildfire, requiring additional and sustained state intervention to maintain an imposed and unstable equilibrium. Thus even as the economic, social and cultural realities of U.S. civic life have changed over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries e and even as knowledge of the ecological benefits of fire to ecosystem health has developed over time e the message of Smokey Bear has remained remarkably consistent, communicating an official imperative to prevent anthropogenic ignition.

Chinese lineage villages are social-ecological systems (SESs) designed according to principles of fengshui ("wind-water"). Fengshui is a composite of cosmological beliefs and landscape management strategies, including the protection of sacred groves, aimed at optimizing the collective, long-term wellbeing of lineage groups by enhancing long-term natural and social resilience. Along with other adaptive management features, village fengshui forests promote social-ecological vigor by conserving plant, soil, and water resources, enhancing social memory, and serving as living models of resilience in the face of social, economic, and political changes. Modern programs to transform rural communities through state-led agricultural production systems included bans on fengshui practice and the destruction of forests. Many communities protected their fengshui forests, providing contemporary opportunities for local, regional, national, and international conservation initiatives incorporating locally preserved forests.

Fengshui forests, also known as fengshui woods or fengshui woodlands, are culturally preserved remnant groves of natural forest or small plantations that are common in southern China. Similar forests known by other names are prevalent in many parts of East Asia, including Korea and Japan, where they have long helped sustain rural livelihoods and ecosystems. However, as is the case with research on the origins of fengshui philosophy, research on the origin, diffusion, present-day distribution, and conservation status of fengshui forests remains relatively sparse. Much of the research into fengshui forests has been published in Chinese, and is not accessible to a global scientific audience because the manuscripts are not easily discoverable or because of language barriers. This paper provides a quantitative review of 57 original papers on fengshui woods written in Chinese since the 1990s. Content analysis of Chinese-language papers on fengshui forests demonstrates a geographic bias towards case studies from southern China, and a predominance of methodologies representing vegetation surveys conducted by forestry specialists. Published field results and previously published research on fengshui forests report very high floristic diversity. Our own field research in 57 villages in five provinces shows that these locally protected woodlands are components of common property regimes (CPRs) that have been better preserved than the other forests in southern China and usually represent the only forest remnants adjacent to villages and other settle- ments. However, fengshui forests face threats from industrial pollution, urbanization, and other forms of eco- nomic development. We briefly report on our own preliminary field results and suggest that more research is required to develop interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the historical and cultural factors that support the persistence of fengshui forests across China and East Asia as a whole, and to integrate these wood- lands within sustainable rural development strategies. These remnants of southern China's subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests are especially important in light of current efforts by the national government to promote urban forestry, ecosystem conservation, cultural heritage protection, and ecotourism, and to increase the ca- pacity of natural carbon sinks within the country's borders.

Large old trees are keystone ecological entities and cultural heritages that provide vital services to humans in settlements. We investigated the abundance, species diversity, distribution patterns, and environmental and anthropogenic determinants of large old trees in Wuchuan Gelao and Miao (minority ethnic groups) Autonomous County in southwest China. We examined the role of large old trees in the local culture systems and their management and protection practices through in-depth sociological interviews of local villagers. The 5105 large old trees from 80 species originated either from natural forests (28.1 %) or cultivation (71.9 %). Species distribution differed by elevation and topography units. Cultivated trees (e.g. Cupressus funebris and Phoebe zhennan) were mainly distributed at low-elevation valleys and slopes. Wild trees (e.g. Ginkgo biloba and Liquidambar formosana) mainly distributed in valleys at medium elevation. Most large old trees dwelt in artificial habitats such as house-side (25.0 %), farmland (10.4 %), graveyard (9.9 %) and roadside (8.5 %). Villages located at medium elevation, close to city and with medium human population proportion had higher tree density. Elevation and distance to city had positive effect whereas population density negative effect on wild tree proportion. Villages at medium elevation had higher species diversity, whereas distance to city and farmland-area proportion had negative effect. Local people protected large old trees mainly for cultural reasons. Cultural large old trees accounted for 71.9 % of the trees, of which 65.5 % were fengshui tree and 6.4 % sacred tree. Proportion of culturally protected large old trees was positively correlated with population density, but negatively with Han population. Protection of sacred trees depended on traditional taboos, and of fengshui trees on local customary laws and family regulations. These effective traditional beliefs and practices contributed to persistence of large old trees in artificial habitats around villages despite a long period marked by rapid cultural, political, and economic changes. Wuchuan can serve as exemplary of protecting large old trees based on local culture and regulation at the community and family levels. The findings informed that large old trees need dedicated protection measures that stress their main values and threats. In addition, local customary laws, traditional culture and ecological compensation should be integrated into conservation policies and practices.