11 Can deforestation help rebuild forests? The Indonesian agroforests GENEVIEVE MICHON AND MERIEM BOUAMRANE Until the nineteenth century - and before the Industrial Revolution and the start of modem agricultural development - the rural landscape in Europe centred on three components: fields and pasture; forests producing large amounts of wood and managed by the feudal, royal and then governmental forestry authorities; and small woods or domestic forests, defined by and centred on agricultural practices. Along with three-year rotation and fodder crops, this trinal system has disappeared from modem landscapes, to be replaced by a bipolar forest-agriculture structure. This bipolar structure is reflected in most interpretations of tropical forests, in which the landscape is often seen as a binary system: on the one hand there is the forest - a closed, impenetrable, wild area - and on the other agriculture, which is open, domestic, civilized, and dominated by 'crops'. As a result, it is not surprising then that we find it difficult to interpret areas that have been affected by smallholder practices and are no longer recognizable as 'natural' forest, but are not yet sufficiently organized to be classed as fields. Depending on the observer, these poorly defined areas may be considered as phases in the degradation of an ideal forest situation, which had formerly been character- ized as 'climactic', or as a transitional situation somewhere between the two structural categories of 'forest' and 'cultivated area'. In both cases, it is easy to detect more-or-less extreme 'deforestation' behind this feature, and there will always be people prepared to deny that these formations correspond to deliberate land and resource management choices, much less to ways of incor- porating the forest resource into a domestic structure. However, if one looks closer, these 'degraded' or 'empty' formations look remarkably similar to the old domestic forests. They are primarily forest agri- cultural fallow, but also former forests kept within agricultural areas, sacred woods or fruit orchards that have been protected or redeveloped by local communities for traditional, economic or religious reasons. There are also vari- ous types of additional forest or forest plantings on agricultural land, such as smallholder woodlands in East Africa and the Indonesian agroforests. Lastly, there are different types of agroforestry that include trees in the landscape, either in isolation, as live hedges, or mixed with crops, but always as a subsidi- ary to agricultural production. Around the last areas of virgin forest, these more-or-less densely wooded formations form the body of the forest matrix in 123