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This paper examines how changing indigenous and Western cultural conceptions of northeastern Tanzania’s West Usambara forests played themselves out both in struggles over resources and processes of ecological change. Using oral and documentary sources, it explains how pre-colonial indigenous societies placed value on forest resources, as well as their broad patterns of forest exploitation. It follows with a discussion of the period beginning in the late 19th century and ending in the early 1960s, when indigenous forest users saw their access to forest resources severely restricted by an increasingly powerful colonial state. Finally, it describes the events immediately following Tanzania’s independence in 1961, when government officials turned over to peasant farmers large areas of the colonial forest reserve. Each of the four periods covered here - pre-colonial, German colonial, British colonial, and independence - is ultimately over the character of the forest environment and the soils which support it. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.