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This project is a social history of Mexican forestlands between 1880 and 2000. It will show that scientists' changing understandings of ecology and the rational use of natural resources were distilled in a series of legislative codes and development projects that until recently did not take the practices or understandings of rural communities into account. These legal frameworks therefore became a central point of contention with rural people. I will study select communities in Chihuahua and Michoacán that sometimes resisted and sometimes accommodated to these government initiatives in order to show that social conflicts over the woodlands determined the fate of the forests and the communities that depended on them.