The Transformation of the World (83 page)

Deforestation

In the long history of planned deforestation and of protests against it (which in Europe and China began between the 1850s and 1900), a precise place cannot be easily assigned to the nineteenth century: certainly the most destructive age yet seen for the earth's primeval forests, but still innocuous in comparison with what was to come. It has been estimated that of the major clearances since the dawn of agriculture, roughly one-half occurred in the twentieth century.
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The pace of deforestation had accelerated over the previous century. Between 1850 and 1920 probably as much primeval forest was lost worldwide as in the period double that length from 1700 to 1850. By far the most affected region was North America (36 percent), followed by the Russian Empire (20 percent) and South Asia (11 percent).
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The great forest clearance in the earth's
temperate
zone then came a halt almost everywhere around 1920, marking an important break in the history of the environment. (In some countries this turn in favor of the forest had actually begun much earlier—as far back as the early nineteenth century in France and Germany—and even in the United States individual activists had initiated a gradual rethink in the last third of the century.) Thereafter, many of the forest stocks in temperate zones stabilized or regenerated.
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The two main reasons for this were the end of extensive land clearance at the expense of the forest; and the raising of tropical production to cover the requirement for wood in the North.

Even today it is difficult to cut through a host of opinions on desertification and wood shortage to get to verifiable facts. Moreover, assuming that such facts
are available for certain times and places, there is the additional problem of gauging the short-term and long-term consequences of forest loss. Shrinkage may continue for a long time in a particular region before its deleterious effects enter the picture. And when does a crisis become “general”; when does it acquire supraregional significance? A number of histories might be narrated to show that different development paths exist within a general worldwide trend of destruction and unsustainable forest use.
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In China, forest destruction has been taking place for close to twenty-five hundred years, but one should not speak of a general wood crisis before the eighteenth century. Since then wood has been in short supply as a fuel and a construction material, not only in densely populated provinces with intensive forms of agriculture but in most of the core areas of the country. Non-Han communities in remote peripheries organized themselves for the first time in the eighteenth century to defend their remaining forest from Han Chinese, who often appeared as large-scale commercial raiding parties. Wood theft became a widespread crime in the Chinese heartlands. If new trees were planted for commercial purposes, they were of fast-growing varieties—and even those were not given enough time to grow.
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A general deforestation crisis ensued in the nineteenth century, but neither the state nor private individuals did anything to combat it; little has changed today in that respect. There was no tradition of official forest conservation, such as began to develop in Europe in the sixteenth century. Today's environmental crisis in China has its roots in the nineteenth century. This cannot be fully explained by the weakness of the nineteenth-century Chinese state and its relative lack of concern for the common good, or by the fact that control over the forest (as in the Mediterranean, but not as in India, where it was in various ways a point of departure for state-building
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) never served as a power base, or by cultural indifference to the myth and beauty of the forest. At least one economic factor also needs to be acknowledged: namely, a kind of path dependence of natural calamities. The crisis reached a point where the costs of overcoming its causes would have been greater than society could bear.
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External factors played no role in this development. China was not traditionally a wood exporter, nor did foreign businessmen show an interest in its forests in the post-1840 era of Western aggression. In any event, China found itself heading for a
homemade
forest crisis without the means to correct it. No supposed inadequacies of “Asiatic” societies in general can account for this. Japan—which had undergone a great deforestation crisis since the late sixteenth century, mainly as a result of fortress and ship construction during the period of unification around 1600—halted the tree loss in the late eighteenth century and launched new planting initiatives. This happened under the political ancien régime of the Tokugawa period, without any help from European forestry. The industrialization of Japan, beginning in the 1880s, then had a major adverse effect on forest resources, and the state did not see it as a priority to protect them. With scarcely any fossil fuels of its own, the country derived a large part of its industrial energy from charcoal
(plus water power). It was only after 1950 that trends began to favor the forest again.
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Japan, like China, never became a significant exporter of wood. Siam/Thailand, on the other hand, the only country in Southeast Asia to remain politically independent, granted concessions to European firms interested in its teak. There, forest conservation was not on the agenda.

Another history may be told about the Indonesian island of Java, one of the oldest and most deeply penetrated colonies in the world. In Southeast Asia large-scale deforestation got under way long before the age of voracious plantation forestry dawned in the nineteenth century; many areas had already laid out pepper gardens by 1400, before any contact with colonialism. European consumers were reached via the Mediterranean and later by way of the Portuguese monopoly trade. This replacement of primeval forest with monoculture spread more widely over the next few centuries, especially on Sumatra.
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The 330-year Dutch presence on Java passed through a number of phases.
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In the 1670s the Dutch East India Company took control of the areas of Javanese teak forest regarded as most valuable and, unlike dense jungle, easy to exploit for export. Over time the destructive impact of its logging methods became apparent. In 1797 the “sustained yield” principle generalized and made permanent an originally temporary ban on felling that had been introduced in 1722 for certain areas of forest. The basic idea of conservation, now seen explicitly as an alternative policy, was first applied against harmful indigenous methods, especially the burning of teak forest (completely prohibited in 1857). In 1808 a forestry department was created, all private use of the forest was forbidden, and the rationale of conservation was spelled out in greater detail. This was also the period when a science of forest maintenance emerged in Germany; it was not long before it came to notice in other European countries, the British Empire, and North America.

In 1830 the introduction of the so-called Culture System, a system of colonial exploitation based on compulsion, soon swept away the whole previous tradition of Dutch operations on Java, as wood and land requirements—for agriculture, especially new coffee plantations, as well as for roads and (after 1860) the railroad—suddenly shot up. This phase of unregulated, predatory cultivation by mainly private interests lasted until 1870. Between 1840 and 1870 Java lost roughly a third of its teak forest, with no thought given to reforestation. Then began another phase of conservationist reforms, involving the re-creation of a forestry department, a ban on private exploitation, and the regeneration of stands by means of tree nurseries. By 1897 the teak economy was definitively under state control; forward planning now ensured that requirements for wood were covered without inflicting the damage of the earlier period.

The example of Java shows that colonialism—in many respects, a “watershed in environmental history”
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—could have various effects on the forest at the resource-development frontier, ranging from extreme overexploitation for short-term profit to rational planning in the interests of long-term conservation. It would be too sweeping a judgment to blame all the destruction of Indonesian
forest reserves on the colonial state. As in India or the Caribbean, it also introduced new ways of seeing and new methods of conservation.
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The effects of colonial rule in India were similarly ambiguous. The British extracted wood (primarily the costliest kinds) on a large scale from the Himalayan forests; their most pressing needs were associated with shipbuilding, once the East India Company and the Royal Navy began to farm out large orders to Indian yards during the Napoleonic Wars. After the age of the sailing ship, deforestation in India received a fresh impetus in the 1850s from the conjunction of railroad construction (which here as everywhere drove wide corridors through the country), population growth, and the progressive commercialization of agriculture.
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But while the colonial authorities countenanced and pursued “modernization,” they also promoted reforestation and absorbed traditions of conservation from Indian rulers (more than from local farmers). Where colonial representatives showed some respect for the demands of local people, as the British sometimes did in India, they had to grapple with a host of old rights of use to the forest and to engage in protracted negotiations in search of a compromise.
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Protective measures were easiest to enforce where officials acting in a competitive bureaucratic framework knew how to make them seem fiscally useful in the long term. A possible downside of conservationism, however—not only under colonial conditions—was that communities traditionally living in and off the forest might become objects of state intervention: “quiescent serfs of the Forest department.”
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Analogous to forest ordinances and game laws in early modern Europe, the conservationist measures of an environmentally aware government created new boundaries between legality and illegality.
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Again and again they provoked resistance on the part of peasant communities.
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India illustrates a paradox of the colonial state with unusual clarity. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the British built there, with the help of expert German advisers, a forestry department and a body of legal regulations that would have no match elsewhere for decades to come. The Forest Department designed and operated a rational system of maintenance that finally brought the chaotic destruction of Indian forests under control. It was a model copied all over the world, not least in England and Scotland, partly because it proved both efficient and profitable in business terms. At the same time, however, it appeared to many Indians as an especially ugly face of the colonial state, a ruthless alien intrusion into the lives of millions who, whether to preserve or to clear it, had to have dealings of one kind or another with the forest.
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In the nineteenth century, India and Indonesia participated in a worldwide tendency to clear forest land for monoculture plantations (tea, coffee, cotton, rubber, bananas, etc.). The disposal of wood was of secondary concern; the main aim was the ancient one, now fanned by capitalist forces, to extend the area of land under cultivation. It was this powerful motive that impelled the destruction of forest in the coastal regions of Brazil. Coffee-growing began to spread as early as 1770, and by the 1830s coffee had replaced sugarcane as the main commercial
crop—a position it maintained until the beginning of the 1960s. It was mostly hill country that made way for the coffee shrub, but without its former protection the land underwent rapid erosion and soon had to be abandoned. This mobile economy was predicated on the belief that coffee shrubs needed the “virgin” soil of freshly cleared forest. Thus, well into the second half of the nineteenth century, coffee growing developed as a peculiar mix of modern and archaic forms of agrarian plunder: a plainly visible frontier pushing irresistibly into the interior. From the 1860s on, railroad construction made it possible to exploit highlands at some distance from the coast, while at the same time immigrants began to pour in from southern Europe and to take the place of black slaves in production. By 1900 the country had 6,000 kilometers of railroad, and the laying of track had everywhere led to major deforestation along with the advance of coffee. Cultivation methods did not change: fires continued to play a major role, often spreading out of control, and the freedom of livestock to graze on unfenced land blocked any natural regeneration of the forest. Land use in Brazil thus disregarded both the future of the forest as a resource and the long-term sustainability of farming. Often what was left behind was no more than steppe or inferior scrubland. No one had an interest in high-quality forest. It was simpler and cheaper to import ship timber from the United States or railroad sleepers from Australia.

Brazil represents an extreme example of wasteful forest use unchecked by official supervision. Unlike the colonial state, which in the best of cases aimed at long-term resource maintenance, the independent Brazilian state allowed free rein to private interests. The destruction of the Atlantic rainforest, which began in the Portuguese colonial period but really took off only under the postcolonial empire (1822–89) and the subsequent republic, was among the most savage and thorough processes of its kind anywhere in the modern world, all the worse because it was of no benefit to the economy as a whole and met with no political or scholarly opposition that might have at least slowed the work of devastation.
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There is not just
one
history of the European forest in the nineteenth century, if only because the whole peninsular and insular part of the continent (Iberia and Italy, Denmark and the British Isles) had little or virtually no remaining forest by the turn of the century (nor did the Netherlands as well). The other extreme was Scandinavia, especially Sweden and Finland. Here a cultural closeness to the forest, its sheer immensity in comparison with the size of the population, the ongoing incorporation of forest into the farming economy, and clearly defined government policies added up to a set of motives that have kept the Scandinavian forests in existence up to the present day. The picture was very different in England, where the Royal Navy's insatiable needs led first to extensive tree felling and then to inevitable laments about the strategic dangers of dependence on foreign sources of wood. After all, at least 2,000 fully grown oaks of the best quality were required for the construction of a single large ship of the line. Wood shortages forced the Admiralty early on (under pressure from the House of Commons) to employ iron technology; it became noticeable
everywhere after 1870 that this made large ships lighter than comparable ones built with timber, and the effect was further strengthened by the replacement of iron with steel. In France too, the navy made an almost complete switch from wood to iron between 1855 and 1870. This reduced the dual pressure, from ships and railroads, to which the European forests had been subject. And at the very same moment, around 1870, the chronic crisis of British agriculture was creating new scope for land to be used for forest. Fast-growing lumber was planted again, and for the first time woodland areas supplied the recreational needs of the city population. The little that remained of the English forest now received conservationist attentions.
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