Taking you on a journey through diverse forest stands on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, the Netherlands, this paper highlights how foresters try to transform these forest stands into climate-proof and resilient forests.
Long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research within the Dutch Forestry Agency - Staatsbosbeheer - this paper focuses on a crucial moment and technology in forestry: that of the inspection or schouw that precedes and informs more large-scale management interventions, including felling and logging. As Dutch forestry is moving away from plantation-style monocultural production forests towards more diverse, mixed, and therefore ideally more climate-adaptable forests, the inspection is a crucial moment for foresters to observe how forest stands are faring in changing conditions, and offer them the opportunity to calibrate their management plans.
Accompanying foresters in this task, I highlight how and what foresters come to know when they inspect ‘their’ forest. I specifically zoom in on temporal considerations and knowledges, ranging from the way foresters ‘read’ signs of past management practices and decisions in the landscape, to expectations about timber markets and market prices, and to speculations on multispecies relations as these are becoming over time in a forest. In so doing, this paper highlights the crucial role of multiple temporalities in the management of forests after – but in the continued presence of – the material legacies of disastrous monoculture plantations.