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- Convenors:
-
Mikko Toivanen
(FU Berlin)
Juha Haavisto (University of Turku)
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- Chair:
-
Mikko Toivanen
(FU Berlin)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Nature for Harvest: Commodities and Resources
- Location:
- Linnanmaa Campus, SÄ111
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel provides a multi-level analysis of forestry between the national and the global in the transitional post-WWI moment, as a contested site of intersection between rapidly developing and interconnected processes of nation-building, transnational commerce and science, and colonial politics.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines the multifaceted and rapidly developing roles played by forestry in societies around the world in the transitional moment of the aftermath of World War I (approximately 1917-1930). This was a moment when newly independent states sought to harness both the products of forestry (timber, pulp, paper and packaging materials) and its associated practices (land ownership regimes, forestry research and state-guided forest management) in the urgent process of nation-building that spanned the fields of economics, politics and science. Simultaneously, multinational, Western-based wood industry companies were spreading and securing their reach around the world on all continents, often in contested relations with local authorities and communities. And in colonial contexts like British India and the Dutch East Indies, imperial powers were seeking to establish profitable wood plantations, partly to cover the costs of the recent war. These developments saw forestry centred firmly at the intersection of the national, international and transnational, as the subject of multiple overlapping global flows of commerce, investment and research. This panel provides a trans-domain investigation of this key moment of forestry development that seeks to go beyond existing literature both by its explicitly global frame of reference and by integrating economic, political and scientific levels of analysis to the approaches of environmental history. We also welcome papers that consider the forest itself as a site of nation-building, transnational connectivity or political contestation; as well as papers that interrogate the changing role of animal life and labour within forestry thinking and policies in the period.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how forest departments and conservation associations presented forest conservation as a public matter to garner public support for their objectives during the interwar period, a time marked by fears of a global timber shortage.
Paper long abstract:
Preparing for the upcoming New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition set to open in 1925, director of forests Leon MacIntosh Ellis envisioned the court of the New Zealand State Forest Service to offer visitors a lesson on the importance of forest conservation through pedagogical tools such as relief maps, charts, and photographs. Such display, he believed, would help to foster a public forest consciousness – a utilitarian and aesthetic appreciation of forests as well as political support for forestry. Ellis’ ambition to educate the public on conservation mirrored those of contemporary advocates of conservation across the settler societies of the British empire and the United Kingdom itself in the wake of World War I. Indeed, fearing a global timber shortage, state forest departments and voluntary conservation associations across the British empire sought to create a public forest consciousness to secure public support for conservation and forestry policies. This paper explores how state forest departments and voluntary conservation associations presented forest conservation as a public matter through propaganda schemes and campaigns with the aim to garner public support for their policies, adding new insight into the relationship between forestry and notions of public opinion, and democracy. On a broader scale it offers a historical perspective to contemporary discussions on democracy, public opinion, and climate change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss the sustained exploitation of the forests of Nepal Terai during and after WWI to meet Indian railway companies' demands for sleepers. I will demonstrate how the imperial interests of the British Raj and Nepali government under the Ranas intersected in the jungles of Terai.
Paper long abstract:
The supply of railway sleepers to British Indian Railway Companies dwindled during the WWI. There was a heavy demand for broad-gauge sleepers overseas because of the war which resulted in a severe shortage of sleepers for railways in India. Consequently, the Railway Board approached the Nepal durbar expressing interest in the extraction of sleepers from the “excellent sal forests” in the Sarda valley. Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher was more than willing to help the Raj and Nepal was already helping the imperial war effort by sending young Nepali men to fight for the empire. Generously, Chandra made an offer, free of royalty, of up to two hundred thousand sleepers from the Sarda Valley. Chandra presented this offer as Nepal’s contribution toward the prosecution of the great war with hope and prayers for the final success of the British forces. The extraction of sleepers from Nepali forests, at a royalty, continued throughout the 1920s under the supervision of an Indian Forestry Conservator. Here was an instance of the confluence of political and economic interests of the Nepali Rana rulers and the British Indian government in the extraction of forests of Nepal Terai. In this paper, I will discuss the integration of Nepali to the larger political economy of British Raj in South Asia and the ecological consequences of it. My focus on the sal forests of Nepal Terai and their sustained extraction will also highlight ecological imperialist projects of the Nepali state that saw the Terai as its internal colony.
Paper short abstract:
It is argued that forestry science was vital in the nation-building of Chile in the Araucanía region between 1912 and 1931. Foresters were key in protecting the forest for the common good and they were the main brokers between the different parties interested in the forest resources.
Paper long abstract:
Chilean forest history during the late modern period has been understood as a process of extractivism and ‘Chilenization’. The state strove to control the forest and its people without any major consideration of the territory’s ethnic and environmental diversity. In this sense, the Chilean history would not be so different from other experiences in the Global North and in the Global South.
However, a new analysis of the sources from the Araucanía region, southern Chile, between 1912 and 1931, suggests that the situation was more complex. It is argued that Chilean state officers were vital for building a nation. They made significant efforts to conserve the forests for the common good, having to cope with the lack of collaboration of some land occupants and the harshness of the elements. The Chilean foresters also strove to accommodate the different interests that Euro-Chilean settlers and indigenous people had on the forest natural resources.
Thus, the Araucanía’s case not only nuances the extractivist trend or narrative that tends to dominate forest history, but it also warns historians that the obstacles to conservation may come from ‘below’, rather than from the ruling elite. From a wider perspective, the Chilean case shows the important role that the state can play in the socioenvironmental challenges posed by the Anthropocene. It demonstrates that ‘seeing like the state’(James Scott) did not necessarily involve a simplification of the ecological and social reality.