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Paper short abstract:

We analyse the transformations of two mountainous areas of the Iberian North (in Asturias and Álava) from the Modern Age to the present day. In both cases there was an exploitation of the same resources, but the different management practices have affected the tree mass in very different ways.

Paper long abstract:

The mountains of the northern Iberian Peninsula were characterised during the Modern Age by the presence of multi-productive communal areas. Through the TemPa and Antigone projects, we have analysed two case studies (Ayande, in Asturias, and Entzia, in Álava) in which the material evidence of the production of firewood, timber or livestock (stall and transhumant) can be recognised. However, today the landscapes of each area show notable differences. In Alava, the spatial distribution of woodland, wooded pasture and open pasture has hardly changed. On the other hand, in Asturias we detected a strong decline of woodland and the advance of scrubland. This has led us to consider the existence of a more complex scenario at the local level, where possibly differences in the management of natural resources have generated very different landscapes. On the other hand, we wonder to what extent these differences depend on previous landscape dynamics, local community strategies or larger-scale production policies.

Finally, we want to highlight the importance of applying a multidisciplinary methodology (integrating archaeology, history and environmental sciences) to understand the complexity of the historical transformations of mountain areas at small and large scales.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the resilience and vulnerability of forest peasant communities by investigating the socio-economic consequences of wildfires in North Ostrobothnia during the 17th century, as well as the effects of Swedish legislation in the growing tar industry of the region.

Paper long abstract:

Notwithstanding harsh conditions such as war, a cold climate, and state control, the seventeenth century was a time of great economic transformation with direct consequences for people’s everyday life. In Finland (then a part of the Swedish realm), peasant communities began to produce large quantities of tar for the international market. The forests in which this production took place were owned as commons by peasant communities. With increased production followed increasing levels of forest exploitation which put pressure on the peasantry’s institutional structure as well as the forests themselves. This also resulted in increasing instances of wildfire breaking out due to the expanding tar industry. In this paper, I will demonstrate how these communities were affected by wildfires and discuss whether these communities were resilient enough to endure and recover from such disastrous events during the 17th century in North Ostrobothnia, Finland. The aim is to explain the socio-economic effects of wildfires from a bottom-up and top-down perspective. By using local district court protocols and Swedish legislation, I will explain how and why fires occurred, how they affected individuals and communities, and what help was available for those who suffered from wildfires. The legislation is used in order to make clear for what reasons they were implemented, what impact they had, as well as how cooperation strategies between state officials and rural populations functioned.

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Paper short abstract:

At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina had about 30% of its surface covered by forests, with about 1,600,000 km². In less than a century the country lost more than two thirds of its native forests. The aim of this paper is to explain this process of socio-environmental destruction.

Paper long abstract:

At the end of the 19th century, Argentina had 160 million hectares of native forests. In less than two centuries the country lost more than two thirds of its native forest heritage. Today there are less than 33 million hectares of forests left. The exploitation of this forest wealth is the starting point of this analysis, which aims to draw an interpretative picture -from a historical-environmental perspective- of the evolution of forest exploitation in the period 1880-1950. Our main objective is, then, the historical-environmental study of this process of exploitation of Argentine forest resources in the context of their incorporation to the market and the relationship established between this process of deforestation and the expansion of the agricultural frontier, its transformation and conflicts. The area where the greatest forest exploitation is taking place is centered in the Gran Chaco, the region with the greatest wealth of biodiversity in the country. It occupies 80 million hectares (800,000 km2), 30% of the country's surface, and is its largest forest region. Although Argentina was economically structured on the basis of agricultural production in the Humid Pampa, forestry has always been an important complement to the development generated by agricultural and livestock activities. The demand for wood for construction and as fuel grew significantly in addition to the specific industrial demand for the region's emblematic tree, the quebracho colorado. This situation led to a brutal extractivist activity, which implied the almost total destruction of the native quebracho forest.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze how - paradoxically - the disappearance of human impact, in the form of traditional management, has reduced biodiversity in European lowland forests, and how management reintroduction can contribute to maintaining healthy forests in a changing climate.

Paper long abstract:

The dominant narrative of 20th-century forest conservation focused on the elimination of human impact from forests. Forests, so the narrative went, should be governed by natural processes, and the best way to achieve this was non-intervention, at least outside commercial stands. When forest management was necessary, those methods were to be preferred that imitated natural processes, such as the Pro-Silva method of close-to-nature forestry. While these principles worked well in many forests, there were some regions, especially in the lowlands, where non-intervention led to decreasing biodiversity because of natural forest succession. Recent research in forest historical ecology pointed out that the reason behind this apparent paradox is likely to be the lack of human management. However, this management was different from the methods of scientific forestry. It mainly included traditional management types, such as coppicing, litter raking and forest grazing, which kept forests relatively open. When these uses were restricted or even banned by forestry authorities, the resulting succession led to the impoverishment of light-demanding forest flora. Realizing this, nature conservation authorities have tried to reintroduce traditional management into many European forests. However, the results are not always straightforward mainly because changing conditions, including atmospheric nitrogen deposition, warming temperatures and plant invasions, render the past hardly applicable to the present. Using examples from several European regions, this paper will provide an overview of the paradox of human impact for forest biodiversity and highlight best practices in achieving healthy forests in an uncertain future.

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Paper short abstract:

The 1930s saw a concerted effort by the Portuguese New State to transform the rural landscape through a massive afforestation plan. This paper argues that political and scientific discourses about fire as an enemy of forests are key to understanding the expansion of state power over the territory.

Paper long abstract:

In 1938 the Portuguese dictatorship of the New State ushered in an Afforestation Plan that sought to completely reshape the country’s rural landscape while imposing an ideological corporative vision for the nation. A new political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic discourse encouraged Portugal to become again a “country of forests”. Affirming that once pristine woodlands had been destroyed by the “carelessness and ignorance of local populations”, the Plan proposed that more than 400.000 ha of commons should be turned into state forests. This was a key aspect of the expansion of state power over the territory in the early to mid-20th century.

Fire was a key theme in this process. Drawing on transnational discourses about “degraded” Mediterranean landscapes, fire became “the most terrible enemy” of afforestation efforts, capable of destroying “in a mere instant” what nature took centuries to grow. Consequently, an ever-increasing array of restrictions on fire uses led to the exclusion of local people from what were once common lands. The new forest imagined by the Afforestation Plan was to be a forest without fire.

This paper investigates the twin stories of state-sponsored afforestation and the exclusion of fire from the forests, to analyse the emergence of a political, legislative and scientific consensus about fire as an enemy from the 1930s until the early-1970s, when the increasing incidence of wildfires led to a reassessment of the role of fire in forest management.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how the use of forests as a natural resource was justified by their economic utility. Via contextualist analysis of the works of A. K. Cajander, it produces an environmental intel-lectual history from a post-humanist perspective on Finland's engagement with its forests.

Paper long abstract:

The forests of Finland have been the cultural and economic cornerstone of Finnish identity and society. However, treating forests primarily with economic utility has hidden critical, human-induced environmental problems such as extensive clear-cuttings, drainages, and monoculture plantations. This paper maintains that addressing these issues necessitates delving into their intellectual roots. To this end, the paper investigates the emergence and evolution of justifications for exploiting natural resources, shedding new light on how economic utility was used to rationalized these uses, overshad-owing other potential justifications. By employing contextual analysis, the paper crafts an environ-mental intellectual history, offering a post-humanist lens on Finland's engagement with its forests. It unravels the path dependencies cemented during the twentieth century, revealing how the dominance of economic utility was first challenged by emerging environmentalist arguments in the 1940s and gaining traction in the 1960s and 1970s. A critical investigation of the ideas in the works of forestry experts such as A. K. Cajander, N. A. Osara, the critical environmentalist movement within forestry sciences by E. Kalela and E. Lähde, and comparing them with Swedish and British works on the development of scientific forestry, will show how the forestry industry continuously developed and vigorously defended their justifications of exploitation of natural resources and how the environmentalist tried to counter them. The paper opens up new avenues of investigation into the developing, transnational, scientific and modernised forestry and the impact that human beings had on the forests as a multi-species entity.

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Paper short abstract:

This work aims to problematise the transformations that have taken place in the use of forests in Portugal over the last two centuries, highlighting the use of natural resources by local populations and the introduction of forestry in forest management.

Paper long abstract:

With this work, we intend to problematise the changes that have occurred in the use of forests in Portugal over the last two centuries, highlighting the use of natural resources by local populations and the introduction of forestry knowledge through the work of forestry engineers in afforestation programmes under the initiative of the central state administration.

We will, therefore, focus on the consequences of these actions and practices on the part of the various agents who, on different scales and chronologies, transformed natural landscapes. Essentially, these human actions are characterised by the intensive use of pastoralism, wood for charcoal production or the implementation of forest monocultures, which have caused various problems today. About this last aspect, we are trying to highlight why certain species have become dominant in forest stands, such as eucalyptus, due to the use of this tree by the cellulose industry as a raw material. The study of this theme, which includes the analysis of forestry policies related to eucalyptus, aims to understand the role of man, forestry-based industries and the state as decision-making agents in the processes of deforestation and afforestation through a vision open to the perspective of forest management, in which human intervention is a determining factor alongside natural components in the configuration of forest spaces, as products of the interrelationships that have been established throughout contemporary Portugal. Finally, we have tried to point out ways to cooperate in repairing the damage caused by extractivism and the rentier view of the forest.

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Paper short abstract:

Since the 19th century, the volume of international timber trade has grown enormously. While its impact on the condition of tropical forests has been widely discussed, this is less the case for the forests of Central Europe. To fill this gap, an empirical study of Polish forests is proposed.

Paper long abstract:

The responsibility of international trade in the process of environmental degradation has been the subject of much debate in environmental history. Proponents of the unequal ecological exchange approach, inspired by world system theory, have stressed the importance of trade flows in the environmental degradation of peripheral areas whose resources are put at the service of more powerful centres. Others stress the difficulty of highlighting the role of exports as a real environmental burden. However, empirical studies on this issue are largely lacking, especially for the period before the mid-twentieth century. To fill this gap, the paper focuses on the case of timber in the Polish lands, which have been an important international supplier of timber and forest products since at least the sixteenth century. The quality of the statistical material available from the mid-nineteenth century onwards makes it possible to analyse the effects of international trade in a truly documented way. By distinguishing different regions of analysis (Poland was divided between several empires at the time), the presentation systematically compares the available figures on timber exports to Germany (the region's most important customer) with those on natural forest growth and standing volume, which are more difficult to reconstruct. A discussion of the figures allows for a more nuanced approach to the reality of the depletion caused by German commercial penetration of Polish soil, and thus to go beyond a superficial analysis of the actors' discourses and to see what material reality they were based on.

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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on governmental reforestation practices, I will show how forests and forest management in the Philippines have been shaped by environmental narratives about native and exotic tree species that still pervade the forestry sector as well as the tree planting projects of today.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the last centuries, the Philippine forests have been heavily transformed. As most of the old-growth forests of the archipelago have been cut down by Spanish, American, and Philippine authorities, the question of how to reforest the bare landscapes has become more and more relevant.

After experimenting with different native and exotic tree species while focusing on easy and fast growth, most of the Philippine reforestation projects in the 20th and 21st centuries have relied on a small diversity of exotic tree species. Interestingly, the over 3.600 native trees have not only been neglected but also described by the exact opposite attributes: slow-growing and complex. Although voices from scientists and civil society have become louder and question the governmental reforestation approaches in public, the dominance of exotic tree species is still prevalent.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with environmental authorities, scientists, and civil society groups, I will analyze how reforestation discourses and practices have been simplified through environmental narratives that are linked to colonial forest management and specific resource focus. Linking different current perspectives on reforestation with the forest and forestry history of the Philippines, I aim to show how environmental narratives and forest policies are mutually dependent, and, further, hinder the planting of native trees today.

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Paper short abstract:

German forestry is praised for being among the most sustainable, both historically and at present. We investigate whether the narrative that forestry is inherently sustainable is valid and how we can respond to the current situation, which is marked by recurring fires and collapsing ecosystems.

Paper long abstract:

With the rapidly changing climate, uncertainty arises in how to take care of the highly complex ecosystems of forests. The thought of forestry being inherently sustainable with Carlowitz and others being the proclaimed heroes of the current forestry industry has led to assumptions on sustainability, complexity, and uncertainty factors which have led to detrimental policy advice on sustainable forestry practices, see EU forest strategy 2030. These include static and linear growth modeling predicting a continuous re-growth of trees as a resource, omitting parameters such as changing temperatures, photosynthetic constraints, humidity, and damage incurred through human intervention.

Taking stock of the misconceived ideas of supposedly sustainable practices that naturally grew out of history, as well as the concept of continuously re-growing trees, in a critical analysis employing complex systems thinking and economic damage calculations will help build a new model focusing on a post-growth and socio-ecological basis.

The challenges of instability and complexity in a rapidly changing climate make it more difficult to take care of our forests. However, employing historical discourse evaluation and complex system thinking to create a new dynamic socio-ecological economic approach to forestry can show new ways of looking at our forests with more respect and humility. This paper mainly focuses on the German historical and present discourse as Germany still counts as a leader within the sustainable forestry industry worldwide, and despite its failings the current and historical practices are revered in places such as the USA and Canada.