Christof Mauch Carl-von-Carlowitz Series The Growth of Trees A Historical Perspective on Sustainability
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Christof Mauch The Growth of Trees A Historical Perspective on Sustainability Translated from German by Katie Ritson Carl-von-Carlowitz Series Volume 3 published by the German Council for Sustainable Development
Carl-von-Carlowitz lecture 2013 of the German Council for Sustainable Development in June 2013 in Freiberg (Saxony) in cooperation with Technical University (TU) Bergakademie Freiberg, the Saxon Mining Office and the Saxon Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz society Lecture by Christof Mauch: Excursion through time and space a historical perspective on sustainability For conversations, suggestions and criticism, Christof Mauch wishes to thank his fellows Verena Winiwarter, Donald Worster and Joachim Radkau. The author expresses special thanks to his colleague Pavla Šimková, who proofread this text and took care of image rights.
Content Foreword Reflection and Sustainable Development: Looking Backwards to See Forwards Chapter 1 Excursions in Time and Space Chapter 2 Hans Carl von Carlowitz Chapter 3 Europe and the Globe Chapter 4 American Space Dreams without Limits Chapter 5 Pasts and Futures Chapter 6 The Age of Vulnerability Chapter 7 Sustainable Societies? 9 15 21 31 37 43 47 57 Annotations Image Sources Bibliographical references About the author and the publisher 70 78 79 87
Foreword Reflection and Sustainable Development: Looking Backwards to See Forwards An Introduction to the 2013 Carl von Carlowitz Lecture The time and venue of the fourth Carl von Carlowitz lecture in June 2013 could not have been more apt, for it was the third centenary of the publication of Sylvicultura Oeconomica by the superintendent of mines, Carl von Carlowitz. The event was held in Freiberg, not far from his former place of work. The home of the Mining Authority of Prince August the Strong, von Carlowitz s sovereign, is still that of the Free State of Saxony. This is more than a passing reminder of the roots of the concept of sustainability. e writings of von Carlowitz mark a milestone in the history of sustainability. He focuses on the largely thoughtless destruction of nature, and gives us a picture of a sustainable use of nature that nurtures and maintains, is born out of ethical principles and requires a high degree of education and comprehension. Von Carlowitz was concerned with the welfare of his country, no less: for a short historical moment, the welfare of his Saxony was dependent on the natural resource of wood explicitly on trees means of growth, and whether more could be produced within ecological constraints. Reflection and Sustainable Development: Looking Backwards to See Forwards 9
Von Carlowitz makes clear that sustainability is a contentious term. Today we tend to forget this, when talk comprises entirely of win-win situations, and, as a result of frequent dilution, the concept lacks the brilliance of its historical and these days political source. Sustainability is not a fluffy idea. e concept derived from the conflict between exploitation and overuse: salt extraction, silver mining, and smelting ore were the drivers of wood scarcity. At the same time, the forestry industry serves as the perfect example of different aspects of sustainability and the inherent principle of common benefit. e long evity of trees and forests is far beyond that of a human lifespan. ese are long production cycles, lasting generations. But other branches of the economy too and ultimately all branches will need to think long-term, analyze bad decisions and manage resources to secure the future of society. Not just natural resources, but social capital as we know from Gro Harlem Brundtland s political concepts and von Carlowitz s ideas on forestry must be managed in such a way that utilization does not become plunder, and use does not become using up to the end that future generations are placed at a permanent disadvantage. Von Carlowitz s ideas are just as current and challenging today as when they were written: each generation is responsible for solving its own problems, and must not allow them to burden those of the future. ere also exists a duty to avoid foreseeable future problems. In the case of renewable resources, use must be kept within the rate of regeneration; the use of non-renewables may not be higher than the amount that can be replaced by renewable production. Dangers and unjustifiable risks for human health must be minimized, and energy and resource use must be decoupled from economic growth. The German Council for Sustainable Development is aware of the need to reflect on the historical and cultural development of sustainability, and to apply this to our current knowledge and action. The relationship between human beings and their environment, and the 10 Foreword
decisions they are faced with in this context, are formative for the sustainability of societies and cultures: that much we know from history. The German Council for Sustainable Development is immensely grateful to Professor Christof Mauch for accepting this invitation to give the fourth Carl von Carlowitz lecture and taking this excursion through time and space, through which he will look back at sustainability in history. Professor Mauch continues this lecture series exploring the foundations for, and pathways of, sustainable development. The first Carl von Carlowitz lecture was delivered in 2009 by the ecologist Professor Wolfgang Haber, who focused on the consequences of population dynamics for sustainable development. Climate scientist Professor Carlo C. Jaeger from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research sketched out a twenty-first century history in his 2010 lecture Growth Where Next? In 2011, Professor Gesine Schwan explored how sustainable development can be served by the political establishment, calling for new rigour in the cooperation between politics, business, science, media, and society. At the heart of the lecture printed here is environmental history, which is also the history of humanity. It tells of decisions made by societies to regulate and shape their dependencies on, and relationship with, their environments incorporating the history of the term sustainability and the lessons that can be learnt from it. Professor Mauch uses several examples to vividly express the risks and challenges faced by what we think of as sustainable societies, at a time when the systems of which they were part became too large or complex to handle. He outlines the rise of Europe in terms of the historical situation and peculiarities in the ways in which inhabitants have engaged with their environment, illustrating to a large degree why the world is the way it is today. By this means, he shows us that an understanding of historical change is of far greater importance for Reflection and Sustainable Development: Looking Backwards to See Forwards 11
shaping the future than merely observing what is happening around the globe at our moment in time. Professor Mauch is director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) in Munich. As a historian his focus has been largely on German and North American history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on international environmental history. He gained his doctorate in literary history at the University of Tübingen in 1990 and his second doctorate in modern history at the University of Cologne in 1998. Christof Mauch has taught at the universities of Tü bingen, Bonn, Cologne and Georgetown University in the USA. From 1999 to 2007 he was director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He took up the chair in American Cultural History at Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich in 2007, and is currently director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies. He was President of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) 2011 2013. Christof Mauch has written and edited numerous scholarly books and articles, and has received numerous accolades for his work. His membership of international boards and committees reflects his engagement in his academic field and his interest in transdisciplinary research. As director of the Rachel Carson Center, his aim is to write environmental history and contribute to the shaping of our world. The goals of the center are to advance the exploration and debate of the interactions between humans and nature; moreover, it tries to strengthen the role of the humanities in current political and scientific discussions on the environment and sustainability. Conceived as an international and interdisciplinary forum, the RCC has thematic foci such as Natural Disasters and Cultures of Risk, Environmental Knowledge and Knowledge Societies, Resource Use and Conservation, and Environmental Ethics, Politics, and Movements. To make its work accessible, the center holds conferences and workshops, manages an online portal of resources on the environment and society, publishes a book series in English and in German, and organizes exhibitions at 12 Foreword
the Deutsches Museum and elsewhere. The Rachel Carson Center has thus succeeded in establishing its own take on the world, and in opening and stimulating new perspectives on research into the environment. Berlin 2013, Marlehn Thieme Chair of the Council for Sustainable Development Reflection and Sustainable Development: Looking Backwards to See Forwards 13
Chapter 1 Excursions in Time and Space A Historical Perspective on Sustainability
In the beginning was Venice: City of merchants, of wealthy bourgeoisie, of elegant facades, pompous palaces, scowling sculptures, elegant paintings, of riches put on display: Venice. The Lion City on the Mediterranean with its trading colonies in Flanders and Maghreb and Contantinople and Trebizond. Venice: Towards the end of the thirteenth century it was the wealthiest city in Europe, and a hundred years later it had become the world leader in printing books. And, at the heart of Venice, its arsenal. Here its ships war galleons and large-bellied merchant ships were built and overhauled. One hundred ships per year were made seaworthy by some 16,000 workers. The ships sterns were made of oak, the oars of beech. The Venetians had an insatiable hunger for wood. For without wood there could be no ships. And without ships, no trade, no defence, no power, no wealth. 1 Nothing, we might assume, would have alarmed the Venetians more than the spectre of a wood shortage. Therefore the Great Council made laws in the fourteenth century that were designed to secure the supply of wood for shipbuilding: the arsenal had first pick of oak, price limits were set, and captains paid a fine for every broken or damaged oar. But although the list of laws grew ever longer and the punishments ever stricter, the depletion of the forests in the vicinity of Venice continued to increase, and nothing seemed to stop it. The lawmakers were convinced that the local population, whose cattle grazed in the forest and who used it for firewood, were the cause of the decrease in the available wood stock. Thus, as the fifteenth century drew to a close, they devised a new strategy: large forested areas with the best oaks and beeches were reserved for the arsenal; the state forestry guard (provveditori ai boschi) developed elaborate 16 Chapter 1
Figure 1 The Venetian Arsenal The shipyard, erected on two marshy islands, is regarded as Europe s largest production base prior to industrialization. The serial production of ships and galleys took place with great efficiency during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Demand for timber from the forests surrounding Venice was correspondingly high. methods of measuring, counting and mapping the individual species of tree. A report written in 1471 tells us, for example, that a particular section of the forest held enough oak for one hundred excellent galleons. Interestingly, the Venetian forest authorities began to change their thinking in the sixteenth century; they began to observe the forest not just in terms of space, but also in terms of time. The comparison of the inventory at the end of the fifteenth century with documents from half a century later shows that a radical change in the way the forest was understood had taken place: If we fell all the beeches that are contained in this forest, says the 1548 inventory, we can supply the arsenal with oars for thirty years. With good manage- Excursions in Time and Space 17
ment, however, we will be able to meet demand for many centuries to come. The Venetians were advocates of sustainability before this term existed. Carl von Carlowitz praised the particular cautiousness of the Most High Republic of The Venetians were advocates of sustainability before this term existed. Venice [ ], that She provides for all other Things and shows herself to be good / in her provinces, not just in planting Shipbuilding Wood / but also in conserving it [ ] and in observing it for the needs of its famous Arsenal. 2 The Venetians seemed to be doing everything right. When they needed one thousand stacks of oak wood for the construction of the devotional church Basilica Santa Maria della Salute, the Senate made sure that the wood was acquired from the Hungarian king, so that Venice s own stocks were reserved for the maintenance of canals and construction of breakwaters. This made no economic sense, but the Senators decision was based on sustainability. The Venetians marked each individual tree to show its future use, beginning when the trees were saplings; some trees were then marked a second time when they had reached three feet in height. But reality did not correspond to the lists and the maps, and the future did not correspond to the prognosis: there were fewer and fewer trees, and nobody in Venice understood why. Today we know that the Venetians were more successful than they realized. The story of what actually happened is too complex to be summarized in a few short sentences. But the fact remains that the stocks of the state forest decreased, whereas the intensively used forests, in particular the forest commons from which the local population took underwood, berries and fruits, and leaf mould as fertilizer, saw a steady increase in wood growth. History offers us numerous examples of cultures that died out because they exhausted their resources. The Mayas, we believe today, are an example of this; but the most remarkable case is probably that of Easter Island, where entire forests were felled in order to transport 18 Chapter 1
Figure 2 Moai, the colossal monolithic statues on Easter Island The statues in the South Pacific are up to 9.8 metres high and weigh on average 12 tons. The levering out, transportation and erection of the statues consumed large amounts of wood. Transporting of the stone giants was carried out by means of rolling tree trunks, which often had to be replaced by new ones. colossal stone statues, meaning that there was ultimately a shortage of firewood and wood for boat-building that the local population, which subsisted mainly from fishing, needed to survive. 3 The Venetians with their hierarchies of History offers us numerous examples use and their rules on forest conservation had set better priori- because they exhausted their resources. of cultures that died out ties. e perceived and real scarcity of wood had little to do with the end of Venice s thalassocracy. The Venetians, who had galleons but no ocean-going vessels, lost their lucrative spice trade to the Por- Excursions in Time and Space 19
tuguese; and ultimately it was Napoleon who dealt the death blow to the Lion City, not the decline of the forests. If anything, the Venetians had managed their forests in exemplary fashion; far better, in any case, than the English, who exploited their forests systematically and exhausted the wood stock. That Great Britain was able to rise to the position of great power is, in view of its forest politics, a miracle I will discuss later. 20 Chapter 1
Chapter 2 Hans Carl von Carlowitz
Hans Carl von Carlowitz, with whom we are concerned here, was born during the irty Years War. e town with which his name is linked, Freiberg in Saxony 4, attracted the greedy attention of the advancing Swedish army due to its silver mines, but the Freiberg miners knew how to defend themselves; the Swedish general Lennart Torstensson in his frustration nicknamed the town a nest of rats, because the miners were repeatedly able to drive their enemies from the sha s and tunnels of the mines by diverting water into them. Carlowitz must have been brought up on these stories of pillage and plunder. He was a child of his time, a time in which hunger, disease, and destruction were rife and the knowledge of vanitas, the transience of all earthly things, was one with the desire for rebirth and divine salvation. No one put this into words better than the baroque poet Andreas Gryphius: 5 You see / where er you look / mere earthly vanity What man today has built / will fall upon the morn This place where cities lie / will hence be turned to corn And there a shepherd boy with sheep and cow play free The flow rs that bloom will soon be trod into the clay The flesh which beats and throbs will turn to ash and bone Not one thing shall endure / not precious ore, nor stone Today our fortune smiles / tomorrow comes dismay The glory of fine deeds will like a dream be gone Should then this earthly game / by fragile man be won? Oh! What is earthly life, that we hold dearly yet 22 Chapter 2
Figure 3 Gabriel Ehinger: The Mourning Philosopher. Etching around 1660, after a painting by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld The phrase Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas (English: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ), is attributed to King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 1:2). It refers to the vanity of everything that is earthly and it characterized the experience and worldview in the seventeenth century, when Hans Carl von Carlowitz grew up. Carlowitz s pleas for conservation and sustainability are an expression of a fundamental tension with regard to the dominant philosophy of his time. Hans Carl von Carlowitz 23
If not a futile thing / mere shadow, wind, and dust. A little meadow flow r / found once, forever lost. Upon eternity no eye has e er been set. For Gryphius and his contemporaries, all earthly life was fleeting. Life moved between the poles of carpe diem and memento mori, between pleasure in life and knowledge of death. For Carlowitz too, this man with his baroque wig, the terrors of the earthly vale of tears were little more than an expression of God s plan. On his travels, which took him from Scandinavia and England to Malta, the young nobleman recognized that within few scant years [ ] more wood is used than grown in many lifetimes and he feared the jealous judgement of our great God at the end of the world as prophesied by Philipp Melanchton, in which man would suffer greatly for lack of wood. 6 Against this experience of fleeting and futile human existence, the idea of sustainability, which extends into a far-off future, is especially pronounced. Fear of death can amplify the enjoyment of pleasure, but also the drive to resist fate and invest in the future. Carlowitz conceived his Sylvicultura, his magnum opus on forestry as a domestic message, written out of love for the fostering of the greatest good. 7 e household patriarchs at whom it was aimed were in the main noble landowners and estate managers, 8 but ultimately his work became something of a foundational text for the science of forestry. 9 For cohorts of economists and foresters, the Sylvicultura was required reading and became a canonical text. In 1761, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar used the Sylvicultura as a model for For cohorts of economists and foresters, her creation of a comprehensive the Sylvicultura was required forestry plan (regulating the taxation and inventory of her forests, reading and became a canonical text. the soils, the animals and plants), which centred around the idea of sustainability and projected the forests growth three centuries into the future, up to the year 2050. 10 e principle of sustainability was on 24 Chapter 2
Figure 4 Title page of Sylvicultura oeconomica Carlowitz s work was published in 1713 and consists of two volumes, with 30 chapters and 429 pages. The Sylvicultura oeconomica pleads for a prudent consumption of wood as a renewable resource. Carlowitz s book is regarded as the first cohesive German work on forestry. the rise; soon it would become popular in other countries as well. e Prussian Bernhard Fernow (1851 1923), who emigrated to the United States following his studies at the Forestry Academy in Münden, exported the theory of sustainable forest management to the USA, becoming the first forestry director of the US Ministry of Agriculture in 1886; in the spirit of Carlowitz, he harshly criticized the marketoriented tendencies of his elected homeland, which he described as being focused on cash flow 11 and The principle of sustainability was private exploitation. 12 e influence of the botanist and forester in other countries as well.. on the rise; soon it would become popular Dietrich Brandis (later Sir Dietrich Brandis) from Bonn was even greater. Brandis became forestry advisor to the Indian central government in Calcutta in the middle of the nineteenth century, in turn in- Hans Carl von Carlowitz 25
fluencing Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the United States Forest Service, who is known in history as the father of tropical forestry. 13 e Sylvicultura provided the Germans with a forestry textbook at an early date; it would play a pioneering role (both direct and indirect) in forestry management across Europe and around the world in the decades and centuries that followed. The history of this work is one reason to remember Carlowitz. Another reason is his thinking, to which we of course cannot do justice by reducing it to the term sustainability and its economic virtues. Carlowitz s concern was to smelt silver ore effectively. Wood was needed in large amounts for the construction of tunnels and mine shafts, and to initiate the chemical processes needed. Just as in Venice a lack of wood would have meant no ships, no trade, and no wealth, in Saxony a dearth of wood and charcoal would have meant no silver mines and no resplendent promenades and palaces. But Carlowitz saw wood as more than just a resource. In his Sylvicultura the mining official reveals himself over and over to be a friend and admirer of nature, and the powers of the natural world. Carlowitz was just as concerned with the growth of trees as with economic growth, and just as interested in humus as in silver. He paid attention to soil, Carlowitz was just as concerned with flora, wind, climate, and the incline of the land, the taste and the growth of trees as with economic growth, and just as interested in humus as in silver. scent of what his contemporaries called an unlovely piece of earth, in which Carlowitz recognized a miraculous, life-nurturing spirit at work. He marvelled at the lifegiving force of the sun and called the natural world a great worldbook to be studied. 14 The value of the trees could not be reduced to the value of the wood. For him, they were unspeakably beautiful. The loveliness of the green colour of the leaves, he once wrote, I cannot put into words. 15 But let us not get carried away. e sustainable economic ideas of Carlowitz and the global idea of sustainable development mapped 26 Chapter 2
out in Rio are worlds apart. At least from the moment that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we humans have been aware of the enormous destructive power that we are capable of unleashing on the whole planet. 16 For Carlowitz, God was the dominant figure who commanded the earthly sphere, for us today it is Man. Carlowitz wanted to conserve one resource, wood, in order to exploit another, ore, even more effectively. With hindsight, it is evident that Carlowitz distinguished between sustainable and non-sustainable resources, and that his thinking drew a veil over a classic conflict of interests. For him as for his contemporaries, ore as a finite resource was of no immediate importance. Today, we think in terms of systems that take account of many different resources and the whole globe. Carlowitz connected the term sustainable with the forests of Europe, not with the North-South divide and the unequal distribution of natural resources on the planet. Carlowitz s worldview is no longer easy to understand, his prose is contorted and pompous; and the environment and climate summits of the twenty-first century would be incomprehensible to the mines administrator from Saxony. We need to keep this in mind, lest we are tempted to turn him into a sustainability pop-icon in 2013. So let us not get carried away. e loyal English patriot John Evelyn (author, architect, and horticulturalist) had already penned a bestseller decades before Carlowitz with his book Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions, and in this he laid the foundations for forest management aimed at both nurture and preservation: Men should perpetually be Planting he wrote, so Posterity might have Trees fit for their Service and Felling what we do cut down with great Discretion, and Regard of the Future. 17 Carlowitz was neither the first practitioner nor the inventor of sustainability, and in his monumental work Sylvicultura oeconomica, the word sustainable ( nachhaltend ) appears, famously, only once. 18 Why, then, should we remember Carlowitz? Why do we have this Carlowitz lecture? On the one hand, the Sylvicultura oeconomica has contributed to the genesis of modern forestry science as no other work has. e in- Hans Carl von Carlowitz 27
Figure 5 Hans Carl von Carlowitz as an icon of pop culture Carlowitz s deliberations on the protection of forests are worlds away from today s discourse on sustainability. He was moreover not the first to formulate ideas about resource consumption. Is Carlowitz being turned into an icon of pop culture through celebrations of 300 years of sustainability in Germany? sights of Venetian foresters and their methods of observing and conserving forest resources disappeared into registries and archives and were completely forgotten. e teachings of John Evelyn, too, had no long-term bearing on British forests. Admittedly, the Tree-Planting he advocated did become something of a national obsession amongst the English aristocracy, in parks and along avenues, but British forestry practices were largely ignorant of Evelyn s Sylva; ultimately, if all else failed, it was always possible to import wood to Merry Olde A country with few resources notices England from other parts of the more quickly when they start to decline. globe. Colonies encourage avarice. Germany was different. A country with few resources notices more quickly when they start to decline. Richard Grove sees the beginnings of modern environmental consciousness in the colonial world of small 28 Chapter 2
tropical islands, for example the Caribbean islands, or Madeira. ere, the Portuguese, Spanish, and English colonists observed early on, in the seventeenth century, that economic growth had limits and could lead to ecological devastation. 19 In history we see time and time again how important knowledge of local changes, which Carlowitz saw and intuited, has been, and how tragic the kind of tunnel vision that did not comprehend local changes and conditions. Venice is one example: then, the forest commons could be managed to achieve greater yield and used more diversely and effectively than the In history we see time and time again mapped state forests. A very different example is provided by the has been, and how tragic the kind how important knowledge of local changes North Sea. During the transition of tunnel vision that did not comprehend from the rural societies of the late local changes and conditions. Middle Ages to the agrarian system of the Early Modern period, profitable landscapes for monocultures were created at the mouths of rivers. But the more orderly this geometrically composed, manipulated nature looked from afar, the more the gradual shifts in the landscape were ignored. The dikes were breached more often, instead of less. The new system proved to be unexpectedly fragile. 20 What could be behind it? A kind of agriculture based purely on profit? America in the early twentieth century gives us an example of just such a process with drastic consequences. The farmers who transformed the prairie into immeasurable, vast, uniform fields of wheat in the 1920s were able to make their land ten times more profitable than the ranchers who had farmed there before by using heavy combine harvesters with enormously wide teeth. They didn t even need to work the land themselves, but could manage the farm from afar, as suitcase farmers. But technological progress and the distance between farmer and furrow exacted a high price, for they failed to notice the gradual changes in the landscape in the soil, for example, that flaked and dried and turned to dust; and after a short period, Hans Carl von Carlowitz 29
Figure 6 Dust Bowl in Dallas, South Dakota 1936 Non-sustainable use of agricultural land led to an insidious aridification of soil in the Southern States of the USA. The Dust Bowl disaster was one of the greatest natural catastrophes in North American history. in 1935, a huge expanse that was almost twice as large as Germany, was transformed into a desolate wasteland. The Dust Bowl disaster was one of the greatest disasters in North American history. 21 30 Chapter 2