Opening the stacks
Opening the stacks
Forests composed predominantly of a single tree species, planted in uniform rows and same-age stands to facilitate management and commercial exploitation.
2 chapters across 1 book
The chapter explores how the state imposes legibility on complex forest ecosystems through the development of scientific forestry in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, transforming diverse old-growth forests into uniform monoculture plantations for easier measurement and fiscal management. While this approach initially increased timber yields and commercial productivity, it ultimately led to ecological degradation, including soil depletion and increased vulnerability to pests, revealing the limitations of state-driven simplification and control of natural systems. Efforts such as forest hygiene attempted to mitigate these negative effects but underscored the challenges of managing ecological complexity within a utilitarian framework.
Chapter 1 of "Seeing Like a State" traces the emergence and global spread of scientific forestry as a state-driven rationalization of forest management, emphasizing quantification, uniformity, and economic utility. It critically examines the ecological degradation caused by monoculture plantations and the externalized environmental costs ignored by utilitarian frameworks. The chapter further explores the state's use of cadastral surveys and measurement to impose legibility on land tenure systems, facilitating taxation, commodification, and control, while highlighting local resistance and the political implications of citizenship and bureaucratic objectivity.