THE HISTORY OF DEFORESTATION

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Williams

History Today July 2001

It is a common misconception that deforestation is a recent occurrence,
gaining momentum in the tropical regions of the world since about 1950. But
its history is long, and stretches far back into the corridors of time when
humans first occupied the earth and began to use fire deliberately, probably
some half-a-million years ago. All that has changed since the mid-twentieth
cen-tury is that an ancient process has accelerated, and that, compared to
previous ages, environments more sensitive and irreversibly damaged have
been affected. Possibly as much as nine-tenths of all deforestation occurred
before 1950.
Chopping down trees is part of an age-old human quest for shelter, food and
warmth. Trees provide wood for construction, shelter and making a multitude
of implements. Wood provides the fuel to keep warm, to cook food and make it
palatable, and even to smelt metals. The nuts and fruits of the trees are
useful for human foods, medicines, and dyes, and the roots, nuts, young
shoots and branches (and the flush of young grass after burning) pro-vide
food for animals. Cleared forest provides (at least initially) naturally
friable and nutrient-iich soils for growing crops. Clearing requires no
sophisticated technology'. Humans with stone or flint axes need bound-less
energy to fell trees; in contrast, fire and browsing animals can wreak havoc
with little effort. The substitu-tion of metal for stone axes c.3,500 years
ago, and then for saws in the medieval period, eased the back-breaking task
of clearing, and accelerated the rate of change, but it did not alter the
basic process of destruc-tion and land-use transformation. Power-saws during
the last fifty years have made a major impact.
There is much uncertainty about the pace and locale of deforestation during
past (and even present) ages. This revolves around the multiple meanings
given to three basic ques-tions. What exactly is a forest? What was the
extent and density of trees at any past given time? And what consti-tutes
'deforestation'? Pragmatically one may say that a forest can range from a
closed-canopy tree cover to a more open woodland, which affects density.
'Deforestation' is used loose-ly to mean any process which modi-fies the
original tree cover; from clear-felling, to thinning, to occa-sional fire.
However, it should not be forgotten that forests re-grow, often with
surprising speed and vigour, and forest re-growth has occurred whenever
pressures on it have been relaxed. This was observed, for example, after the
Mayan population collapse c.800 AD, after the Great Plague, after the
initial European encounter with the Americas, and with agricultural land
abandonment in eastern USA post-1910 and post-1980 Europe.
Pie-literate societies everywhere had a far more severe impact on the
forests than is commonly supposed. The increase and spread of people, and
domestication, took place in largely forested environments. In Europe
Mesolithic cultures (c. 9000-5000 BC) did not avoid forests but actively
engaged with them, clearing their edges for cultivation, and using fire for
game hunting. On the upland fringes of the Pennines, North York Moors and
Dartmoor, successive clearings are accompanied by pollens of plants such as
sorrel and ribwort plantain, which can only flourish as a result of less
tree cover.
The subsequent 2,500 years of Neolithic agriculture (c. 4500-2000 BC) was
far more sedentary and sta-ble than once thought: the conven-tional
archaeological wisdom of the Neolithics practising a 'swidden' agriculture
(rotational burning and clearing for cropping) as they spread across Europe
from east to west is no longer subscribed to.
The significance of the wide-spread incidence of the large, timbered long
houses excavated during recent decades has not always been appreciated; many
were occupied for centuries, which suggests perma-nence of settlement. The
Neolithics were discerning farmer/pastoralists who sought out floodplain
edges, and selected the loessic soils for their fertility and not for their
supposed treelessness. Modern experiments show that flint and stone axes are
effective forest-fellers. Once cleared of their trees, the floodplains
sup-ported intensive garden cultivation and meadows. The cleared soils
sus-tained yields of cereal crops for sur-prisingly long periods, and
shortfalls in diet were supplemented by a hith-erto unsuspected reliance on
cattle, which supplied meat, blood, milk and cheese, as well as by lesser
num-bers of sheep and pigs and their products. Consequently, large num-bers
of livestock (30-50 head) were needed to make it economically fea-sible to
extract milk and meat pro-duce. A typical six-household, thirty-person
settlement  would  have needed to plant about 13 hectares of wheat, and run
a 40-head herd of cattle with 40 sheep/goats. If the area used for crops,
housing, garden plots, fuel, constructional timber, pasture land, meadows
and rotation-al forest browse is totalled then each settlement needed over 6
sq km of woodland to survive, or a staggering 20 hectares per person.
Whatever forest the axes did not eliminate, burning and animal grazing, if
inten-sive enough, thinned or destroyed. The process continued unabated
during the late Neolithic to early Bronze ages (c. 3000-1000 BC). Char-coal
layers, decreases in forest pol-lens, increases in cereal and weed pollens
and interbedded farming and clearing implements, all point to the continuity
of agriculture.
The evidence for similar processes of early forest disturbance with
clear-ing are unfolding for the Americas, so that any romantic idea of the
pres-ence of virgin forests before Euro-pean contact is a myth. For example,
burning, swiddens and manipulation of trees in the rain forest of
equatori-al upland areas may date from as early as the first retreat of the
ice (C.12,000 BC) and most soils are stud-ded with charcoal. Ethnobotanists
believe that much of the Amazonian forest is a cultural artefact conse-quent
upon native peoples develop-ing successive resource management strategies,
such as selective propaga-tion, to cope with fluctuations in population
dynamics. The Maya low-lands and other parts of tropical cen-tral America
have a similar history. In temperate North America the six-teenth- and
seventeenth-century trav-el accounts of the American botanist John Bartram
(1699-1777) and oth-ers in the south-eastern states in par-ticular, are full
of vivid descriptions of indigenous clearing and agricul-ture, which is
substantiated by archaeological and palaeobotanical evidence. From at least
10,000 BC the aboriginal population occupied the rich bottom lands of the
continental river systems. Progressive clearing on the flood plains and
lower terraces, and the intensification of cropping, gradually converted the
landscape into a mosaic of permanent native American settlements and
cultivated fields, early successional forests invading abandoned native
Ameri-can old fields, and remains of the original deciduous forest in the
uplands. By AD 1000 the Indians were colonising the fire-prone eastern
woodlands. Knowledge about defor-estation in Africa is sparse, and with the
exception of settlement in savan-na-woodland and adjacent belts in west
Africa, it may not have been extensive.
In every continent fire and the axe, together with dibble-and-hoe
cultivation and later the  light plough, often integrated with pas-toral
activity in Old World situations, resulted in the creation of non-forested
patches. Forest structure was changed by the selective utilisation of plants
(such as olive, walnut, pistachio, bamboos and palms) by humans and animals
which altered the distribution of many tree species. In sum, the impact of
early humans on the forest was greater than sus-pected; it may well have
been one of the major deforestation episodes in history.
In Europe from c. 1000 BC to the end of the Dark Ages, increasing
population, burgeoning urbanisa-tion, and trade by different cultures,
mainly on the northern rim of the Mediterranean   basin, caused widespread
coastal and some inland deforestation. The contemporary lit-erature of the
'classical' age of Greece and Rome, the works of Strabo, Theophrastus,
Cicero, Varro, or Columella, supplement archaeologi-cal and palaeoecological
evidence. For the first time, people recorded what they saw, did to, and
thought of, their external world, and were conscious of their power to
control and even 'create' nature. The prima-ry cause of clearing was either
to grow food or facilitate grazing, fol-lowed in impact by domestic fuel
procurement, ship-building and metal-smelting. The detail of each process
comes in roughly reverse order to its importance. Thus, as always, clearing
for growing food was the most important change but gets little mention as it
is subsumed into the larger everyday, taken-for-grant-ed practice of
agriculture. Yet the industrious farmer, who Virgil said 'subdues his
woodland with flames and plough' and who 'carted off the timber he has
felled', was the prime cause of change. There are refer-ences to extensive
forests becoming either greatly diminished or elimi-nated. Metal-smelting
looms dispro-portionately large in the literature because of its intense
localised impact, as at the mines of Rio Tinto (south-west Spain), Populonia
(Italy, opposite the isle of Elba), Laurion (south-east Athens), or Cyprus,
although it is doubtful if it was any-thing like as devastating as is
com-monly made out. Still more abun-dant is the evidence about felling to
smelt metal, to produce fuelwood for domestic use and baths, to service the
general timber trade to Imperial Rome and other cities, or as an out-come
of  warfare,  particularly through ship-building by Venetian and Arab
traders during the seventh to eleventh centuries.
The marked seasonality of the cli-mate in the Mediterranean basin, the
prevalence of fire -and overgraz-ing by stock, particularly goats, resulted
in the succession of an inferior woodland - garrigue or maquis -which in
turn could be degraded to poor pasture. Ultimately massive ero-sion, with
associated deposition of silt in shallow coastal locations, led to the
widespread onset of malaria by the fourth century BC. Centuries of
overgrazing and clearing during the medieval period continued the process. A
general picture emerges of considerable change. However, the extent of
forest degradation and erosion or their contribution to eco-nomic decline
should not be over-stated. With a few exceptions, forests furnished the
timber needs of the time as well as in the early Renais-sance period, as
evidenced by the great fleets launched by Venice, Genoa and Catalonia. It is
likely that the final woodland denudation of the Mediterranean world was
much later and was the product of popula-tion pressure as late as the
nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Middle Ages, particularly in western and central Europe, and also in
China, witnessed a surge of eco-nomic activity in which the forest and its
multiple riches played a cen-tral part. It is thought that the forests of
France, for  example, were reduced from 30 million hectares to 13 million
hectares between c. 800 and 1300 - and still a quarter of the country was
covered. In Germany and central Europe, perhaps 70 per cent of the land was
forest-covered in AD 900 but only about 25 per cent remained by 1900. The
historian of medieval technology, Lynn White, has talked of the 'cultural
climate' of invention, innovation and religious belief that characterised
the Middle Ages, and it is a useful concept when thinking about clearing.
There was an intense religious belief in creating a divine, designed earth,
coupled with a need to understand and use nature for practical ends. Lay and
ecclesiastical owners cleared vast areas both for the glory of God and
personal territorial gain; piety was accompanied by an improving zeal. The
underlying driving force was a sixfold increase  of population between 650
and 1350 throughout Europe and more food was needed to avert famine.
Under-utilised and marginal lands were colonised in the west European
heartland, and a massive  expansion  of  settlement occurred in the forests
of central and eastern Europe. Three technical innovations helped  raise
production.
First, the dominant crop rotation practice, which used two fields with one
fallow, was replaced by a three-field system, thus shortening the fallow
period. This was possible because new crops like oats and legumes helped to
fertilise the soil and supplemented animal and human nutrition. Secondly,
the development of the wheeled plough with  coulter  and  mould-board
allowed cultivation to move from the light soils onto the heavy moist soils
that were usually forested. Thirdly, ploughing efficiency was improved by
the invention of the rigid-horse collar  and  nailed  horseshoes, increasing
speed and pulling power, thus favouring the horse over the ox.
Whereas the society of the tradi-tional manorial system was hierarchi-cal,
custom-bound and socially immobile, the new clearing and expansion produced
a more fluid society.  Aggrandising  landlords encouraged individual new
settlers onto their lands, and offered gener-ous terms of ownership and
personal freedom. In a general way clearing contributed to the emancipation
of the common man by giving him property, freedom and status. Organised
colonisation by Germanic settlers on the forest frontier of cen-tral and
eastern Europe, changed the ethnic and settlement map of that part of the
continent. The high point of clearing was between 1100 and 1350. Place names
indicating clearing and new settlements in once-forested areas abound, and
rent rolls, charters, and leases show how expansion occurred. Cultiva-tion
rose from about 5 per cent of land use in the sixth century AD to 30-40 per
cent by the late Middle Ages, and the vast tracts of forest were fragmented,
thinned or elimi-nated.
By the end of the twelfth century the reduction of forest and the rise of
personal power by the nobility led to them exerting territorial con-trol on
the remaining forests as hunting grounds. This was opposed	by the peasants
who gathered fuel, grazed stock and made good use of the forest products.
The vast body of custom and rights that grew up subsequently to govern the
use of the forest was a measure of its increasing scarcity.
The various elements interlocked to produce what Lynn White has called 'the
agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages', which asserted the dominance of
humans over nature. It also shifted the focus of Europe from south to north,
from the restricted lowlands around the Mediterranean to the great forested
plains drained by the Loire, Seine, Rhine, Elbe, Danube and Thames. Here the
dis-tinctive features of the medieval world developed - a build-up of
tech-nological competence, self-confidence, and accelerated change which
after 1500enabled Europe to invade and colonise the rest of the world. In
that long process of global expansion the forest and the wealth released
from it played a central part.
Little is known about clearing in China where massive deforestation must
have happened also. As ever, the detail of agricultural clearing is murky,
but the demands of industry are clearer. A flourishing iron and steel
industry in the Shandong region in north-east China during the Northern Song
dynasty (AD 910 and 1126), and the early substitution of coal for charcoal
suggests not only precocious technological development but widespread
devastation and shortages of fuel. Just after the Domesday Book was
completed, iron production in China was about 125,000 to 150,000 tons, only
a little less than total European production at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Production then declined by a half, whether through
exhaus-tion of fuel, the Mongol invasions, or some other factor, is not
known.
In contrast to the abundance of information on the working of bureaucratic
government, there is a paucity on peasant life and liveli-hood. But
agricultural clearing must have gone on, with the relentless increase of
people from e. 65-8O million in AD 400 to 270 million in 1770, and the
quadrupling of land in agri-culture. Large swathes of the forest-ed lands in
the central and southern provinces would be engulfed by the enormous
migration of peoples from the north
During the 450 years from 1492 to c. 1950 Europe burst out of the con-fines
of the continent with far-reaching consequences for the forests of the rest
of the world. Its capitalistic economy commoditised nearly all it found,
creating wealth out of nature, be it land, trees, animals, plants or people.
Enormous strains were put on the global forest resource by a steadily
increasing population (just over 400 million in 1500 to nearly 2.5 billion
in 1950), also by rising demands for raw materials and food with
urbanisation and industrialisa-tion, first in Europe and, after the
mid-nineteenth century, in the United States. In the mainly temperate
neo-European areas, settler societies were planted and created. Perma-nent
settlement began in earnest by the mid-seventeenth century after the near
elimination of the indigenes by vir-ulent Old World pathogens,    like
smallpox, measles and 'flu. The imported Old World crops and stock
flourished wonderfully. The dominant ethos of freehold tenure, dispersed
settlement, ?improvement? and personal and political freedom led to a rapid
and successful expansion of settlement, although much environmentally
destructive exploita-tion also occurred. Tree growth was considered a good
indicator of soil fertility in all pioneer societies, and the bigger the
trees the quicker they were felled to make way for farms. The United States
was the classic example of this neo-European agri-cultural  clearing.  The
pioneer farmer, through 'sweat, skill and strength', was seen as the heroic
sub-duer of a sullen and untamed wilder-ness. Clearing was widespread,
uni-versal and an integral part of rural life; about 460,300 sq km of dense
forest were felled by about 1850 and a further 770,900 sq km by 1910. 'Such
are the means', marvelled the French traveller the Marquis de Chastellux in
1789,

?by which North-America, which one hundred years ago was nothing but a vast
forest, is peopled with three million of inhabitants .... Four years ago,
one might have travelled ten miles in the woods ... without seeing a single
habitation.?

It was one of the biggest deforesta-tion episodes ever. A similar process of
the pioneer hacking out a life for himself and family in the forest occurred
in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In Aus-tralia, for
example, nearly 400,000 sq km of the southeastern forests and sparse
woodland were cleared by the early twentieth century.
In the sub-tropical and tropical forests,  European  systems  of
exploitation led to the harvesting of indigenous tree crops (e.g., rubber,
hardwoods), and, in time, to the sys-tematic   replace-ment of the original
forest by 'planta-tion' crops grown for     maximum returns in relation to
the capital and labour (usually slave or    indentured) inputs. Classic
examples of this were  the  highly profitable crops of sugar in the West
Indies; coffee and sugar in the sub-tropical coastal forests of Brazil;
cot-ton and tobacco in the southern United States; tea in Sri Lanka and
India; and, later, rubber in Malaysia and Indonesia. In eastern Brazil, over
half of the original 780,000 sq km of the huge subtropical forest that ran
down the eastern portions of the country had disappeared by 1950 through
agricultural exploita-tion and mining. In Sao Paulo state alone the original
204,500 sq km of forest was reduced to 45,500 sq km by 1952.
Peasant proprietors were not immune to the pressures of the glob-al
commercial market. The expan-sion of peasant cultivation in lower Burma
(encouraged by British administrators) between 1850 and 1950, resulted in
the destruction of about 35,000 sq km of imposing equatorial (kanazo) rain
forests and their replacement by rice. Through-out the Indian sub-continent
the early network of railways meant an expansion of all types of crops by
small-scale farmers, often for cash, that led to forest clearing
every-where.
Societies not yet affected by Euro-pean penetration did not exploit their
forests any less vigorously or in a more egalitarian or caring a man-ner
than did their ultimate colonial, commercial European overlords. There is
plenty of evidence from, for example,  south-west  India  and Hunan province
in south-central China from the sixteenth century onwards to show that the
commer-cialisation of the forest was well established. In the former,
per-manent indigenous agricultural settlement existed side-by-side with
shifting cultivation, and village coun-cils regulated forest exploitation by
agriculturalists. The forest was not regarded as a community resource;
larger landowners dominated forest use in their local areas. Scarce
com-modities such as sandalwood, ebony, cinnamon, and pepper were under
state and/or royal  control.  In Hunan, a highly centralised adminis-tration
encouraged land clearance in order to enhance local state rev-enues so as to
increase the tax base and support a bigger bureaucracy and militia. State
encouragement was also given to migrations into the forested hill country of
south China later on.
Forests everywhere were being exploited and were diminishing in size as a
response to increasing popu-lation numbers and increasing com-plexity of
society. In the sub-tropical world change was just slower than that
unleashed by the Europeans with their new aims, technologies, and
inter-continental trade links, but no less severe. Measures of destruc-tion
are hard to come by, but in South and Southeast Asia between 1860 and 1950,
216,000 sq km of for-est and 62,000 sq km of interrupted or open forest were
destroyed for cropland.
During these centuries deforesta-tion was also well under way in Europe
itself, which was being colonised internally. This was partic-ularly true in
the mixed-forest zone of central European Russia, where over 67,000 sq km
were cleared between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth century.
The insatiable demand in all soci-eties for new land to settle has been
matched by a rising demand for the products of the forest themselves. For
example, the European quest for strategic naval stores (masts, pitch tar,
turpentine) and ships' timbers made major inroads into the forests of the
Baltic littoral from the fourteenth century onwards and those of the
southern USA after about 1700. Alternative construction timbers like teak
and mahogany were discovered in the tropical hardwood forests after c. 1800.
The  pace  of transformation increased during the first half of the
twentieth century. In the Western world demands for timber accelerated. New
uses (pulp, paper, packaging, plywood, chipboard) and relatively little
substitution of other materials boosted use, while traditional uses in
energy production, construction and industry continued to loom large. The
indispensable and crucial nature of timber in many Western economies gave it
a strategic value akin to that of petroleum in economies today. In the
tropical world the massive expansion of pop-ulation by more than
half-a-billion on a base of 1.1 billion resulted in extensive clearing for
subsistence, accompanied by an expansion of commercial plantation
agriculture. In all, perhaps a further 2,350,000 sq km of tropical forest
was lost between 1920 and 1949. The only encouraging feature in the global
picture during these years was the reversion of farmland to forest. This had
begun in the eastern United States with the abandonment of 'dif-ficult' and
hard-to-farm lands in New England in favour of easier-to-farm open
grasslands, and continued with the abandonment of the cotton and tobacco
growing lands in the South-ern States. A similar story unfolded in northern
Europe with 'marginal' farms.
The most publicised deforestation - the deforestation everyone thinks of
when the word is mentioned - occurred after 1950. Since then, the temperate
coniferous  softwood forests have about kept up with the demands of
industrial societies for supplies of timber and pulp. But the focus of
deforestation has shifted firmly to the tropical world. Here, better health
and nutrition have re-suIted in a population explosion. These often landless
people have moved deeper into the remaining forests and further up steep
forested slopes. They have no stake in the land and therefore little
commit-ment to its sustainable management. Since 1950 about 5,500,000 sq km
of tropical forests have disappeared, Central and Latin America being
classic examples. In addition, the tropical hardwood forests are being
logged-out for constructional timber at an alarming rate, while wood is cut
for domestic fuel in prodigious quantities in Africa, India and Latin
America. Globally fuelwood cutting now roughly equals saw timber
extraction - about 1.8 billion cubic metres compared to 1.9 billion cubic
metres. It is forecast to rise rapidly in line with world population
increase.
The history of deforestation is long and complex. It is one of the main
causes of terrestrial transforma-tion whereby humankind has modi-fied the
world's surface, a process which is now reaching critical pro-portions. One
thing is certain: with an ever-increasing world population many will want to
exploit resources and therefore the process of defor-estation will not
abate. Others will want to restrict its use and preserve it. The tensions
between exploitation and preservation will continue.