Twenty-First Century Landscapes: Planning, Extraction, and the Reshaping of the Southeastern Carpathian Forests in Interwar Romania

• In Event: Mountains in Transition: Tracing the Environmental History of the Southeastern Carpathians Mountains

Abstract

While the wood products industry had long been a cornerstone of the economies of the Southeastern Carpathian region, it took on a new level of importance; economically, socially, and ecologically; by the 1920s. Using exploitation and management plans, internal forestry communications, works by period doctrinaires, and local records, this study marks forest exploitation in the early twentieth century as a radically transformative process. It argues that state-led capitalist extractive practices went hand-in-hand with plans that sought to reshape Carpathian forested landscapes and local communities into fundamentally different social, economic, and ecological spaces. It traces how foresters’ regulation attempts and planned extraction became entangled with modernizing attempts to change the composition of forests and their relation to local communities for decades and centuries to come. While immediate economic and social arguments were at the forefront of forestry engineers’ plans to transform rural spaces and extract resources, their long-term plans sought to reshape the Carpathian socioecological landscapes by the twenty-first century. Control, predictability, and surveillance became central to the practice of Romanian forestry institutions and inextricably linked to the profound growth of the wood-products economy of the region in the 1920s. In combining economic activity with social and ecological change, this paper seeks to connect local experiences and Carpathian landscape management with larger questions about modern capitalist and forestry practices, connecting the region with global modernization trends and those connected to statebuilding, surveillance, and socioecological management.

Author

• George Andrei, Indiana U Bloomington