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Session Submission Type: Panel
Despite their literal rootedness, trees have a long history of crossing borders – be they the customs borders regulating wood imports, the political borders separating national forestry institutes, or the imaginary borders between old and unexplored, possibly colonizable, worlds. In this panel, we will look at the transnational dimension of the history of forestry and the history of trees, striving to trace both the links that connected different forests and the ways in which particular forests and forest knowledge connected different parts of the world from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Through our case studies – which address changing perceptions of the scientific and commercial value of North American forests, the impact of French forestry on Mediterranean environments and societies, debates over the climatic effect of trees in Europe and colonial Africa, and the commodification and globalization of the Southeast Asian hardwood forests – we endeavor to start a conversation about the role of forests and their inhabitants, users, interpreters, and administrators in connecting global environmental histories with histories of science and technology. In view of the central ecological, economic, and symbolic function of trees and forests, the four papers and the conversation will also address how forestry history can speak to diverse audiences and connect environmental history to the every-day experiences of people around the globe.
Seeing the Forest from the Trees, and the Continent from the Forest: Trees and Early European Efforts to Understand the North American Environment - Sam White, Ohio State University
French Foresters Abroad: French Empire and the Nineteenth-century Evolution of Forest Science - Andrea Williams, Colorado State University
Good Trees, Bad Trees – Colonial Debates on the Climatic Impact of Forests - Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Plying a Global Trade: Post-WWII Economic Reconstruction and the Invention of Southeast Asian Tropical Hardwood Plywood - Emily Brock, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science