I don't think it's off topic at all, but then I've never felt there should be tight bonds of topicality. If nothing else it interferes with my thought process. We shouldn't need a new thread every time a discussion takes a little bend. It'd make searching the archives easier, I supose......
Europe used to pretty much be a forest.
The practices of sustainable forestry you speak of have existed but are hardly universal.
What I've read is that the main deforestation came with the early industrial/postmedieval age (16th/17th), after the population recovered from the great plagues, when the emptied lands were filling back in, when steel was becoming cheap, but "coke" from stone coal was not yet in use; charcoal from wood was the fuel and the alloying ingredient for making steel. As I've mentioned I don't remember how much charcoal it takes to produce a ton of steel under preindustrial conditions, but I just remember it is an impressive figure; it's a lot. An outcaste caste of charcoal burners came into existance to feed this need. They were landless, itinerate. I don't know how the economics, etc. worked as to who owned the forests they worked or whatever.
Africa has seen a lot of deforestation, too, usually blamed on Imperialistic foreign exploitation, goats, and market agriculture (Africa never invented steel; this may fit in there somehow).........interesting to see how this or that must be the main cause; let us content ourselves to say a significant factor in the deforestation of Europe may have been steel production. If anyone wants to look into it further, please let us know what you find out.
|