[fearn]

Hi Tom,

Let's break this down a bit. Part of the problem is that our terminology about "forest" has changed over the last 500 years, as have our thoughts about tree usage.

For instance, in the 16th century England, a "Forest" was a royal reserve. New Forest actually has far more grass than trees (that's why the New Forest Pony is just a pony, not some miraculous horse that lives on tree leaves). A park was a forest with a wall around it. A "Desert" was an uninhabited area (Shakespeare has people sitting under the trees in the middle of a desert in one play)--this is the origin of our term "deserted." And when you start translating from other languages, it gets worse. "Monte" in Spanish can mean both mountain and forest, for example.

Now, when you read many accounts of "deforestation," what are they talking about? If they are using modern translations of older terms, they can get well and truly screwed up. For instance, a region of Spain may have become "desert," in an old text. Aha! says the historical ecologist--deforestation! Actually, a town got sacked in a war, and as a result, the number of trees nearby actually *increased*. THAT is the level of evidence we're dealing with. In Grove and Rackham's excellent The Nature of Mediterranean Europe, there's an entire chapter devoted to how to read historical evidence for ecological purposes, and I recommend it (and the entire book) to anyone who's interested. A major purpose of the book is to discuss and correct the errors made in reconstructing the ecological history of the Mediterranean Basin, and it's a fascinating read.

Getting back to forests and woodlands: Woodlands (at least in the UK and probably elsewhere) were used to produce two things: wood and timber. Wood is the small stuff used for things like charcoal, fence posts, furniture, etc (think "firewood"). Timber are the tall trees used for major construction projects, like buildings and ships. In a woodland, most trees were deliberately pruned (coppiced or pollarded) for wood production, because that is what most people used in everyday life. Timber was a major source of wealth. Property owners deliberately planted and cared for timber trees, replanting immediately when they were cut down. Essentially, they were long-term trusts. A well-known example: when Oxford Cathedral was built, they planted a number of timber oaks, for the repairs that they knew it would need in a few centuries. Today, only the rich have investments that run on this time-scale, but in the old days when they couldn't get timber from the US, Norway, or Brazil, they had to make sure that the resources would be available when they needed them.

So...deforestation in Europe? It gets pretty complex. Certainly a lot of trees have been cut down in the last 150 years, especially with the introduction of American "Scientific Forestry" which drastically changed the way Europeans looked at their woodlands (for instance: woodlands were to only be used for growing trees for industry, not for raising pigs, firewood, etc). Prior to that...? Well, in the UK (where I've got the best evidence to hand), basically all the land was cleared and in use by around the 4th century BC. Deforested? Not really. There are lots of woodlands that have probably been in continuous use and harvest since that time. It's something to think about.

In Africa, we simply don't have the record. It's pretty obvious from aerial surveys and some archeological work that parts of the Congo basin that are now forest were densely settled at one time. What happened to those people is (to my knowledge) largely unknown. My guess is that, in Central Africa, we've got at least as complex a land use history as in Europe. I suspect that parts of central Africa have been as consciously and complexly managed as parts of England. Given the wars and colonialism of the last few centuries, much of the evidence is hidden. I'll note in passing that the same thing can be said for North and South America's precolumbian history.

To sum up: basically, I think that deforestation, and blaming steel production for it, is a radically over-simplified idea, to the point that I'd suggest that it's wrong. To start with, throw in harvesting timber for ships, switching to coal for industry and cutting down woodland for other industrial uses (such as farming or sheep-herding), and the switch in how forests were both understood and managed, from a local-scale sustainable use to global-scale resource extraction. In transferring the argument to Africa, you need to factor in all the history that have disappeared into the mists, since we don't have any records other than the griot's stories and similar myths. Personally, I don't this can be parsed very simply as increased steel production=> deforestation.

Fearn