The Industrialization of Austrian Forests 1766-1914

The modern history of European forests is characterized by long-term recovery of forest biomass stocks and increasing regulation and rationalization of forest management and use. This history is often told as a success story, and as the paradigmatic example of sustainable resource management. However, recent research has pointed out that conceptions of sustainability in rational forest management adhered to a narrow economic understanding of the term, and that its implementation often came at the expense of local populations and forest ecology. The project INFEST therefore develops a novel and nuanced narrative of forest change. INFEST adopts the perspective of interdisciplinary environmental history to study the industrialization of forests in Austria from 1766 to 1914. The project tackles forest change as a process shaped by both socio-cultural (e.g., power relations, practices) and ecological dimensions (e.g., nutrient availability, plant growth), and their relations over time. INFEST hypothesizes that this period, during which Austrian forests underwent a shift from forest depletion to recovery, also marked a regime shift from a multifunctional towards an industrialized forest regime, characterized by distinct changes in sociocultural and ecological forest characteristics, and a reduction in diversity across these dimensions. INFEST links methodological approaches form cultural and political environmental history (i.e., qualitative analyses of historical sources) with material environmental history (i.e. quantitative biogeochemical accounting and modelling). The project analyses (1) cultural programs underlying legal regulations of forest use at national and provincial levels, based on analyses of legal documents and discourses surrounding them; (2) social practices of forest use and ensuing conflicts, based on analyses of archival sources in two local case studies (e.g., forest management plans, “Servitute”, court records); and (3) biogeochemical stocks and fluxes of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in forests, based on forest inventories, maps and model reconstructions. Ultimately, INFEST aims at identifying (4) a socio-ecological regime shift in the course of the industrialization of forests. INFEST develops the first history of socio-ecological forest change in Austria that consistently links sociocultural and ecological forest dynamics. It establishes novel insights about how different social actors and their interests interacted with forest ecosystems in the long 19th century. Databases developed in the project will be made available through research infrastructures and foster future research in the history of forests and woodlands and on legacies of forest use. By enriching the historical understanding of the emergence of “sustainable forest management”, the project also contributes to current debates on sustainable resource use.