ACTUAL TREE-HANGING OR ACTUAL INSUPPRESIBLE ALLIANCES
Originally, I'd attached these tags about British imperial forestry to a post about United States treatment of forests, Indigenous peoples, and land administration from 1900-ish to 1935-ish, during a transition period when clear-cutting logging was threatening profit so the US turned to a German-/British-influenced "sustained yield" forestry paradigm:
In the midst of the first Empire Forestry Conference of scientists, academics, and colonial administrators in 1920, the chairman of the Forestry Commission of Britain, Lord Lovat, said that forests were "grown for use and not for mere ornament ... Forests are national assets only so far as they supply the raw material for industrial development."
Rajan (in Modernizing Nature) directly quotes professor of forestry at Oxford, R.S. Troup, who had been influential in the Indian forest service; at the same forestry conference in 1920, Troup promoted sustained yield like this: "Conservation was a 'wise and necessary measure' but it was 'only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire'. The ultimate ideal was economic management [...], which regarded forests as capital assets, fixed annual yields in such a manner as to exploit 'to the full interest on this capital [...]' and aimed for equal annual yields so as to sustain the market and provide regular supplies of timber to industry."
An accessible summary of the shift to sustained yield: [Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Economic Development, 1800-1950. S. Ravi Rajan. 2006.] Concise look at the trajectory from Royal Navy timber reserves; to British foresters training in German traditions before joining as officers in the powerful British-Indian land administration bureaucracy and then training US land managers.
From Rajan:
"[An] extremely important aspect to the repackaging [of forestry science and management] [...] [and] a critical principle that stands out here is that of sustained yield, or sustainability (Nachhaltigekeit). This concept was fundamental [...]. By the turn of the [twentieth] century a large pan-colonial [British-United States] scientific community was in existence, trained in the German and French tradition of forestry [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of [British] India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' [...]. Dietrich Brandis [...], considered the founder of Indian forestry [...] married Rachel Marshman, who was [...] also the sister of the wife of General Havelock, a close friend of Lord Dalhouse, the then governor-general of India. On Havelock's recommendation, Brandis was put in charge of the forests of [...] Burma [...] and was subsequently appointed inspector-general of forests of India. [...] He also trained prospective foresters of the forest department of the USA, including Gifford Pinchot. [...] Chancellor Bismarck gave the visiting British Prime Minister Gladstone an oak sapling [...]. Prussia prided itself on helping devise [...] modern forest management. [...] [T]he Forestry Commision [...], [or] [t]he Imperial Visionaries, as they became known, believed that an increase in primary production in the tropical dependent empire would result in the growth of the British economy. [...] They deemed their own job to be serving the imperial economy."
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And this may sound stark to us today, but this early twentieth-century pitch is actually kinda toned-down compared to the framing that British land managers used earlier in the nineteenth century, which had sought to turn much of India into a "forest products" extraction hub. First for British Navy ship construction and extracting Mysore's spices and timber, then for railroad construction and things like teak, and then grassland ecosystems and Himalayan foothills were deliberately converted to more "industrious" monoculture timber plantations of pine and acacia species which Britain imported from Canada and Australia respectively.
Elsewhere, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley described it like this:
'These forest reserves [...] did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather "a more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing new landscapes [...]."' While Sharae Deckard adds: '[T]he subversive potential of the "green" critique [...] was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods [...].'
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This has also been covered by:
Vinita Damodaran, Richard Grove, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Jonathan Saha, Gregory Barton, Rohan D'Souza.
More summaries of the situation (shorter length, accessible):
"Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Forests and the Agenda of Forest Management in the British Empire, 1800-1900". S. Ravi Rajan, In: Nature and Orient: Essays on Environmental History of South and South East Asia, 1998.
"'Dominion over palm and pine': the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920-1947". J.M. Powell, Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2007.
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And the book:
Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand.
Edited by Damodaran and D'Souza, with work from conferences hosted by Grove, in 19 chapters including:
"Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India" (K. Jan Ootheok); "Redeeming Wood by Destroying the Forest: Shola, Plantations and Colonial Conservancy on the Nilgiris in the Nineteenth Century" (Deborah Sutton); "Nature's Tea Bounty: Plant Colonialism and 'Garden' Capitalism in the British Empire" (Jayeeta Sharma); "Industrialized Rainforests: The Ecological Transformation of the Sri Lankan Highlands, 1815-1900"; "Forestry and Social Engineering in the Miombo Woodlands of South-Eastern Tanganyika" (Thaddeus Sunseri)
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And also:
Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. GA Barton, 2002.
"Colonialism and Green Science: History of Colonial Scientific Forestry in South India, 1820-1920". VM Ravikumar Vejendala, Indian Journal of History of Science, 47:2, pages 241-259, 2012.
"Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History." Vinitia Damodaran and Richard Grove, in Nature's End: History and the Environment, 2009.
"The Reconfiguration of Scientific Career Networks in the Late Colonial Period: The Case of Food and Agriculture Organization and the British Colonial Forestry Service" by Jennifer Gold, and "A Network Approach to the Origins of Forestry Education in India, 1855-1885" by Brett M. Bennett. Both chapters are form Science and Empire, 2011.
Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Joseph Morgan Hidge, in Series in Ecology and History, 2007.
Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, 2005. And also: "Peninsular Malaysia in the context of natural history and colonial science." Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, 2009.
"Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1". Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso, Environment and History 12, no. 1, pages 31-64, February 2006.
