Wood

A History

Joachim Radkau

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745683614
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Environment & Energy Policy

Ötzi the iceman could not do without wood when he was climbing his Alpine glacier, nor could medieval cathedral-builders or today's construction companies. From time immemorial, the skill of the human hand has developed by working wood, so much so that we might say that the handling of wood is a basic element in the history of the human body. The fear of a future wood famine became a panic in the 18th century and sparked the beginnings of modern environmentalism.

This book traces the cultural history of wood and offers a highly original account of the connection between the raw material and the human beings who benefit from it. Even more, it shows that wood can provide a key for a better understanding of history, of the pecularities as well as the varieties of cultures, of a co-evolution of nature and culture, and even of the rise and fall of great powers. Beginning with Stone Age hunters, it follows the twists and turns of the story through the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution to the global society of the twenty-first century, in which wood is undergoing a varied and unexpected renaissance. Radkau is sceptical of claims that wood is about to disappear, arguing that such claims are self-serving arguments promoted by interest groups to secure cheaper access to, and control over, wood resources. The whole forest and timber industry often strikes the outsider as a world unto itself, a hermetically sealed black box, but when we lift the lid on this box, as Radkau does here, we will be surprised by what we find within.

Wide-ranging and accessible, this rich historical analysis of one of our most cherished natural resources will find a wide readership.

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PATHS INTO THE THICKET OF HISTORY

1 The ‘Wood Age’

Do materials make history?

Wood is a special kind of material. From time immemorial, the skill of the human hand has developed by working wood, so much so that we might say the relationship with it is part of human nature. The handling of wood is a basic element in the history of the human body, and in the history of craftsmanship.

In a brown coal mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, eight wooden spears have been discovered since 1994 that date back 400,000 years – by far the oldest known wooden implements anywhere in the world (figure 1.1). This highly improbable find is in its way more spectacular than all those at Troy put together. It testifies to an amazing skill in woodworking, greater than anyone previously attributed to people in the Palaeolithic Age, and it shows just how early man developed a high level of competence in dealing with wood. An earlier prehistoric object – a yew spear unearthed at Clacton-on-Sea in 1911 – had already caused a sensation, but after the Schöningen find that was seen to be not just an isolated case but a representative example of Palaeolithic woodcraft.

The know-how associated with wood belongs, as it were, to ‘human nature’ – to a primal anthropological state. Hartmut Thieme writes of the Schöningen spears: ‘The technical perfection of these ballistically balanced weapons points to a long tradition of using such implements.’ The exciting conclusion is that humans were capable of big-game hunting hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we previously thought (Thieme 2007: 85). Since 1973 there has been considerable discussion of Paul S. Martin’s thesis of ‘Pleistocene overkill’, according to which North American big game, with the exception of certain kinds of bison, were wiped out by human invaders within the space of a few centuries, some 10,000 years ago. Archaeological finds have indeed revealed a striking overlap between the appearance of humans and the disappearance of big game. The problem with the theory seemed to be that it was hard to imagine how these early humans could have technically mastered big-game hunting on such a scale. But, if we think of the art of perfect woodcraft stretching back into the mists of time, and applied precisely to hunting weapons, then the problem vanishes; the missing link is found.

The glacier mummy of ‘Ötzi’ from 5,300 years ago, which caused such a sensation when it was discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal in the Austrian Alps, had no fewer than seventeen different kinds of wood on it, each used for a particular purpose (Spindler 1994: 232–8). Archaeologists have also refuted Tacitus’ claim that the ancient Germans built their houses from unhewn tree trunks; it appears again and again that the ‘savages’ were not as savage as we used to think. Ötzi has distracted public attention from oak-lined wells dug up in opencast mining areas in Saxony and near Erkelenz in the Rhineland, which dendrochronological datings have shown to be more than 7,000 years old. These completely unexpected finds have revolutionized our picture of prehistoric settlements in Central Europe, but most spectacular of all have been the wooden nails that make expert eyes as big as saucers. The archaeologist Susanne Friedrich commented: ‘After these, anything is possible!’ One is curious whether the ‘Stone Age’ will one day prove to have been a highly developed ‘Wood Age’!

Figure 1.1: Eight wooden throwing-spears were found in and after 1995 in an opencast brown coal mine at Schöningen, in the foothills of the Harz mountains. Dating back 400,000 years, they are the oldest hunting weapons to have survived intact. They were lying in a hunters’ camp amid the bones of at least fifteen horses, which had presumably been hunted with these weapons on the shores of a lake. They prove conclusively that primitive man (and, later, Neolithic man) was not only a scavenger but a skilled hunter. But they also prove that people had developed technical skills in woodworking.

Since wooden implements have survived much more rarely than stone or metal objects, we long underestimated the extent to which human history rests upon wooden foundations. A whole culture of work depends on wood – from the Palaeolithic right down to the modern age. There has always been interaction between people and wood: the material made its mark on the hand, the muscular system and man’s creative powers, and wooden implements bore traces of the hand that fashioned them.

The wooden machines of the early industrial age, however standardized in their production, sooner or later acquired an individual character from the people who worked on them – which is why these were less interchangeable than workers on iron machinery. Adjustments often needed to be made to wooden machines, and the workers themselves had to take charge of repairs. Wood was easy to work with, but wooden machinery wore out quickly and encouraged a lot of small improvements to be made all the time: ‘Wood has been par excellence the material of innovation.’ Two historians of the Japanese textile industry noted: ‘Technological progress, therefore, penetrated more rapidly into factories equipped with wooden iron-reeling machines than it did with those of iron-machines only’ (Clancey 2007: 130, 131).

Where the machines were made of iron, workers were sometimes expressly forbidden to make repairs themselves. Previously, wood had preserved a degree of autonomy for labour and also set limits to the increase in the pace of work. The natural fibrous structure of the various kinds of wood influenced the history of technology. Indeed, the effects of wood extended into social history and the consciousness that workers had of themselves.

Woodworkers played a pioneering role in the formation of the German labour movement, providing a number of key leaders such as August Bebel, Carl Legien and Theodor Leipart. All three were turners – an occupation which, though low in the craft hierarchy, called for special skills of its own (Flade 1979: 231). Both Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, respectively the first party boss and first president of the German Democratic Republic, had originally been joiners. And, in the case of England, Edward Thompson has shown in his great biography that William Morris (1834–96) – who sparked new enthusiasm internationally for the crafts, especially carpentry – was not only a Romantic admirer of the Gothic style but also a passionate socialist.

The political consciousness of workers derived not only – as Marxist theory would have it – from the experience of capitalist exploitation but also from pride in craft skills. Carpenters may have stood out numerically, but when the various trades fused into an industrial union it called itself (after initial hesitations) the Deutscher Holzarbeiterverband, the German Woodworkers’ Union (Gottfried Christmann, in Grebing 1993: 17ff.). And in 1966, when the German Wood Union (Gewerkschaft Holz) followed the technological realities and the practice of employers’ associations by renaming itself the Wood and Plastics Union, this move triggered considerable disgruntlement: ‘It’s a new emblem that leaves our members cold’; ‘even if we rechristen ourselves, we shall always remain the Gewerkschaft Holz’ (Hans-Otto Hemmer, ibid.: 255). Wood shapes identity!

In commerce, too, wood created a world of its own. Buying wood is a matter of trust, since many defects are not visible from the external aspect of a tree. ‘Lumber-grading requires considerable exercise of personal judgment’, remarked Stanley Horn (1943: 219), at a time when wood was the object of intensive scientific research. And he knew what he was talking about. For this reason, long-lasting personal relations tend to develop between sellers and purchasers.

The Company of Woodmongyres, founded in London in 1376, lost its charter in 1667 when a number of cases of deception came to light; Samuel Pepys’s diary contains details of this (Latham 1957: 31). Since the felling and transportation of timber was often subject to government regulation, large dealers often needed to have contacts in officialdom – and so it was that a network took shape, based on either trust or corruption, according to the situation and the way it was seen. ‘Conservatism and corruption marked the system by which the navy received and used its timber’, Albion tersely opens his chapter on naval timber procurement. ‘Patron–client links … are central to the allocation and management of timber concessions’, is how Dauvergne describes the timber business in South-East Asia today (Dauvergne 1997: 8). And much the same can be observed in Europe too, throughout the history of the commercialization of timber.

We continually come across a special kind of human milieu in the world of wood – one sealed off on the outside but full of tensions inside. Today, when an ecologically aware public has become alert to illegal tree-felling and forest plunder, many timber firms claim not to know where their product comes from (see, for example, ‘Gegen illegales Holz’, WWF-Magazin, July 2009). Perhaps many really do not know: it would be further evidence of what Jürgen Habermas called ‘the new obscurity’.

Wood, wood, everywhere!

Werner Sombart (1863–1941), one of the founders of modern sociology, never forgot – unlike many of his successors – that nature is the foundation of life on earth and that human culture is deeply marked by its handling of natural resources. In his view, the entire culture of pre-industrial times had an inner unity that was only apparent in retrospect but had never been taken into consideration by historians. This unity had a ‘decidedly wooden character’ (Sombart 1928: 1138).

Following Sombart, the concept of a Wood Age culture stretching over thousands of years from the Stone Age to the eighteenth century became central to the colourful panorama of the pre-modern world. Wood, wood, everywhere! The Stone Age was itself mainly an age of wood: this is too easily forgotten, because wooden remnants have survived from olden times only in exceptional cases. The Greeks also carved images of their gods out of wood: it is only an optical illusion that all their statues are marble.

For millennia, wood was the most important, often the only, substance used for fuel, building and craftsmanship; it was also central to the forerunners of the chemicals industry. A whole world may be seen under a wooden aegis – from woodcutters, rafters, charcoal-burners, potash-makers and glass-blowers, through salters, forgers and blacksmiths, carpenters, cartwrights, coopers and veneer sawyers, to the high art of woodcarvers and shipbuilders. In the early modern period, a eulogy of wood’s many and varied uses became a rhetorical figure all the more forceful because of supply worries.

Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg, author of one of the leading works on agriculture in his time, wrote in 1682: ‘If we had no wood, we would also have no fire – and then we would have to eat all our food raw and freeze in winter. We would have no houses, and also no brick, glass or metal. We would have neither tables nor doors, neither chairs nor other household equipment’ (Hauser 1966: 38). Wood as fuel ranked quantitatively far higher than wood as craft material: it is estimated that, up to the nineteenth century, nine-tenths of wood was used for burning; the word ‘coal’, in Germany at least, nearly always referred to charcoal. In 1768 the Venetian naturalist Francesco Griselini called wood ‘the most precious and most necessary good for the needs of humanity’ (Vecchio 1974: 58). As to the forest, it was necessary to human life not only because of its wood but – even more important in some cases – as a grazing ground. It was the only pasture before a special technique was developed for the creation of irrigated meadows.

Someone who looks for wood and forest in history easily becomes obsessed with the subject, finding countless riches in Europe and other parts of the world. Wood as the foundation of human life, economy and culture is present everywhere: all one has to do is dig a little and learn how to read between the lines of the sources.

There is a transhistorical core to the relationship between human beings and wood. However, wood use and woodworking have been subject to (sometimes huge) historical change. The natural properties of the various kinds of wood have always been noted, but they represented potentials that were variously used and appreciated in different cultures and epochs. Wood inspires culture; it does not determine it. If there had been only a single ‘Wood Age’ culture from the Palaeolithic to the 1800s, world history would be truly monotonous. Historians would have to group Neanderthals and people from the age of Goethe in the same category, with the result that the Wood Age would become a night in which all cats were grey. But that is not how things are. Looked at more closely, history presents a multiplicity of ‘wood ages’ and ‘wooden cultures’, beginning already in prehistoric and ancient historical times. The following section will demonstrate this with the help of some striking examples.

Prehistory: in the beginning was fire

‘Anyone who believes that in prehistoric times humans lived in harmony with nature has not the faintest idea of what really happened’, Eberhard Zangger, an unconventional archaeologist, tells us. ‘Whichever region one examines, the first phase of human-induced environmental instability was the most destructive, because it was at the very beginning that the most soil was lost’ (Zangger 2001: 141). Zangger bases himself on the results of digs in Greece, but it is not only there that the evidence points to environmental crises of which no written testimony has come down to us. In the sandy soil of Lusatia, in eastern Germany, extensive forest clearances as early as the fourth century ad led to wind erosion on a scale that proved disastrous for agriculture. Around ad 400, the inhabitants of a village on the Teufelsberg near Briesnig ‘gave up the struggle and abandoned a settlement on which sand deposits up to four metres thick had been laid down over the course of a century’ (Spuren 2002: 278).

It was not natural instinct but hardship and a sedentary existence that led people to adopt a rather more sustainable way of handling natural resources. The early economy was based on plunder, and until modern times the threat of falling back into this repeatedly posed itself. In agriculture and livestock-raising – the two main kinds of farming – the effects of poor husbandry soon make themselves felt. But it takes longer in the forest, and it is there that the temptation of pillage is especially great. It can then take generations for the forest to recover.

But should the forest regenerate itself at all? As agriculture spread, the impetus to clear land was at first much stronger than concern for preservation of the forest. A turn to protection required a change in the form of economy. It may therefore be assumed that man’s relation to the forest had some features of a drama – but when, where and how?

It was long thought that people in early times lived in quite straightforward harmony with the forest, since they would not have been able to clear large areas with their primitive axes. But, as experiments with stone tools have shown, this was to underestimate the capacities of prehistoric man. A Finnish pioneer of experimental archaeology demonstrated in 1953 that a Neolithic stone axe could fell a medium-sized oak tree in a mere half-hour (Radkau 2008c: 42).

The fact that humans soon learned how to make use of fire was also left out of account for a long time. Only since the 1960s has a combination of palaeobotanical and ethnological research made it clear to what extent human civilization had its origins in fire-assisted hunting and slash- and-burn cultivation, which left areas of cleared forest highly fertile for a few years before they became exhausted and had to be given up.

In the conditions of Central Europe, the forest managed to regenerate itself once humans moved on from these fire clearances. But things were not so easy in areas affected by drought. Much of Australia’s savannah land came about as a result of burning by Aborigines, and tree cover returned only gradually when these practices were abandoned (Goldammer et al., in Schulte and Schöne 1996: 172). The dramatic character of man’s early relationship with nature was mainly on account of fire. When it did not destroy the humus layer in the soil, lush and species-rich vegetation could quickly spring up over large areas. But the key question was how to keep fire under control if the wind suddenly gusted or changed direction.

Stephen J. Pyne, who, with the ardour of a pyromaniac, has uncovered the igneous beginnings of civilization all over the world, formed a general impression that fire very rarely destroyed a landscape all on its own. ‘But fire and hoof, fire and axe, fire and plough, fire and sword – all magnify the effects by altering the timing of fire, its intensity, the fuel on which it feeds, the biological potential for exploiting the aftermath of a burn’ (Pyne 1997: 39). The mountainous Mediterranean region, with its light soil and dry summers – an ‘empire of fire’, where sheep and goats followed in the wake of burning – was one of the fragile landscapes highly vulnerable to fire. And this brings us geographically to the world of classical antiquity.

Antiquity: the supposed crisis of the forest

In 1864 George P. Marsh, then US ambassador to Italy, published the most famous American manifesto against the destruction of the forests – Man and Nature – in which he argued that ancient Rome’s ‘brutal and exhausting despotism’ over both man and nature was the causa causarum of the devastation of the Mediterranean (Marsh 1974: 5). In the same vein, travel guides written today maintain that the poverty of the Mediterranean forest is due to shipbuilding in antiquity. Later historical experience, however, gives reason to think that the exact opposite was the case: that forest conservation first became official policy as a result of intensive shipbuilding.

What do the ancient sources tell us? For those familiar with forest history in modern times, the great surprise is that the kind o...