Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

German scientific forestry is generally referred to as a starting point for the concept of sustainability and the variety of interpretations it has found in recent public and scientific discourses. Its early history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, is treated, more or less, as a 'founding narrative' with all the typical aspects of this literary device: simplicity, a degree of mysticism and a teleological relation to the current state of the art. But there is more insight to be gained from the history of scientific forestry, and sustainability in particular, than the affirmative creation of tradition. The origins of sustainability were fraught with conflict. Focusing on timber production and financial revenue for the state treasury, scientific forestry simplified the biological composition of forests, re-organized their internal structure along the lines of legibility and accountability, and restricted access for users other than scientifically trained personnel. The modernization and streamlining of Central European forests provoked resistance and violent clashes. After about four decades, foresters also noted environmental changes in the forests such as increased vulnerability to drought, storms and forest pests. The history of forest management planning, introduced in the 1820s, and of experimental forestry in the 1860s, exemplifies how techno-scientific systems communicate with socio-cultural and natural environments. However strongly a science-based reform programme tries to disentangle itself from the politics of nature, such programmes, as well as the terminology by which they are fed into and received by public discourse, are subject to historical change and power struggles.