
Wednesday 18 December 2024, 10.00-11.00 EEST (Athens time)
Webex link:
https://uoa.webex.com/uoa/j.php?MTID=m020d72a9f9b8845d3159eaffa28adb41
Seeing the wood for the trees: The Roles of Science, Law and History in colonial-capitalist Australian forestry Systems, 1880-1940
Berris Charnley, University of Queensland, Australia
ABSTRACT
A number of large and enduring systems were set in place around the turn of the twentieth century. These systems were built for connecting and developing global colonial empires. Communication, transport, and energy are obvious examples, but many types of resources, including trees, were also sites of imperial systematizing work. In addition to their imperial and colonial purposes, several features distinguished these new systems.
They were, their builders claimed, scientific; new laws were frequently a part of their operation; and they have often come to be celebrated as modernising, developmental, beneficent projects. One example of these new systems can be found in the work of Edward Harold Fulcher Swain, a celebrated Australian forestry commissioner. Often remembered as an early conservationist and supporter of national parks; Swain also wanted to create a ‘cabinet wood forest’ in the Australian state of Queensland in the 1920s. Looking to Taylorism, Swain argued that new economically efficient forestry systems were needed to avert the effects of a coming timber famine. In support of this work, Swain devised a taxonomic-commercial indexing system that presented Australian trees as alternatives to imported hardwoods for cabinet making. He developed a sliding system of felling taxation which allowed new forms of ownership to embrace these trees and new forms of prosecution to criminalize unlicensed wood-getting. Swain also shaped his personal and professional archives to solidify his reputation as a heroic scientific reformer. The details of Swain’s work illustrate the extractivist and exclusionary nature of system building in this period, and how it has come to be celebrated. More hopefully, these details also suggest the possibility of other systems, built in other ways, embodying other values and purposes, which might address the deforestation, logging, fire, and disease crises currently overrunning the forestry systems that Swain helped to build.