Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (review)

This book is really two books, on two important subjects, and a disappointment in each. The core of the text is a description of how the British, beginning with the Marquis of Dalhousie's Forest Charter of 1855, created a system of reserved and protected forests in India, a model of environmental (if regal) stewardship that eventually disseminated throughout the empire and even to the United States. The author frames this narrative within an argument that this astonishing achievement marks the true font of modern environmentalism, particularly its resolve to remove lands from private ownership and commit them to a greater social and ecological commonwealth. The tendency in American environmental historiography to identify the origins of environmental thinking with sentimental, literary, scenic, and wilderness themes is thus misplaced.

The invention of state-sponsored forestry—and its extension throughout the European imperium—is one of the great unwritten stories of the contemporary world. It is a grand sprawl of a narrative, more like a blur of Diego Rivera murals than a chronicle, and a crisp distillation is something that should command a wide audience. Partly the story is one of imperial powers remaking colonies according to Western images and purposes. Partly it is a story of applied science. Foresters belong with other cadres of engineers busily surveying railroads, erecting dams and bridges, and extracting ore. Partly the story is one of globalization. The same institutions, and often the same people, reappear, as ideas and intentions circulate throughout the empire. And partly, as Barton argues, it is a story of environmentalism. The chief property of forests were their "influences," the diffuse impact that they had on climate, particularly their putative capacity to reduce flooding and droughts. This was a sufficiently compelling motive to warrant state control over vast portions of a colonial estate.

The project first materialized in British India. Barton is at his best in elaborating how, in detail, it originated. The achievement is all the more astonishing because Britain had no forestry profession and few forests. Instead, the administrative apparatus developed in the hands of three German foresters—Dietrich Brandis, Wilhelm Schlich, and Berthold Ribbentrop. During the succeeding decades, the system spread throughout the empire, largely through the diaspora of India-trained foresters. Barton's account of this process is less successful, even careless, without any particular driver to unify the process. He follows the institutions through decolonization, as empire forestry becomes commonwealth forestry. This account is even more haphazard. State-sponsored forestry was indeed an imperial creation, and its life-cycle parallels that of the imperiums that it served. The past few decades have witnessed a collapse of such institutions almost as remarkable as their creation. None of this material gets into the text.

The reason is that Barton wants to use the British India story to argue that the pith of American conservation lies in imperial forestry, not in Thoreauvian Transcendentalism, and he is partly correct. American environmentalism has many tributaries; everyone in the field readily admits as much. American conservationists looked to European models and, for their own western territories, to European imperialists. America's national forests had purposes similar to those in India. But they differed, too. By 1920, when British Imperial Forestry Conferences commenced, Americans had little interest in Europe's colonies as administrative models, were more keen to study French forestry than Indian, and began to experience the acute pathologies that state-sponsored forestry entailed.

This is a book of lost opportunities. The arguments concerning the origins of environmentalism are both paltry and unconvincing. The author attacks examples of historiography now twenty years out of date. His dismissal of national parks as an institutional model is unacceptable. In debating how to administer national forests, the National Academy of Sciences, while looking to British India, cited Yellowstone, then overseen by the military, as the most suitable exemplar. His accounts of forestry in...