Wood: A History by Joachim Radkau (review)

For years Joachim Radkau, Professor of Modern History at Germany’s Bielefeld University, has probed the history of European forest use and the ways in which it has shaped and been shaped by the societies in which it took place. In Wood: A History he combines the fruits of his and others’ work in a thought-provoking, intellectually challenging whole. Patterns of forest use and the ways in which social patterns affected them are central to his study. From the Middle Ages to the present day these patterns have evolved and changed, but throughout wood has remained a central element in life. Although focused primarily upon Germany, his work provides insights into developments elsewhere as well.

Conflicts over forest use play a central role in Radkau’s narrative from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, a period he characterizes as the “Wood Age.” Peasants utilized forests for pasture-land, firewood, mulch for fertilizer, and much else. To them low forest—coppice—was the most valuable. Governments and the more affluent had other priorities, seeking profits from timber sales, woodfueled iron smelters, and materials for the ships that carried trade and aided in national defense; they tended to prefer high forest—especially plantations of spruce and other evergreens. It was the latter who dominated policy making and left the bulk of the documents upon which historians have drawn. Peasants came to be characterized as destroyers of the forest; foresters as their saviors. As Radkau demonstrates, this picture badly distorts events; forest problems resulted from the work of foresters and policy-makers at least as much as from the actions of forest-dependent peasants and woods residents.

In the twentieth century wood first became less central to society, then rebounded as laminated beams, chipboards, and other new products began to replace steel, concrete, and plastics in a variety uses. People, however, were by this time more distant from forests and debates over them took new forms as conservation, environmentalism, and wilderness preservation took center stage. As with earlier debates over forest use, Radkau handles these new differences with evenhandedness.

In spite of the value of his insights and the skill with which he makes his way through local differences and the varieties of uses in Germany, Radkau’s work is not without its shortcomings. When he moves beyond Central Europe, he falters. France is given short shrift, and while he points to North America for parallels to the European experience, his analysis is superficial. He relies primarily upon Michael Williams’ Americans and their Forests (1989), a valuable but in some ways dated work, and upon Stanley Horn’s This Fascinating Lumber Business (1943), a popular non-scholarly account. A number of valuable works are overlooked including the multi-authored This Well-Wooded Land (1985). Canada goes almost unmentioned.

Radkau’s section on Japan is also flawed. He claims that “little attention has been paid in Japan or elsewhere to the role of wood” in that society (p. 295) and then goes on to credit Conrad Totman’s The Green Archipelago (1989)—and his other works—with providing an overdue corrective. This overlooks the vast body of Japanese-language studies by Tsutsui Michio, Tokoro Mitsuo, Shimada Kinzo, and others, works on which Totman drew heavily.

Originally published in German in 2007 under the title Holz, Radkau’s English-language version suffers from a workmanlike, but sometimes stilted translation. “Wood Talk,” a concluding section of quotations dealing with forests that date from ancient times to the present, dangles incongruously at the end. On the other hand, the numerous, well-chosen illustrations that appear throughout the work are eye-catching and of real value.

This is a work that social historians might be inclined to overlook, but they should not. The skill with which Radkau shows how interwoven with society the use of wood has been and how these inter-relationships have varied from place to place and over time make Wood a study that should be widely read.