Review of The State in the Forest by Richard Hölzl (original) (raw)
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Landscape History, 2023
This article sets forth an exhaustive analysis of the importance of natural resources in the daily lives of peasants in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia during a period of socio-economic upheaval. These resources included firewood and timber, and were gathered by peasants under their common rights to access manorial forests. Against the background of a changing Galician countryside, the everyday existence of peasants dependent on these resources was transformed. Forest resources symbolised wealth, and at the same time the goal of meeting the existential needs of peasants. By giving a direct voice to the rural population, as contained in unique manuscripts, it was possible to recreate and reconstruct this part of life, seen through the eyes of the poorest social group struggling with the trials of everyday life, such as poverty, hunger, shortages of fuel for cooking and heating and maintaining basic hygiene in dilapidated buildings.
Common Forest, Private Timber: Managing the Commons in the Italian Alps
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2021
Developments in the recent historiography stress the importance of analyzing the unequal distribution of profits derived from the management of common lands. This article takes a step forward in solving a problem that many of these studies raise but do not sufficiently explain, examining not only who received these profits but also who generated them. 1 The historiographical debate about the commons is heated, as it is in the literature of other disciplines. Nonetheless, Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which appeared a half-century ago, remains an essential, if controversial, reference. Although Hardin was concerned with environmental problems caused by global overpopulation, the academic debate triggered by his work centered on just one of his examples-a pasture open to all without restriction, where every shepherd tried to add as many animals as possible to his flock, unaware that the eventual cumulative effect of this "rational" strategy would be the over-exploitation of the pasture and its destruction. In Hardin's view, common resources were inevitably destined to this fate. In the following decades, several studies rebutted the validity of Hardin's paradigm, illustrating in detail the dynamics at play in the utilization of commons and the strategies involved in their management. A series of historical
Urbanizing Nature. Actors and Agency (dis)connecting cities and nature since 1500, 2019
The main purpose of the chapter is not simply to update our knowledge on the urban wood supply of the cities in the Southern Low Countries. Highly urbanized since the end of the Middle Ages, the Southern Low Countries provide a fertile ground for testing traditional narratives and historical models as well as for developing a more in-depth picture of the city-resources relationship. The first part of the chapter outlines the way cities were supplied with timber and wood products. The second part explores how these relationships were tied up to numerous factors, ecological, technical, social as well political. Doing so, this chapter aims at releasing new lines of inquiry for further research.
F. Diosono, The Timber Trade and Transport in Roman Italy
M. Bentz - M. Heinzelmann (eds.), Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World – Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology (Cologne/Bonn 2018), vol. 54: Sessions 4–5, Single Contributions, Propylaeum, Heidelberg 2023, 153-170, 2023
Small-scale forestry in the Italian Alps: From mass market to territorial marketing
Small-scale forestry and rural development: The …, 2006
The paper analyses the industrial roundwood production trends in the Italian Alps in the last 50 years, pointing out the decreasing economic performance of local timber producers and the loss of competitiveness with respect to foreign markets. In spite of decision-makers and public opinion's general believes, timber production in the Italian mountainous areas is not a valuable alternative to the declining role of agriculture. In this context, an increasing economic role in maintaining an active management of forest resources is being played by Non Wood Forest Products and Services (NWFP&S) as niche products. Two development paths both referring to the NWFP&S markets development are presented and factors playing a key role in successful NWFP&S marketing are briefly discussed. Evidences are provided to show that income deriving from NWFPs and fuelwood selling is not only provided annually and in relative constant amount, but also that the level of profitability in this business sector is much higher than in timber production and marketing.
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the strategies followed, from the end of the 18 th century to same time IPE permits to show some aspects of the changes concerning a developed region as Lombardy, where the development of manufactures can be only in part explained by the typical model of a cereal and textile producing region (those on which the proto-industrial theory was modelled) 2 because in Lombardy very different specialized cultivations (mulberry trees, linen, vines, citrus fruit, olives) were added to the cereals granting relevant earnings and orienting the relationship between the agriculture and a lot of different manufacturing activities.