by an ecological historian named Karl Appuhn, who knocks over a couple of widely held views of medieval foresting practices. The first is that they were suicidally exploitative, reducing a one-time powerhouse like Venice to a backwater once it had stripped its domestic timber supplies and deforested itself into poverty. Nice parable, it seems, but not what the record shows.
A second idea he knocks down is that renaissance forest management, when it was practiced, was mechanistic and Baconian, shrewdly focused on maximizing profit and disregarding natural, ecological or spiritual ends. This, too, proves a myth once the Venice record is examined. Here are the Amazon description and link, and a couple of screen-shot excerpts from the first chapter:
Karl Appuhn - Publication Date: December 9, 2009
Wood was essential to the survival of the Venetian Republic. To build its great naval and merchant ships, maintain its extensive levee system, construct buildings, fuel industries, and heat homes, Venice needed access to large quantities of oak and beech timber. The island city itself was devoid of any forests, so the state turned to its mainland holdings for this vital resource.
Karl Appuhn explains how Venice went from an isolated city completely dependent on foreign suppliers for wood to a regional state with a sophisticated system of administering and preserving forests. Intent on conserving this invaluable resource, Venice employed specialized experts to manage its forests.
The state bureaucracy supervised this work, developing a philosophy about the environment—namely, a mutual dependence between humans and the natural world—that was far ahead of its time. Its efforts kept many large forest preserves under state protection, some of which still stand today.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801892619/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
from page 9:
from pp. 23-24:
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