Royal forests in Poland and Lithuania

Title page of Jan Kochanowski’s Satyr albo dziki mąż (1564),
a political satire in verse that criticized forest exploitation.
(National Digital Library Polona, from the article)

Forest law continues to provide grist for scholarship.

October's Environmental History published, alongside an article on early Chinese forest law, Mateusz Falkowski's "Fear and Abundance: Reshaping of Royal Forests in Sixteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania". The abstract:

This article analyzes new restrictive forest legislation announced by king Sigismund Augustus (d. 1572) in Poland and Lithuania. In the sixteenth century, eastern Europe remained the most densely forested region on the continent; Poland and Lithuania, however, were blessed not only with resources but also with an unusual combination of plains, forests, rivers, and seaports that facilitated the development of large-scale forest industries. Drawing on a combination of royal documents, domain surveys, correspondence, customs registers, and contemporary literature, I argue that the significant resources available to the king allowed him to think of the forest economy and long-distance trade in its products as the backbone of state finances. I recognize changes in the forest regime as part of the greater state reforms redefining the relationship of the king’s subjects to his domain, as well as a strategic move designed to increase treasury income to finance the military during the Livonian War (1558–83). I also argue that changes in the forest regime were established because of the abundance of resources, unlike in many contemporary European states that introduced prohibitive laws as a result of wood shortage fears.

For other recent takes on forest law see here, here and here, or click on the "forest" label.

Property in the Prussian forest

The recent issue of Environment and History had a review by Charles Closmann of Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871-1914 (U. Toronto Press, 2012). After discussing the book's treatment of German cultural attitudes to the forest, Clossman writes:

Subsequent parts of the book examine debates about how to manage Germany’s forests. Drawing from minutes of the Prussian Landtag, Wilson shows how conservative landowners supported what they considered to be modern definitions of property rights in debates over an 1880 Prussian Forest Law. On the other side, left liberal critics supported the public’s traditional right to wander freely in the woods, collecting timber for fuel, gathering berries, and picking mushrooms. A subsequent chapter traces debates over Berlin’s Grünewald, with Wilson demonstrating again how left-liberal and some working class critics demanded that the Prussian state preserve a major forest in the city’s outskirts. In this case, enthusiasm for a beloved forest stemmed not from irrational anxiety about modernity, but in part from a desire to enhance recreational opportunities for the working class. Wilson notes, ‘The struggle to protect the Grünewald demonstrates the rational and progressive aspect of the forest discourse’ (p. 131).

Support for forest preservation also came from the state, for different motives. In chapter five, Wilson shows how Prussian state foresters attempted to restore the degraded forests of the Tuchel Heath, in the Prussian East. In this case, state officials intended to scientifically manage the region’s forests and to discipline what they saw as an ethnic Polish population desperately in need of German Kultur. A dramatic story of heroes, thieves and frustrated officials, the story of the Tuchel Heath is well-supported with documents from German and Polish sources, and with lively illustrations from Oskar von Riesenthal’s Bilder aus der Tucheler Heide. 

See here for an earlier article by Wilson on a similar subject. For more on German working-class environmentalism, see here.