Italian forest commons

As summer bakes Jerusalem and flights are indefinitely suspended, thoughts of Italy's Cadore region, discussed in Giacomo Bonan's The State in the Forest: Contested Commons in the Nineteenth Century Venetian Alps (White Horse Press, 2019), are beguiling. (Bonan wrote an excellent paper, "Confronting Hardin: Trends and Approaches to the Commons in Historiography", for a collection I edited a couple of years ago.) ARO recently published a review by Richard Hölzl of the book; some excerpts:

At the center of Bonan’s book are the Alpine valleys of the Cadore, a region in the Eastern Italian Alps to the North of Venice and bordering on Alto Adige/South Tirol and Austria. The region came under the rule of the Serenissima of Venice in the early fifteenth century and remained so until its fall in 1797. After the brief but very important period of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, it was part of the Habsburg Empire from 1815 to 1866, when the Veneto was annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy. Since the thirteenth century the families of the Cadore, constituted as the Community of the Cadore, organized the local forests and their exploitation as commons under a system known as regole. Regole initially meant regular decision-making at assemblies by the heads of the households of several Cadore villages, who also appointed officers to enforce regulations of communal life. With the increasing success of Venice as a maritime and commercial power, the forests of the Cadore became of importance to the Venetian economy, as they provided timber for shipbuilding and city extension. Timber entrepreneurs of the Cadore cooperated with Venetian merchants and established a vibrant business that also dominated the income and livelihoods of the local households of the Cadore. Timber trade provided decently paid labor for members of every household and subsidized food imports to the mountain valleys, which did not support much agriculture. It also resulted in considerable population growth before and after 1800. Moreover, it furthered the stratification of local society in wealthy timber entrepreneurs, established families who claimed access to and common ownership of forests, and a class of newcomers and landless without such benefits.

The Napoleonic Age brought fundamental changes to this system – changes, which lasted the better part of the nineteenth century and had the established families of the Cadore look back nostalgically on the seemingly good old times, when the regole system was intact and the timber trade supported communities and households well. The advent of modern forestry in the Napoleonic and Austrian period meant that regional and central administrative officers were tasked with supervising the felling process as well as introducing new cutting and conservation measures. The administrative elite in Venice adopted the new scholarship on forests which emerged out of France and Germany and attempted to implement it on Venetian territory.

The Cadore, however, is an interesting exception to the general trend to abolish and privatize the forest commons in the early nineteenth century. Rather than abolishing the commons, the successive administrations tried to modernize their administration by transferring the management from the regole and villages to larger municipalities and regional forest authorities, and by using the profits from the forest commons for road building and schools, rather than supplementing food import. 

A revised history of Chilean water law

The Chilean water code of 1981 is often held up as a paradigm of private property in water. Thomas Miller Klubock's new article in Environment and History, "The Early History of Water Wars in Chile: Rivers, Ecological Disaster and Multinational Mining Companies", provides some historical context. The abstract:

This article examines an early water war in Chile between local agriculturalists and the North American-owned El Teniente copper mine. It recovers a hitherto unknown history of ecological degradation caused by industrial copper mining during the twentieth century in Chile. It argues that contemporary water wars in Chile, usually viewed as a product of the privatisation of water rights in 1981 and the expansion of foreign investment in the mining sector during the 1990s, combined with the impact of global climate change, have roots in the appropriation of water in Andean rivers by North American companies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article’s thesis is that the Chilean state subsidised the mining industry by granting water rights and turning a blind eye to mining companies’ contamination of rivers relied on by agriculturalists for irrigation. Finally, the article traces conservationist responses to the ecological crises produced by contamination of water and soil by the El Teniente mine, which was owned by the Kennecott Copper Company. It demonstrates that conservation of water resources was employed by estate owners as a means of asserting private property rights against the interests of mining companies.

Nicolas Schubert, Fundición de cobre en mina El Teniente, Codelco Chile

Water services - the Scandinavian model

I recently came across Tapio Katko's Finnish Water Services: Experiences in Global Perspectives (Finnish Assn. of Water Utilities, 2016). It's been reviewed in several journals; here are some excerpts from Glen O'Hara's review in Scandanavian Economic History Review (references to page numbers omitted):

Particularly impressive sections include those on the post-Second World War growth of transnational water governance systems through the auspices of the United Nations, including the International Hydrological Decade of 1965–1974, the subsequent International Hydrological Programme and the regional Baltic agreements that followed the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and then, in a further burst of maritime co-operation, after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

Perhaps because of Finland’s small population, and her traditional Nordic role within the international aid and development network, the international situation plays a key role in this book. The spread of integrated Water Management Systems via observation of other countries’ examples, and the role of international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in defining good governance, are usually to the fore – or at least mentioned – in a compelling narrative of how policy actually works in practice....

Finland, of course, is a country where water systems have for the main part remained in the public, and usually in the municipal, sector: though as Katko acutely points out, that still means that Finland’s water concerns spend a great deal of money in the private sector through the services, equipment and goods that they necessarily consume. As in other countries, charges have mainly paid for Finnish water supply, with direct government support remaining rather low, and in recent years declining further. Capital investment, including in Finland’s far north, was the main intervention mounted by the government: all interesting sidelights on a Nordic economic and social system that depended much more on concert and co-ordination than on massive continued budgetary support, whatever the ubiquity of these states’ image as a type of social democratic utopia outside their borders. 

The commons imaginary

I recently came across what seems to me a really important article, John Wagner's "Water and the Commons Imaginary", published in 2012 in Current Anthropology (along with a series of responses by other social scientists of the commons, including Elinor Ostrom, in what must have been one of her last writings). The abstract really doesn't do justice to the article's central argument, so I'll bring some excerpts here (citations omitted):

The term “commons” has been appropriated over recent decades by individuals, corporations, and interest groups seeking to benefit from the positive emotional responses that the term seems to evoke. In some cases—shopping commons, for instance—use of the term appears to be mainly a marketing strategy, but in other cases the term carries a definite political argument, most typically an argument against commodification, privatization, or enclosure and in favor of egalitarian, grassroots approaches to resource management. It is at this point that a clear break occurs between commons as a particular kind of institutional arrangement and commons-as-social-imaginary.

In applying the term “social imaginary” to the commons, I rely especially on the work of Benedict Anderson on imagined communities and of Appadurai on imagination and globalization. Commons constitute a very different kind of imagined community than a nation-state, but much of Anderson’s analysis is applicable nevertheless.... 

The commons imaginary can... be understood as a response to... fundamental changes in our social, economic, and political lives, particularly those associated with economic globalization, the accelerated pace of erasure of place-based communities and social identities, and global environmental and economic crises. The commons imaginary, like the nation-state, is also dependent for its construction on print and electronic media. The recent proliferation of the use of the term “commons”... clearly attests to the manner in which it is being constructed.

Water law in medieval Lombardy

"Diploma" of Frederick Barbarossa granting navigation rights to the monastery of
San Carpoforo di Como (1159)

I recently came across Acque della Lombardia Medievale, apparently the catalog for an exhibition held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano in 2015. (If you're ever in Milan, don't miss the associated Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.) The editors, Federico Gallo and Rita Pezzola, write:

According to Roman law, one defines every permanent water-course as "publicum" whether it was navigable or not, and only rivulets and streams were considered private. During the Middle Ages and in particular in the 10th and 11th centuries, we find more and more imperial and royal diplomas giving grants and donations related to stretches of rovers: they refer to the construction of ports and mills and to fishing and navigating rights. Thus the principle, or better the custom, of considering some parts of a river as capitalized (today we would say "privatized") was established, and more and more we find that the water-course was at the disposition - more or less in their possession - of the people who owned the adjacent land. During the Dieta di Roncaglia (Piacenza) in 1158, Federico I, called Barbarossa - assisted by lawyers from the school of Bologna - redefined the legal status of rivers. Referring to Roman law, the Emperor inserted the "flumina navigabilia" in the regalie (royal prerogatives), so that the "flumen publicum" no longer referred to permanent water-courses, but only to the navigable ones.

For a similar development in 19th-century Canadian water law, see here.

Enclosure Norwegian style

The International Journal of the Commons recently published "On enclosure Norwegian style", by Erling Berge and Anne Sigrid Haugset. The abstract:

More than 200 years after the King sold one of the “King’s commons” to urban timber merchants, local people in some ways still behave as if the area is a kind of commons. The paper outlines the history of the transformation of the area from an 18th century King’s commons to a 21st century battleground for ideas about ancient access and use rights of community members facing rights claimed by a commercial forest owner within local consequences of national legislation. The discussion is focused on the right of common to hunt small game without dog in Follafoss private commons. The right was confirmed in a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1937 and in legislation on hunting in 1951. The Government’s proposal for new legislation on hunting in 1981 removed the right without saying a word about it, and it was never commented on in parliament during the legislative process. To explain what we observe it is suggested that a new layer of legislation on rights of common from 1857 and 1863 created a structural amnesia about private commons making it easy to remove them from legislation.

Swamp drainage and law reform

It turns out that not all legal historians think environmental history is interesting. Today's Reviews in History has a review by Daniel Gosling of David Chan Smith's Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws: Religion, Politics and Jurisprudence, 1578–1616 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Here's what Gosling has to say about one of the chapters:

Chapter three looks in more detail at the corruption of the law in the early 17th century, and the complaints of those that were expected to use it. The text does this by examining the case-study of The Case of the Isle of Ely (1609), which saw Coke attempt to negotiate the proposed draining of the Fens, the low-land area of marsh and bog in the east of England. This was such a thorny issue because in order to drain the Fens taxes would have to be raised in the surrounding areas, and parts of the Fens would have to be enclosed to incentivise investors. Although this case-study demonstrated how contentious the common law could be amongst the wider population, and how Coke attempted to solve the problems, this chapter more than any of the others feels like an unnecessary digression from the wider argument, with too much time spent looking at the law in the Fens rather than the more pressing topic of common law reform that the rest of the book had set about to describe.

Some might have a different opinion. I would actually like to see a full-length study of the law of drainage; from what I remember from Catherine Drinker Bowen's book on Coke, commissions of sewers were a fertile source of law.

Water and public spaces in Weimar-era Berlin

A pernicious myth has it that environmental protection and conservation are a sort of upper-class conspiracy, or at the least a luxury appreciated by the well to do. An H-Urban review by Eliza Martin of Matthew Gandy's The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (MIT Press, 2014) discusses the book's treatment of water in interwar Berlin ("Weimar Berlin" is evocative but confusing), showing that in this context, as in many others, proto-environmentalism was a working-class issue. Martin writes:

Gandy asserts that examining the changing paths water takes through urban spaces gives us new ways of viewing and understanding cities and how they evolve. He is particularly interested in the process of modernization of urban space, and the role water infrastructure plays in that activity. Gandy states that controlling water is a key aspect of modernization and state formation...

*****

Gandy... demonstrates [the] movement towards an emphasis on nature as leisure, when he discusses changes in urban planning taking place in Weimar Berlin. As part of creating a modern city, Martin Wagner, city building commissioner in Berlin, was concerned with providing residents, especially working-class residents, with an opportunity to have contact with nature. Wagner felt one way to do this was to provide access to local lakes and rivers as spaces of leisure. Wagner moved to protect remaining lakeside land from privatization to keep these areas open for the city as a whole, as a public resource, and provided public transportation to these areas. Here we see links between water and infrastructure as not purely a public health issue, but also as about democratizing access to urban space, and offering working-class Berliners the chance to enjoy urban nature.