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. A Forest on the Sea explores the history of this enterprise and Venice's efforts to extend state control over its natural resources. 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. A Forest on the Sea offers a completely novel perspective on how Renaissance Europeans thought about the natural world. It sheds new light on how cultural conceptions about nature influenced political policies for resource conservation and land management in Venice.''Karl Appuhn's study of Venetian efforts to control and manage their forests is a fascinating case study in the problems and politics of resource management. By carefully tracing the evolution of Venice's attempts to control, harvest, and replenish its forests, Appuhn reconstructs a world of experts, bureaucrats, shipbuilders, and rural villagers who all recognized how vital a commodity trees were to an early modern state. An excellent and stimulating contribution to early environmental history.'' -- Paula Findlen, Stanford University''An extraordinary book that offers a fresh perspective to see Venice anew in both its materialist and ideological manifestations. Beyond Venice, it challenges readers to rethink a number of issues of broad interest to early modern history in general: state bureaucracies and economy, the production and reproduction of knowledge, and the relationship between humans and nature in theory and practice.'' -- John A. Marino, University of California at San Diego''Takes environmental history into the streets and countryside of the Renaissance citystate. Appuhn brilliantly reveals how Venetian political anxieties yielded a remarkable system of forest conservation to promote civic virtue and regional governance. In the interplay between Venice's crowded lagoons and sylvan hillsides, he overturns the old story of European scientific rationalism as the death of nature. An original and important work.'' -- Matthew Klingle, author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Note on Dates Introduction States, Economies, and Nature Chronology 1. Forest Exploitation before the Venetian Conquest Venetian Demand for Forest Products Regional Forest Ecologies and the Venetian Timber Supply Local Practices of Forest Exploitation and Venetian Shortages Perceived Shortages and the Emergence of the Market Hierarchy 2. The Venetian Discovery of Mainland Forests Water Management and Venetian Interpretations of Mainland Landscapes Local Property Rights and the Limits of Venetian Power to Preserve Forests The Failure of Market Regulations 3. Venetian Forestry Laws and the Creation of Public Forest Reserves The Creation of the Boschi Pubblici The 1476 Forestry Laws and the Hierarchy of Forest Utilization The Cambrai Crisis, Fiscal Reform, and the Expansion of the State Reserves The Expansion of Forestry Legislation and Its Consequences 4. The Venetian Forest Bureaucracy A Divided Bureaucracy A New Role for the Provveditori alle Legne Sixteenth-Century Forest Surveys Harvests, Local Resistance, and Perceptions of Scarcity The Catastico Garzoni and the Knowledge Gap 5. The Preservation and Reproduction of BureaucraticKnowledge Venetian Bureaucratic Expertise The Cadastral Surveys and the Preservation of Collective Knowledge The Cadastral Surveys as Natural Historical Narrative Topographical Maps and the Reproduction of Knowledge 6. Nature's Republic or Republican Nature? Peak Demand and Peak Anxiety in Eighteenth-CenturyVenice Institutional Reform and the Res Publica of Forests The Venetian Moral Economy of Nature Venetian Discourses in a European Context Conclusion The Three Trials of Pietro Gavardo Finding Meaning in the Forest Appendix Notes Glossary Bibliography
""This remarkable book contains many fascinating details.""
