Forests and National Security: British and American Forestry Policy in the Wake of World War I

A. Joshua West

THE WIDESPREAD and lasting legacies of major military conflicts, so often counted by lives lost and lands taken, are only beginning to be understood in terms of the human relationship with the natural environment. The First World War, unprecedented in scale and profoundly influential in shaping the social and political agenda of the modern era, offers an appropriate starting point for a new kind of environmental history. It is there that Ed Russell begins in his book War and Nature, in which he makes a pioneering attempt to cross the "war-nature divide" by tracing the links between the development of chemical warfare and the U.S. agro-chemical industry during the twentieth century. To Russell, "war and nature coevolved: the control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature."1 The chemical industry exploited political circumstance to find profitable common ground in waging war against both people and nature. Yet what Russell calls the "coevolution" of war and control over nature is not always so complementary. Wars are enormously expensive, not only in battlefield casualties but also in terms of natural resources. Resource limits exposed during the crisis of wartime have the potential to steer the course of military events, and the reaction to these limits influences the approach to resource management in the wake of war. This article considers the impact of wartime experiences on resource management by exploring the evolution of British and U.S. forestry policy after World War I in relation to the circumstances of timber supply and management during the war.

1

The immediate cost of the First World War to forests was dramatic. Battlefields were reduced to ruins along the Western Front, reminding American generals of the vast cut-overs they had left behind in the south of their home country. On an even greater scale was the crisis-driven destruction of forests across Europe to provide for the war effort: Timber worth $800 million was lost in the forests of France, while 50 percent of Britain's productive forest was cut in the span of four years.2 Yet, despite this immediate devastation, the forests of Europe recovered with time, and the war had its most lasting influence through its impact on the development of forestry policy. The cases of Britain and the United States are particularly interesting when considered side by side because, while the nature of policy change differed substantially between the two countries, reflecting very different national circumstances, shared traits suggest common themes about war's impact on resource management. The principal difference lay in the scale and immediacy of impact: Britain's dramatic Forestry Act of 1919 is widely acknowledged as legislation in response to crisis, while the more subtle but no less relevant role of the war in America's policy making of the 1920s has been largely overlooked. Yet despite these differences, both Britain's immediate and America's prolonged forestry debates culminated in policies that were framed around the pre-war agendas of prominent forestry professionals.

. . .