Swedish Environmental History

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliii:2 (Autumn, 2012), 275–287.

ÖRJAN KARDELL Örjan Kardell Cows and Forests: Swedish Environmental History

Agriculture and Forestry in Sweden since 1900—a Cartographic Descrip- tion. Edited by Ulf Jansson (Stockholm, National Atlas of Sweden SNA, Norstedts förlagsgrupp AB, 2011) 232 pp. SEK 241 Agriculture and Forestry in Sweden since 1900: Geographical and Histori- cal Studies. Edited by Hans Antonson and Ulf Jansson (Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, 2011) 542 pp. SEK 186

Sweden became a modern country only in the twentieth century. A major shift in silvicultural practices, plus an emphasis on dairy production, contributed to this national transformation at a time when, paradoxically, rural Sweden was being denuded of people and agriculturally and pastorally driven pursuits were replaced by urban-based industries and services. The two books in this review essay explain how this transformation happened, and why. Nei- ther book is, strictly speaking, historical, but of them both explain changes over time. In that sense, they are interdisciplinary, though not in an explicit sense. Jansson’s Agriculture and Forestry in Sweden since 1900—a Carto- graphic Description (hereinafter, atlas) is intended to describe developments since the last cartographical study of Swedish agriculture in 1909.1 The book is unique, for Sweden, insofar as it also includes developments within forestry, thus allowing opportunities to make comparisons between two professional ªelds that usu- Örjan Kardell is Doctor of Forestry in Agricultural History, Dept. of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Umeå University. He is the author of, with Anna Lindkvist and Christer Nordlund, “Intensive Forestry as Progress or Decay? An Analysis of the Debate about Forest Fertilization in Sweden, 1960–2010, Forests, II (2011), 112–146, available at http://www.mpdi.com/1999-4907/2/1/112/; “Arkivens bild av skogen som resurs under 1650–1950—en handledning,” in Håkan Tunón and Anna Dahlström (eds.), Nycklar till kunskap: Om människans bruka av naturen (Stockholm, 2009), 73–86. © 2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 Wilhelm Flach, Herman Juhlin-Dannfelt, and Gustav Sundbärg, Sveriges jordbruk vid 1900 talets början: statistiskt kartverk (Göteborg, 1909).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 276 | COWS AND FORESTS ally receive strictly individual treatment in both the historical and scientiªc literature. Structurally and editorially, it organizes the agricultural development that it covers to correspond with the charts and topics presented in the 1909 atlas—an obvious point of depar- ture. The atlas is accompanied by Antonson and Jansson’s volume with the same main title (hereinafter anthology), which has the same general alignment. The subject matter in both volumes, however, is wider than the title suggests. Reindeer herding, game management, and topics not traditionally subsumed under the agricultural ªeld, such as leisure and national heritage, are included in both volumes. The anthology also contains articles about such disparate matters as rural architecture, horticulture, and represen- tations of agricultural concerns in art and literature through time. The volumes are in many respects complementary. The atlas provides the basic outline of forestry and agriculture in Sweden, whereas the anthology explores a wider range of information. Though the two volumes can be read separately, the recom- mended order is the atlas ªrst and then the anthology. Under- standably, the atlas has a more distinctly geographical touch, since charts and maps are its primary features, accompanied by select commentaries and short, thematic articles.2 The anthology takes a more traditional textbook approach. Some of the maps and charts displayed in the atlas appear in the anthology with additional statis- tical diagrams, etc. Although many of the same authors contributed to both volumes, the anthology has detailed articles and charts by authors who do not appear in the atlas, and the atlas has a few short articles by authors who are not represented in the anthology. Since agriculture and forestry both concern things that grow, the atlas offers a thorough, cartographical introduction to Sweden’s climate, bedrock, and soil, as well as its population dy- namics from a natural geographer’s point of view. This elementary but important information is not part of the anthology. The authors in both volumes are experts in their respective ªelds, usually with a research connection to their areas of interest (except for Sweden’s minister for rural affairs who wrote the fore- word used in both cases). The editors are human geographers, each of whom contributed several articles. The authors represent a

2 The atlas contains 342 maps, 133 charts, 171 photographs, and 59 illustrations.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 ÖRJAN KARDELL | 277 mix of disciplines, from the natural sciences to the humanities, adding a distinctly scientiªc slant to the historical analysis. Several of the authors write from a genuinely interdisciplinary background; others remain entirely within particular ªelds. Yet, neither book contains an article that attempts to draw major interdisciplinary conclusions regarding the complementary development of Swedish agriculture and forestry during the twentieth century. This intellectual challenge is left to the readers. Nonetheless, the material in this highly ambitious project is comprehensive and up to date in every respect. The one slight drawback concerns the publication of the two volumes in both Swedish and English. In the English translation of the Swedish version, which came ªrst, material deemed too particular to Sweden was deleted, but neither individual articles nor any other material was inserted to facilitate international readers’ understanding of conditions peculiar to Sweden’s background, which the editorial excisions have not eliminated entirely. Most of these peculiarities are geographical, concerning, for example, the division of Sweden into provinces (landskap) or counties (län). The county is the ofªcial unit and the backbone of the administrative order. The province is more of a conceptual throwback to the Middle Ages, deªning amalgamations of the settled districts that formed political entities. The provinces are still much in evidence today, since they provide local and regional communities and populations with their identities and spoken dialects. But the administrative system is not always geographically congruent with the landskap division, though a few counties and provinces share names. Certain ambiguities on this score might leave foreign readers in the lurch, since the volumes make no effort to explicate the individual texts in this respect.3 The books also mention a third geographical division above the level of province or county. If Sweden is divided into roughly, equal thirds, the two northernmost thirds are known as Norrland, literally the north land. The last third is subdivided into halves. The northern half—where the capital of Stockholm is situated— is called Svealand and the southernmost half Götaland.4 To compli-

3 Maps on the county (län) and province (landskap) divisions are presented on the inside cover of Janken Myrdal and Mats Morell (eds.), The Agrarian History of Sweden: From 4000 bc to ad 2000 (Lund, 2011). 4 A map with this division is also presented on the inside cover of Myrdal and Morell (eds.)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 278 | COWS AND FORESTS cate matters one step further, natives often refer to Svealand as central Sweden and to Götaland as the south of Sweden, or at least a part of it, both in common parlance and in writing. Further- more, areas signiªed in the texts as the “west of Sweden,” the “southwest,” or the” west coast” are all situated near, or inland of, the tiny stretch of Sweden’s coast along the reaches of the North Sea, between the southernmost point of Sweden and neighboring Norway to the northwest. None of these expressions for central, southern, or western Sweden correspond to their equivalents in the strict geographical sense. A few points neglected or undeveloped in the texts need to be made for a proper understanding of twentieth-century Swedish agriculture and forestry. First of all, Sweden’s neutrality in foreign politics and military affairs throughout most of the twentieth century—including both World Wars—until joining the Eu- ropean Union (eu) in 1995 meant that the country had to be largely self-sufªcient. This independence inºuenced agricultural policies after World War II and during the Cold War era. Guaran- teed ªxed prices for farm products ªrst and food subsidies later were the main tools in the government’s arsenal, even though the result was a large agricultural surplus that had do be dumped at a loss on the world market—a cost purposely assumed by the government and maintained in the national budget.5

energy, paper, and forestry Industrialization, when it arrived in Sweden, was established in an economic context in which ex- ports were based on reªning such domestic raw materials as iron ore into bar iron and pig iron and, eventually, milling lumber into planks. In these enterprises, the entire industrial chain from ob- taining the primary materials to reªning the products was handled within the country. Energy requirements for the manufacturing processes were met by water power, ªrewood, and charcoal in combination, since Sweden was, and is, lacking in coal deposits.

Agrarian History of Sweden. In the atlas, this division is presented in Åsa Ahrland and Inger Olausson, “The Horticultural Industry: A Green-Fingered Trade in Urban, Modern, and Global Society,” 150 (map “Types of Forest in 1980 and 2006”), with a slight deviation, since Norrland is divided into northern and southern halves. 5 atlas, Antonson and Jansson, “Introduction—Agriculture and Forestry in a Century of Change,” 40–45.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 ÖRJAN KARDELL | 279 Steam power, when introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, was wood-based well into the second half of the century.6 By the turn of the century, electric power, which was introduced to run lights and machinery, had to rely on power plants ªred with imported coal, coke, or domestic wood. Electriªcation and industrialization also propelled the extensive and steady development of hydroelectric power during the ªrst half of the twentieth century. Firewood had a signiªcant role in households both in towns and rural areas during the ªrst quarter of the twentieth century, though, in time, it became more and more conªned to rural use. In 1900, 21 percent of the Swedish population lived in towns and conurbations, compared to 61 percent in 1950.7 This introduction to Sweden’s ªrewood and energy requirements is important because the great demand for ªrewood in all probability affected the diversiªcation and expansion of the forest industry. By 1900, the Swedish forest industry involved little more than sawmills, but by 1950, pulp and paper had become para- mount. Firewood—and the charcoal used for processing iron— was replaced by oil, which became a dominant source of energy during the 1960s, as it did in most of Western Europe and North America. Thus, the diminishing demand for wood as an energy source meant an increasing demand for it as pulp. Witness the pulp mills—both ground-wood and chemical—that began to emerge in Sweden during the second part of the nineteenth century, pre- dominantly in the southern third of Sweden; in Norrland, private companies and the government were less interested in such enterprises.8 This development was crucial for bringing silviculture practices, including tree thinning, to forest management. In that re- gard, the Swedish Forestry Code of 1948 mandated thinning, as

6 Jan Larsson, Hemmet vi ärvde: Om folkhemmet, identiteten och den gemensamma framtiden (Malmö, 1994), 62–63, 234–235. 7 atlas, Ulrich Lange, “Agricultural Architecture: International Trends Translated into Swedish,” 182–185. 8 For the pre-twentieth-century history of pulp mills, see Kardell, Svenskarna och skogen: Från baggböleri till naturvård (Jönköping, 2004), II, 73–75. For the exploitation of Norrland’s timber resources, see anthology, Josefsson and Östlund, 338–353. On the change of energy medium, see David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore, 1999), 182–191; Lars J. Lundgren, Acid Rain on the Agenda: A Picture of a Chain of Events in Sweden, 1966–1968 (Lund,1998), 74–75.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 280 | COWS AND FORESTS well as clear cutting followed by planting. It also changed the logging practice in Norrland, ensuring that only the biggest trees were selected for cutting and that the smaller ones were left for further growth. If the small-sized logs from thinning were not used for pulp wood, loggers would have had no economic incen- tive at all to thin forests, once the premium on ªrewood and charcoal was gone. Clear cutting and thinning, however, were not new management methods, having been developed in Germany during the late eighteenth century to supply iron works with charcoal from native forests. Sweden adopted them during the ªrst half of the nineteenth century for the same reason, and they became a mainstay of forest management in regions of south-central Swe- den, which was not controlled by farming communities, though not in the saw-milling forests of Norrland.9 These saw-milling and pulp and forestry practices still persist today. This industrial hegemony has, on the one hand, bolstered the introduction of foreign species but paradoxically, on the other hand, checked the introduction of new tree species. The only commercial innovation is the importation of the North American lodge pole pine (Pinus contorta) during the 1960s by two forestry companies that had the resources to grow and mill single-species pulpwood in batches large enough to meet manufacturing quotas. The fact that different species of pulpwood generally have different requirements for chemical processing means that the pulp industry cannot accommodate multiple species practically or prof- itably, since single-species batches typically are too small.10 Al- though private proprietors (that is, those not afªliated ofªcially in the cadaster with the land holdings of the state, a limited com- pany, the Church of Sweden, or a municipality) collectively com- mand 51 percent of the productive forest land, and even, in at least one instance, run a large cooperative forestry concern, their individual properties cannot support experimentation with new species.11 Hence, their tree growing is conªned to commercially ac-

9 Kardell, Svenskarna och skogen, 77–78. 10 For nonnative trees in Sweden, see anthology, Owe Martinsson, “Non-Native Trees in Sweden’s Forests: The Recent Past and Present,” 442–457; atlas, Ahrland and Olausson, “Horticultural Industry,” 156. 11 The Church of Sweden, although Lutheran since the early sixteenth century, owns large tracts of land, originally bequeathed to it in piecemeal fashion.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 ÖRJAN KARDELL | 281 cepted species—the indigenous Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) and the Norwegian spruce (Picea abies).

land ownership The signiªcance of the private-ownership ªgure given above—51 percent—is not to be underestimated. Al- though neither the atlas nor the anthology emphasizes its sig- niªcance, it is the magic number that couples forestry and agriculture in Sweden. To a large extent, Sweden’s arable lands and its forests fall squarely within the real estate of individual owners. Since the Middle Ages, the southern third of Sweden, southern Norrland, and the coast of Norrland have harbored a population of subsistence farmers, whose holdings are denoted as private in the modern cadaster. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the state was the nominal owner of all of inner and northern Norr- land, from the farmed zone on the coast toward the mountains and the Norwegian border. The state ownership was formalized by an ofªcial duty, called the delimitation process, which was carried out by the National Land Survey. The land within this region eventually became a marketable commodity that could legally be bought and sold, although the state set aside some of it for settlement. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the best forested land had fallen under the control of limited forestry companies, in- terspersed with farmsteads along the river valleys. The state retained only the poorest sections. The voracious land procurement of the limited companies, however, elicited a public outcry that resulted in legislation curtailing further acquisitions. This legislation was in force for most of the twentieth century. The upshot is a proprietorship of forested land that even now differs markedly from one geographical region to another. In the southern third of the country, private holdings dominate, usually comprising a mix of arable and forested land, whereas in the remaining two-thirds of the country, the larger proportion of land belongs to limited companies and the state. In the far north, the state is the primary owner. Generally, neither the state nor the limited companies are in control of arable land. On the national level, the remarkable stability in land distri- bution during the twentieth century, mainly due to the legal cir- cumstances described above, was not entirely compatible with the state’s attempt to maximize returns from agriculture and forestry

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 282 | COWS AND FORESTS through an increase in farm size, specialization in livestock and produce, and, after World War II, the treatment of trees as a commodity, predestined for pulp- and sawmills. State policy, law, and science have tended to view land use by individuals predomi- nantly as a singular enterprise, geared toward either agriculture or forestry, with a sharp dividing line between the two options. In the twenty-ªrst century, private owners control roughly 60 percent of the national timber reserves (standing volume) and virtu- ally all of Sweden’s arable land.

technical innovation and environmental activism Despite their fragmented system of ownership, farmers had considerable success in inºuencing the evolution of the green sector (agriculture and forestry) through their co-operative owners’ associations during the twentieth century. Agriculture and forestry also beneªted from the introduction of fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, as in Western Europe and North America, resulting in a sub- stantial rise in productivity. Chemical fertilizers ended the age-old dependency of farming based on the spreading of manure. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of specialized farms—meat (beef, pork, or poultry), eggs, dairy, or grain. All of these products were processed in the different branches of the farmer-owned cooperative food industry, and they still are.12 Between 1951 and 1975, 470,000 Swedes—mainly smallholders and agricultural workers—out of a population of about 7.1 million, left the countryside. This exodus not only left agriculture with a labor shortage in the ªelds; it also meant that logging, which smallholders and farm laborers had hitherto performed during wintertime, had to be turned into a full-time salaried position. The newly dedicated forestry workers emerged in the early 1960s on the landholdings of limited companies, state, and church, much aided by the automobile that had become common by that time. The forwarder (a specially designed vehicle for loading and trans- porting cut wood) replaced the horse, and the power saw replaced the hand saw. The introduction of chemical fertilizers in these

12 For agrarian-interest organizations and the food industry, see atlas, Erland Mårald, “Knowledge in the Service of Agriculture: Knowledge on the Borderline between Academe and Farming,” 102–109. For Forestry owners’ associations, see anthology, Sven Lundell, “Family Forestry in Transition: Times of Freedom, Responsibility and Better Knowledge,” 406–422.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 ÖRJAN KARDELL | 283 large forestry holdings at the same time is unique to the northern hemisphere. The individual owners of forested lands—the vaunted 51 percent—never used chemical fertilizers in their forests, not then and not now.13 The technical innovations within forestry were initiated by the limited companies and the state jointly, at a rapid pace. The displacement of forestry workers by mechanical harvesters in clear cutting and thinning during the ªrst half of the 1980s led to a greatly diminished supply of employment opportunities within forestry’s primary production, both in the south and the north of Sweden. Under these conditions, most of the twentieth century sustained a concerted effort for ever-increasing productivity within agriculture and forestry, with both the ideological and monetary support of the state. This goal did not come under any scrutiny by the government until late in the century, despite pro- tests during the 1970s against the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce ever-increasing crops of either wood or grain. As in all contemporary Western environmental movements, these views comprised part of a general indictment of industrial- ized society’s unbridled, avaricious consumption of raw materials and energy. A decisive break in agricultural policy came in 1983 and 1988 when the old support system established in 1933 was dismantled and re-regulated (see above). Paradoxically, this system returned in 1995 as a consequence of Sweden entering the European Union (eu). Forestry, however, took a turn to even greater productivity through the Code of 1979, which remained in effect until 1994. At that point, a new Code elevated nonproductive values (conservation, recreation, and biodiversity) to the level of productive ones within forestry, thereby ofªcially viewing forest ecosystems as more than just trees designated for industrial raw material. This development was in all probability a result of the combined effects of two initiatives of the United Nations (un)—the Brundtland Commission (1983–1987)—ofªcially known as the World Com- mission on Environment and Development (wced)—and the Rio

13 On chemical fertilizers in Swedish forestry, see Anna Lindkvist, Kardell, and Christer Nordlund, “Intensive Forestry as Progress or Decay? An Analysis of the Debate about Forest Fertilization in Sweden, 1960–2010,” Forests, II (2011), 112–146, available at http://www. mpdi.com/1999-4907/2/1/112/.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 284 | COWS AND FORESTS Conference (1992)—the un Conference on Environment and Development (unced). The Brundtland Commission’s assignment was to urge coun- tries to pursue sustainable development together. The Rio Con- ference saw, among other things, an international agreement about the Climate Change Convention and, more important for forestry, it opened the Convention on Biological Diversity for sig- nature. These two initiatives left the international political com- munity optimistic about the prospects for fostering sustainable development without damage to economic growth and for treating biodiversity and productivity as compatible, not competing, goals.

forests, cows, and pastures By the opening years of the twenty-ªrst century, 80 percent of all Swedes had become town dwellers. The countryside lacked not only people; it also lacked cows. A century earlier, 500,000 farms of varying size shared an annual average stock of 2 million cows, providing milk, manure, and butter—the chief agricultural export at the time. Most of these land units comprised a combination of arable lands and forests, as they did a century later. The number of cows did not start to decline until the mid-twentieth century.14 In 1907, Björkbom, a Swedish forester, wrote, “The damage caused by grazing farm animals is more difªcult to register in the wide forest expanses of Norrland than it is in more limited areas. In southern and middle Sweden, where the number of grazing animals to acreage is proportionally larger, and the cultivation or re- generation of forests by sowing or seedlings is more common, the damage is more evident.”15 Björkbom estimated that approxi- mately 2 million animals (cows, sheep, goats, and horses), out of a total of 4.25 million, grazed on forest land during the summer, among them being a half-million cows (see Figure 1). At the time when Björkbom wrote, crop rotation with ley (silage—improved grass species and clover) had started the process of expelling grazing farm animals from forests. Thenceforth, winter fodder and pasture was increasingly produced on arable land

14 atlas, Morell, “Livestock and Animal Production,” 86; anthology, Carin Martiin, “Following Trails of Cattle through the Landscape: Dairy Cows Were Key Players in Changes to Land,” 198–126. 15 Carl Björkbom, “Om skogsbetet,” Skogsvårdsföreningens folkskrifter, IX (1907), 17.

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source Carl Björkbom, “Om skogsbetet,” Skogsvårdsföreningens folkskrifter, IX (1907), 17.

rather than on forested meadows containing unfertilized, low- producing, indigenous grass species and herbs. Crop rotation with ley meant that winter fodder could be produced on high-yielding arable land, thus maximizing the protein and fat content of deliv- ered milk and protecting the tree seedlings on forested land from grazing cattle. This eviction of cows from forests into enclosed pastures accelerated as increasing numbers of farmers began to join cooperative dairy associations through the ªrst half of the century. The new productivity measures resulted in the number of dairy suppliers swelling from 100,000 in 1913 to a peak of 271,000 in 1946. Figures from the ªrst National Forest Inventory in the 1920s show that the acceleration in forestry re-growth due to such innovations was particularly steep in the southern third of Sweden, where private farms (and forests) were to comprise the dominant form of ownership for the following three decades.16 By 1960, the forests of Sweden had reached a state of grace, at least in the eyes of the forestry industry and the state. Private owners, no longer threatened by the gnawing teeth of farm animals, could drive the productive cycle of modern forestry even further—clear cutting, seedling cultivation, and multiple thinning, with hardly any demands for ªrewood competing with the eco- nomics of pulp. This happy state lasted for one-quarter of a century, until the moose population exploded, and the environmental movement changed its tactics. The moose, no longer impeded by

16 atlas, Ahrland and Olausson, “Horticultural Industry,” 143–144.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 286 | COWS AND FORESTS grazing competition from farm animals and stimulated by the abundance of pasture that modern forestry practices offered (clear cuts), multiplied at a terriªc rate. By the early 1980s, the moose population had peaked (175,000 shot in 1982), causing severe damage to forest re-generations and young stands, especially of pine. Despite a steady decline in the moose population since that decade (80,000 shot in 2007), moose are still considered a hazard to forestry, particularly in the southern third of Sweden, where the mere threat of their grazing severely restricts the planting of pine seedlings, and a more effective moose-management system is a priority.17 By the second half of the 1980s, the production-inclined forestry Code of 1979 and state forestry policy had disrupted the cus- tomary communication between forestry and the environmental movement, which began to diversify and cooperate with international organizations. Activism replaced sedate dialogue; con- sumer-based boycotts of products from the Swedish forestry busi- ness proved remarkably effective. From 1994 onward, Swedish forestry has been obliged to negotiate with international forest- certiªcation organizations. By the end of the 1990s, both the Pro- gram for the Endorsement of Forest Certiªcation (pefc) and the Forest Stewardship Council (fsc) had included most of Sweden’s forested land in their respective rules and regulations, which were adapted into national agreements.18 Swedish agriculture retained its diversiªed, ºexible, and small-scale structure at the end of the twentieth century, despite state efforts to re-organize it and despite its industrialization; to this day, farm properties usually consist of inherited land and additional leased areas. By the year 2000, nearly half of the arable acreage in use was leased. The fact that Sweden’s agriculture has oper- ated under one of the world’s strictest set of stipulations governing the environment and animal welfare since the 1960s has probably

17 atlas, Hans von Essen, “Game Conservation,” 190–193; Camilla Sandström, “Adaptiv älgförvaltning nr 10: Med siktet inställt på mål,” FAKTASKOG: Rön från Sveriges Lantbruks- universitet. Nr 19, (2011); idem, Soªa Wennberg Di Gasper, and Karin Öhman, “Challenges Associated with Introduction of an Ecosystem-Based Management System: A Diagnostic Analysis of Moose Management in Sweden,” unpub. paper (Umeå University, 2012). 18 The pefc and the fsc are international, non-proªt and nongovernmental organizations that promote sustainable forestry management at a supranational level through certiªcation. On the changed tactics of the environmental movement, see Lindkvist, Kardell, and Nord- lund, “Intensive Forestry.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00382 by guest on 29 September 2021 ÖRJAN KARDELL | 287 helped to keep its small-scale structure intact and unintentionally to prevent the emergence of a large-scale agribusiness.19

The key element in Sweden’s forestry development was the mechanization of all logging operations—felling, limbing (de- branching), cross-cutting, and sorting. The emergence of the har- vester in 1980 represented a major breakthrough, since this vehicle can perform all four of these tasks. Mechanization also brought increasing productivity (more cubic meters of wood cut per man- hour) and cost-efªciency (reduction of the necessary workforce).20 The drive to mechanize was far stronger than the drive to increase the tree crop through fertilization and plant breeding, which are mainly a result of legislation, policy, and forestry management. Since the late 1920s, the National Forest Inventory has made sure that the annual timber harvest not supersede a certain annual in- crement. Although Swedish forestry has arguably been sustainable for most of the twentieth century, the term sustainable has under- gone a shift in meaning over time, depending upon who is arguing the point—foresters or environmentalists.21 The ineluctable fact is, however, that the introduction of cheap oil and of improvements in agricultural technologies and strategies have had more to do with the development of forestry during the twentieth century than any of forestry’s own achieve- ments did during the same period. The southern third of Sweden beneªted most from these innovations, since the capacity for timber growth there is higher than it is in Norrland.22 The new approach to cattle grazing, in particular, was crucial for forestry, and more recently, biodiversity.23

19 anthology, Morell, “Farmland: Ownership or Leasehold, Inheritance or Purchase,” 56–73; Myrdal and idem (eds.), Agrarian History of Sweden, 256. 20 atlas, Ingemar Nordansjö, “Technical Advances in Forestry,” 130–139. 21 atlas, Göran Kempe, “Forest Production,” 142–153. 22 atlas, Peter Sylwan, “The Land and the Forest—An Essay on Changes in Farming and Forestry,” 21 [map, “Site Quality of Forest Land”]. 23 On biodiversity and cows, see anthology, Sara A. O. Cousins, “Semi-Natural Grass- lands: From Grazing Resource to an Environmental Issue,” 324–337; Martiin, “Following Trails of Cattle,” 198–216. Biodiversity in the so-called natural grasslands, however, has suf- fered from the twentieth-century agricultural strategies that separated grazing cattle and winter-fodder production from forested lands. When used for grazing and for producing winter fodder, forested land has a diverse ºoral composition with a larger number of herbs and grasses. But when these formerly open areas are left for trees to re-colonize, the forest canopy closes, and only moss and sprigs grow beneath it. Neither of the books under review herein, however, offers any discussion of this issue.

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