Empire of Timber

Empire of Timber PDF Author: Erik Loomis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107125499
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This is the first book to center labor unions as actors in American environmental policy.

Empire of Timber

Empire of Timber PDF Author: Erik Loomis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107125499
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This is the first book to center labor unions as actors in American environmental policy.

Seeds of Control

Seeds of Control PDF Author: David Fedman
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295747471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Conservation as a tool of colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into supply chains that grew in tandem with Japan’s imperial sphere. These mechanisms of resource control were only fortified after 1937, when the peninsula and its forests were mobilized for total war. In this wide-ranging study David Fedman explores Japanese imperialism through the lens of forest conservation in colonial Korea—a project of environmental rule that outlived the empire itself. Holding up for scrutiny the notion of conservation, Seeds of Control examines the roots of Japanese ideas about the Korean landscape, as well as the consequences and aftermath of Japanese approaches to Korea’s “greenification.” Drawing from sources in Japanese and Korean, Fedman writes colonized lands into Japanese environmental history, revealing a largely untold story of green imperialism in Asia.

Roots of Empire

Roots of Empire PDF Author: John T. Wing
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004261370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Roots of Empire is the first monograph to connect forest management and state-building in the early modern Spanish global monarchy. The Spanish crown's control over valuable sources of shipbuilding timber in Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines was critical for developing and sustaining its maritime empire. This book examines Spain's forest management policies from the sixteenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century, connecting the global imperial level with local lived experiences in forest communities impacted by this manifestation of expanded state power. As home to the early modern world's most extensive forestry bureaucracy, Spain met serious political, technological, and financial limitations while still managing to address most of its timber needs without upending the social balance.

Sawdust Empire

Sawdust Empire PDF Author: Robert S. Maxwell
Publisher: Texas A & M University Press
ISBN: 9781585440597
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This first comprehensive story of logging, lumbering, and forest conservation in Texas records the industry’s history from the earliest days of the Republic, when a few isolated operations provided for local needs, through the first four decades of the twentieth century. Supplemented by over one hundred photographs, many never before published, the text re-creates Texas’ heyday as one of the nation’s leading timber producers. At that time, the forested area equaled the state of Indiana. In the words of one visitor, the forest was “like a vast wave that has rolled in upon a level beach . . . creeping forward, thinning out, and finally disappearing, except where, along a river course, it pushes far inland.” The industry’s most significant growth occurred between the end of Reconstruction and the beginnings of World War II, when entrepreneurs from the North, the South, and the East ventured into the vast stands of virgin timber in the Texas Piney Woods. These pioneers, attracted by the great potential fortunes to be made, provided the capital, expertise, and energy that introduced large mills and railroads to Texas lumbering and developed markets for their products—not only in Houston, Dallas, and other Texas cities but also across the United States and throughout the world. Various lumber companies, logging and mill operations, company towns, and the genesis of forest conservation are all featured in the text and illustrations. This account will appeal to historians, conservationists, and general readers interested in the Texas lumber industry and in Texas economic history.

Timber and Forestry in Qing China

Timber and Forestry in Qing China PDF Author: Meng Zhang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse that devastated European forests at the same time. This comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development.

Downriver

Downriver PDF Author: Charles E. Twining
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description


Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism PDF Author: Gregory Allen Barton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What we now know of as environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire forest in 1855 in British India, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust. Sprawling forest reservations, many of them larger than modern nations, became revenue-producing forests that protected the whole 'household of nature', and Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt were among those who celebrated a new class of government foresters as public heroes. Imperial foresters warned of impending catastrophe, desertification and global climate change if the reverse process of deforestation continued. The empire forestry movement spread through India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and then the United States to other parts of the globe, and Gregory Barton's study looks at the origins of environmentalism in a global perspective.

When Money Grew on Trees

When Money Grew on Trees PDF Author: Greg Gordon
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080614548X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Born in the timber colony of New Brunswick, Maine, in 1848, Andrew Benoni Hammond got off to an inauspicious start as a teenage lumberjack. By his death in 1934, Hammond had built an empire of wood that stretched from Puget Sound to Arizona—and in the process had reshaped the American West and the nation’s way of doing business. When Money Grew on Trees follows Hammond from the rough-and-tumble world of mid-nineteenth-century New Brunswick to frontier Montana and the forests of Northern California—from lowly lumberjack to unrivaled timber baron. Although he began his career as a pioneer entrepreneur, Hammond, unlike many of his associates, successfully negotiated the transition to corporate businessman. Against the backdrop of western expansion and nation-building, his life dramatically demonstrates how individuals—more than the impersonal forces of political economy—shaped capitalism in this country, and in doing so, transformed the forests of the West from functioning natural ecosystems into industrial landscapes. In revealing Hammond’s instrumental role in converting the nation’s public domain into private wealth, historian Greg Gordon also shows how the struggle over natural resources gave rise to the two most pervasive forces in modern American life: the federal government and the modern corporation. Combining environmental, labor, and business history with biography, When Money Grew on Trees challenges the conventional view that the development and exploitation of the western United States was dictated from the East Coast. The West, Gordon suggests, was perfectly capable of exploiting itself, and in his book we see how Hammond and other regional entrepreneurs dammed rivers, logged forests, and leveled mountains in just a few decades. Hammond and his like also built cities, towns, and a vast transportation network of steamships and railroads to export natural resources and import manufactured goods. In short, they established much of the modern American state and economy.

Delta Empire

Delta Empire PDF Author: Jeannie Whayne
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080713855X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father’s death in 1870, Robert E. “Lee” Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned. A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation—Whayne suggests—not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II. Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post–World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson’s story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.

The Age of Wood

The Age of Wood PDF Author: Roland Ennos
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982114754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A “smart and surprising” (Booklist) “expansive history” (Publishers Weekly) detailing the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt. As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood. “A lively history of biology, mechanics, and culture that stretches back 60 million years” (Nature) The Age of Wood reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives. Ennos takes us on a sweeping journey from Southeast Asia and West Africa where great apes swing among the trees, build nests, and fashion tools; to East Africa where hunter gatherers collected their food; to the structural design of wooden temples in China and Japan; and to Northern England, where archaeologists trace how coal enabled humans to build an industrial world. Addressing the effects of industrialization—including the use of fossil fuels and other energy-intensive materials to replace timber—The Age of Wood not only shows the essential role that trees play in the history and evolution of human existence, but also argues that for the benefit of our planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing, using, and understanding trees. A brilliant blend of recent research and existing scientific knowledge, this is an “excellent, thorough history in an age of our increasingly fraught relationships with natural resources” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).