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ABSTRACT
The paper examines the early history of environmental concerns in Russia. It focuses on a case study: the debates about a potentially detrimental impact of deforestation on water regimes, which took place in the 1830s–40s. It examines two sets of issues: the role of ideas about a growing scarcity of forest resources in Europe; and the actual state of forests in Russia that provided some evidentiary basis for these debates. It argues that these debates were possible at the convergence of several trends: an expanding role and objectives of the forest administration well-versed in European scientific debates of the age and at the same time a visible danger of deforestation in some regions of a strategic significance to the empire. The author also considers different expert cultures and evidentiary standards that could be observed during the debates.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Aleksei Kouprianov from the National Research University – Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, for creating the map used in this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The history of the 1837 expedition to the Upper Volga is reconstructed on the basis of archival documents located at the Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv in St Petersburg, hereafter – RGIA), fond (collection; hereafter – f.) 91, opis’ (inventory; hereafter – op.) 2, delo (file – hereafter f.) 881; f. 398, op. 2, d. 359.
2. Freytag, “Deutsche Umweltgeschichte – Umweltgeschichte in Deutschland.”
3. Corvol, La forêt malade; Reith, “The Forest as a Topic in Environmental History”; Hölzl, “Ecology, Religion, Human Retreat, and Global Imaginations”; Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France; Radkau, Holz – wie ein Naturstoff Geschichte schreibt; Radkau, Natur und Macht; Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe”; Warde, “Early Modern ‘Resource Crisis’: The Wood Shortage Debates in Europe”; Warde, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny.
4. Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.”
5. Andreassian, “Waters and Forests: From Historical Controversy to Scientific Debate”; Fedotova and Loskutova, “The Studies over the Impact of Forests on Climate and the Rise of Scientific Forestry in Russia”; Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism; Fressoz and Locher, “Régénérer la nature, restaurer les climats”; Lotz, “The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and Debates about Forest-Water Relations during the Late Nineteenth Century”; Weigl, “Wald und Klima: Ein Mythos aus dem 19. Jahrhundert.”
6. Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries; Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism.
7. Costlow, “Imaginations of Destruction: the ‘Forest Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture”; Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest.
8. Karimov, Dokuda topor i sokha khodili: ocherki istorii zemel’nogo i lesnogo kadastra v Rossii XVI- nachala XX veka; Lupanova, Istoriya zakreposhcheniya prirodnogo resursa. Lesnoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 1696–1802.
9. Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia.”
10. Pravilova, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia, 47–54.
11. RGIA, f. 91, op. 2, d. 881, ll. (folia) 3–4.
12. Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries, 19–22.
13. Tsvetkov, Izmenenie lesistosti Evropeiskoi Rossii s kontsa XVII stoletiia po 1914 g., 123.
14. Tsvetkov, Izmenenie lesistosti, 126–31.
15. Istomina, Vodnyi transport Rossii v doreformennyi period, 17–18, 179–82.
16. Istomina, Vodnyi transport Rossii, 185–9.
17. My calculations based on the information published in Sanktpetersburgskie kommercheskie vedomosti from 1805 and 1825.
18. Trofimovich, “O vidakh vnutrennego sudokhodstva”; Istomina, Vodnyi transport, 181–2.
19. Vildermet, “Nekotorye zamechaniya”; RGIA, f. 91, op. 2, d. 881, l. 120.
20. Vildermet, “Svedeniya o lesakh v Tverskoi gubernii.”
21. Rykachev, “Statisticheskoe opisanie lesov Tverskoi gubernii za 1848 god.”
22. RGIA, f. 1594, op. 1, d. 642. The file contains materials related to the service of the chief forester Sverchkov in Tver’ province in 1806–9 and graphically shows his disregard for both the wishes of the local governor and his superiors at the Ministry of Finance in St Petersburg.
23. RGIA, f. 379, op. 4, d. 55, 662; f. 1594, op. 1, d. 1643.
24. RGIA, f. 1594, op. 1, d. 65, ll. 28-37; d. 68, ll. 1–15.
25. My calculations based on the lists of chief foresters published annually in Mesyatsoslov i obshchii shtat Rossiiskoi imperii for the period 1805–40.
26. RGIA, f. 1594, op. 1, d. 13, ll. 1-3; d. 33; f. 379, op. 4, d. 2906.
27. My observation is based on the comparison between the lists of chief foresters and the lists of St Petersburg Forestry Institute’s graduates, which could be found in: Verekha, Istoricheskii ocherk razvitiya Sankt-Peterburgskogo Lesnogo instituta, 94–8 2nd pagination.
28. RGIA, f. 387, op.1, d. 776, ll. 12–13ob.
29. Vildermet, “Nekotorye zamechaniya”; Vildermet, “Svedeniya o lesakh v Tverskoi gubernii.” Vildermet’s contribution to the Forestry Journal is briefly mentioned in Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia. However she is mistaken when she assumes that the Forestry Society established by Cancrin in 1832 was the very same society that was active in St Petersburg in the 1870s.
30. RGIA, f. 206, op. 2, d.747; f. 215, op. 2, d. 246.
31. Stuckenberg, Hydrographie des russischen Reiches.
32. From Major Sternval’s report to the Main Administration for Transportation, January 1837. See: RGIA, f. 206, op. 2, d.747, l. 2.
33. On Cancrin see, Bozheryanov, Graf Egor Frantsevich Kankrin, ego zhizn’, literaturnye trudy i dvadtsatiletnyaya deyatel’nost’. Cancrin’s correspondence with Alexander von Humboldt was published in the nineteenth century: Humboldt and Cancrin, Im Ural und Altai. For details of Cancrin inviting Humboldt to Russia see: Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, 200.
34. Anon., “O klimaticheskikh razlichiyakh Rossii.”
35. Shilov, Gosudarstvennye deyateli Rossiiskoi imperii, 278.
36. Anon., “O klimaticheskikh razlichiyakh Rossii,” 5.
37. Anon., “Statuty obshchestva,” 1.
38. RGIA, f. 91, op. 2, d. 898.
39. RGIA, f. 91, op. 2, d. 881.
40. For details see: Fressoz and Locher, “Régénérer la nature.”
41. Andreassian, “Waters and Forests,” 1–27.
42. Anon., “Mery k predokhraneniyu rek ot obmeleniya”; Anon., “O vliyanii lesov i istrebleniya onykh na klimat”; Anon., “O vliyanii lesov na klimat, reki i prozyabenie”; Anon., “Primery vliyaniya lesov na klimat i plodorodie”; Anon., “Razmyshlenie o sokhranenii lesov”; Breitenbach, “O vliyanii lesov na temperaturu.”
43. Khartanovich, Letopis’ Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 265, 269.
44. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krestyane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva; Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 67–9.
45. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany”; Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11–22.
46. Hölzl, “Historicizing sustainability,” 448–53.
47. Fedotova and Loskutova, “The Studies over the Impact of Forests on Climate.”
48. RGIA, f. 91, op. 2, d. 881, l. 141.
49. RGIA, f. 206, op. 2, d. 747, l. 2.
50. RGIA, f.92, op. 2, d. 881, l. 137–8.
51. On Odoevskiy see: Bayuk, “Literature, Music, and Science in Nineteenth Century Russian Culture”; Virginskiy, Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskiy.
52. RGIA, f.92, op. 2, d. 881, l. 89-92; f. 398, op. 2, d. 359, l. 31–49.
53. On Baer see: Tammiksaar and Brauckmann, “Karl Ernst von Baer’s ‘Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere II’”; Brauckmann, “Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) and Evolution.” On Kupfer: Malin and Barraclough, “Humboldt and the Earth’s Magnetic Field.” On Lenz: Steinle, “Electromagnetism and Field Physics.” On Koeppen see Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire, 116–18; Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 91–9. On Koeppen’s collaboration with the Ministry of State Domains see: Loskutova, “Early Research on Insect Pests in the Russian Empire.”
54. Khartanovich, Letopis’ Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 280; Baer and Koeppen, “Über den Wald- und Wasser-Vorrath,” 168, 200.
55. Baer and Koeppen‚ “Über den Wald- und Wasser-Vorrath.”
56. Baer and Koeppen‚ “Über den Wald- und Wasser-Vorrath,” 204–9.
57. St Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, f. 30 (Peter Koeppen’s papers), op. 1, d. 149, l.115.
58. Ibid., 118.
59. Anon., “O klimaticheskikh razlichiyakh Rossii.”
60. Baer and Koeppen‚ “Über den Wald- und Wasser-Vorrath,” 118.
61. Andreassian, “Waters and Forests,” 127.
62. On statistics as an instrument of governance see, Bourguet, “Décrire, Compter, Calculer: the Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period”; Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France: la statistique départementale à l’époque napoléonienne; Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy. On instrumental observation, quantitative measurements and precision see: Bourguet, “Landscape with Numbers: Natural History, Travel and Instruments in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” On Russian statistics in the first half of the nineteenth century see: Smith-Peter, “Defining the Russian People: Konstantin Arsen’ev and Russian Statistics Before 1861”; Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki v SSSR; Val’skaya, “Ob ekonomiko-geograficheskom izuchenii Rossii statisticheskim otdeleniem Ministerstva vnutrennikh del v 1835-1852 gg.”
63. Moon, The Plow that Broke the Steppes, 79–83.
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Marina Loskutova
Marina Loskutova is Associate Professor at the Department of History, St Petersburg School of Arts and Humanities of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. She specializes in the history of life sciences and the social and environmental history of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.