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Examining the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and its research on forest-water relations, the article investigates the relation between scientific internationalism and national expertise. It juxtaposes existing arguments regarding the paradigmatic character of 19th century arguments about deforestations. In particular, in 1999, Christian Pfister and Daniel Brändli argued that, in Switzerland during the second half of the 19th century, forestry administrators forged an argument that deforestations in mountainous regions lead to floods in the valleys. As this argument helped to install new Swiss forest legislation in 1876, forbidding deforestations in the mountains, Pfister and Brändli called it a ―deforestation paradigm‖. In contrast, sources of the IUFRO provide a different picture. At IUFRO meetings, i.e., at the international level of debate, no such paradigm existed. Instead, IUFRO participants discussed various conclusions that could be drawn from research on deforestations. Regarding the outcome of IUFRO projects, participants reported partly in opposing ways about the results of the research projects in forestry journals in their respective countries. Exploring these reports, the article provides an explanation for these different national representations of international research projects.
Since the late 19th century, the idea of producing a map series that depicts the entire world in a uniform style and at a standardised scale has been a fascinating one. After the Second World War, when the prospects of the International Map of the World at a scale of 1:1,000,000 continued to face severe problems, cartographers from socialist countries in Europe produced the Karta Mira, a world map at a scale of 1:2,500,000. In our work, we examined the content of selected Karta Mira sheets, particularly the depiction of settlements, competing territorial claims, and place names. Avoiding the ongoing debate about so-called ‘map falsification’ in socialist countries, we shifted our methodological approach by conceiving the Karta Mira as a representation of Cold War rivalry in geography and cartography. From that perspective, the production of the Karta Mira appears as an attempt to achieve two opposing aims at once. On the one hand, in fear of nuclear war, cartographers hid strategic and relevant cities and shifted various other Soviet cities to an extent that map reviewers might have criticised the accuracy of the map. On the other, questioning territorial claims of Western colonial powers on Karta Mira sheets, as well as the fact of realising the long-cherished plan of a standardised world map, the Karta Mira challenged Western geographical discourses and, from the perspective of its makers, proved the superiority and technical efficiency of socialist geography.
Taking the International Congress on Agriculture and Forestry in Vienna 1890 as an example, the article examines controversies about the future prospects of timber supplies. Two participants at the congress, Adolf von Guttenberg and Eugen Ostwald, demanded an end to sustainable forest management. In their opinion, the railway, as a new transport technology, would enable a balance between regions of timber shortage and regions of abundance. Guttenberg’s and Ostwald’s pre- sentations provoked heavy criticism and led, in the following years, to a fundamental debate about appropriate concepts of forest management. In the debate, three aspects were controversial: (1) the effects of railway transportation; (2) the consequences of the increasing timber consumption; (3) the effects of the timber frontier that was advancing, in particular, in Northern and Eastern European woodlands. As a result, the debate led to an ongoing process of rescaling sustainability.
Since the 18th century, (classical) concepts of sustainability had been based on local schemes of calculation. By contrast, since the mid-19th century, the growing railway network overcame topo- graphical barriers that had been a pre-condition for local-scale sustainable forest management; in addition, the advancing timber frontier continuously opened up newly accessible woodland areas. Experts were forced to continuously gather new data and to steadily rescale their planning. In schemes for future resource management, space was no longer a constant, but a rapidly changing variable.