Principles of Methodical Tree-Felling and the Restriction of Forest Usage Rights

20The first three forest reserves in Cochinchina were created on March 21, 1892, in the province of Thu Dâu Môt. The main principles of the Forestry School of Nancy were applied, including the central principle of “methodical felling,” which consisted in felling, over a fifteen to twenty-year rotation, only as much timber as the forest was capable of reproducing in the same time. Georges Capus, director of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forests, and Commerce, a part of the General Government of Indochina, summed up the principle: “The riches of the forests... are a capital from which we can draw a constant revenue, indefinitely, as long as a portion of the capital is not consumed along with the profit.” [27] An operation called balivage consists in marking with a hatchet the trees that are not to be cut during one or two long rotations, in order to promote the growth of good species and the gradual improvement of stands of commercially valuable species. After several rotations, the initially poor natural forest grows and evolves into a timber forest, and the tree population becomes more homogeneous; in fact, foresters considered the “diversity of flora” in the tropical forests the reason for the lack of commercial interest in them. Long before anyone ever used the term “sustainable development,” nineteenth-century foresters had established its main principles, and Capus presents this forest policy in very contemporary terms, speaking of “a heritage for future generations” that the colonists are morally obliged to maintain and protect. [28]

21These general principles are applied only to forest reserves, of course. In forests outside of reserves, timber-cutting remained unrestricted; it proceeded in the manner described by Thorel and Henry. No minimum felling diameter decreed for a few “protected” species could lessen the impact of the continuing destruction. At the turn of the century, the forested area of Indochina was divided into forest reserves, where supposedly sustainable felling methods were practiced, and areas referred to as “protected,” within which the colonial administration made production a higher priority than sustainability. In fact, Roger Ducamp, first officer of the Forestry School of Nancy in Indochina and first chief of the Indochinese Forestry Service (1901-1912), maintained that even placing forest areas in a reserve should not cause production to be limited. [29] We once again encounter in Indochina the same question that was being asked in France at the moment when natural forests were being converted into timber forests: how is it possible to improve forests without limiting their commercial exploitation? [30] French forest policy in Indochina adopted the most commerce-friendly response, intending above all to “produce firewood in a systematic manner” [31] in the forest reserves, because supplying local populations with firewood at a low price was the surest way of keeping them out of the reserves, and of making sure that the commercial operations that had permits to cut trees were the only ones working in a given area (it was hoped they would obey the rules regarding balivage, including minimum trunk diameters). [32] In other words, the idea was to limit domestic consumption in order to devote more of the “capital” of the forest for industrial use. The challenge of colonial silviculture would be to establish a large forest reserve area quickly, so that the methodical felling practiced in reserves could replace the unrestricted felling practed in “protected” areas before these were totally exhausted.

Reserve Areas

22Thus a sort of race against time was begun, to build up timber in the reserve areas before the other areas were stripped of trees worth felling. Between 1891 and 1902, about fifty reserves were established, most in Cochinchina; in 1905, Indochina had sixty-nine reserves with a total surface area of 155,434 hectares; in 1912, there were 186, with a total area of 360,391 hectares (1.4 percent of all estimated forested land). [33] Thus the area designated as reserve land doubled in size in less than ten years, but it still represented only seven percent of the five million hectares Georges Capus wanted to designate. [34] Between 1920 and 1930, more and more land was designated as reserves, especially in Tonkin, Annam and Cambodia, which caught up with Cochinchina in this regard. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1

Surface area of forest reserves in Indochina between 1905 and 1941 (in hectares).

Surface area of forest reserves in Indochina between 1905 and 1941 (in hectares).

23In 1928, 6.8 percent of Indochinese forests were classified as reserve areas, [35] and at the end of the colonial period more than six hundred reserves had been created in Indochina, representing almost four million hectares, 5.2 percent of the country’s surface (including present-day Laos), equaling 9.1 percent of all forested land, which was thought to amount to forty-two million hectares. [36] But the statistics created by the Forestry Service were fake. They hid the reality that the Service was hardly equal to its task. Some reserves existed only on paper. Roger Ducamp admitted that the Indochinese Forest Service produced phony statistics. He was critical of his own agents’ attitudes, who pretended “without any knowledge, just to inflate the numbers,” that vast areas had been established as reserves. [37] Even in Cochinchina, where the program was a little further along, M. Roy admitted, concerning the felling of forests all along the railroad to Biên Hoa: “We went as fast as we could.... I had no one working for me to survey forests; we submitted incomplete maps; it was all made up.” [38] These admissions regarding the period before the WWI are even more true of the period between the World Wars, when the number of reserves and their extent doubled in only a few years. But in fact the process of designating an area as a reserve seldom went further than mere designation. The total number of hectares said to be in reserves thus tells us nothing about two fundamental questions that would permit us to estimate the value of French forestry policy in Indochina: First, what was the condition of the forest areas made into reserves? Second, what was the difference, in terms of quantity of wood produced, between the reserves nominally limited to “methodical felling” and the “protected” areas that were not protected at all?

Forest Composition in Areas Designated as Reserves

24At the end of the nineteenth century, the forest reserves in Cochinchina were still relatively rich in wood of all kinds. This was true of the reserve of Trang Bôm, which still contained go, sao, sen, vap, and lau-tau trees of all ages, [39] and the same could be said of the reserves of the provinces of Bien Hoa and Baria. [40] On the other hand, many cases prove that the principle endorsed by Ducamp, of not allowing the designation of a reserve to slow down production in a given area, most often led to a situation in which only forests that had already been extensively cut were designated as reserves. Numerous administrative orders designating a particular area as a reserve abundantly demonstrate this, since they were the occasion of the first inventory of the tree population of the designated area.

25The order creating the reserve at Dai Luc in 1914, in the province of Phú Tho, indicated that over a total surface area of two thousand hectares, unrestricted felling had removed every species that could be commercialized; there was not one first- or second-class tree that met the minimum diameter for felling under the regulations. In 1928, the poor state of the initial tree population was confirmed by a management plan that also admitted that there were no more trees that could yield wood for construction. [41] The entire forest had only 0.5 percent first-class species and was ninety percent composed of trees with a trunk diameter of less than forty centimeters. The chief of the Forest Service at Phú Ðoan nevertheless managed to list this population in the category “average density.” The condition of reserve forests in Dai Luc was far from unusual. It was actually typical of the condition of forests in the Central Region near the Red River Delta. The creation of the Nang Yên reserve in 1927 allows the same conclusions to be drawn: the reserve contained only 0.25 percent of first-category species, and eighty-seven percent of its wood fell into the third and fourth categories, including seventy-one percent with trunks smaller than twenty centimeters in diameter. [42] In short, a thicket of brush.

The Effect of Methodical Felling Practices on Forest Production

26The poor condition of forest reserve areas explains why the wood produced under the methodical felling regime amounted to almost nothing. The “protected” forests were the ones from which unlimited timber was removed, and this had been true since the late nineteenth century. These forests provided the colonies what they required throughout that time.

27Beginning in 1924, the Annuaire statistique de l’Indochine allows us to estimate the proportion of wood produced by the reserve forests, since it records the yearly volume of wood that was taxed in the so-called protected areas, as well as the specific amounts of wood to be cut in reserve areas. Figures 2 and 3, produced from these statistics, show the very small amount of production from the reserves. In the late 1920s, thanks to the continuance of certain long-standing practices, Cochinchina alone managed to produce 330,000m³ of firewood from its reserve areas (an amount equal to one third of the total, and eighteen percent of the total production for Indochina), and 22,000m³ of wood for commercial or industrial use from those areas (this equals 10.4 percent of the 212,000m³ produced by the colony, but is only two percent of the total for Indochina). For the other regions reported, wood production from reserves is completely negligible in comparison with the amount produced from the “protected” domains.

Figure 2

Amount of wood produced through methodical cutting as opposed to unrestricted cutting, 1929.

Amount of wood produced through methodical cutting as opposed to unrestricted cutting, 1929.

28The situation did improve somewhat over time: twenty-five percent of firewood and five percent of commercial-quality wood were being produced by reserves at the beginning of the 1930s; by 1942, progress seemed dizzying. The reserves produced fifty-three percent of firewood and 16.5 percent of commercial grade wood (Figure 3); from 1924 to 1941, calculated against the cumulative total of volumes of wood reported, 7.8 percent out of thirteen million square meters of commercial grade wood was taken from the reserves, and 35.7 percent out of thirty million square meters of firewood.

Figure 3

29However, once again it is necessary to be on guard against reported statistics. In fact, in the mid-1930s, local governments decided to open the reserves to more commercial activity, even in those that had not yet been surveyed or marked for balivage. This constituted a sudden increase in the proportion of wood produced from the reserves, but not harvested in accordance with any kind of methodical felling. This was particularly true of Cambodia, where the amount of commercial wood from the reserves went from three to forty-nine percent between 1936 and 1937, while less than ten percent of those reserves had been surveyed. [43] It is appropriate to correct these statistics, as well, in the light of the fact that the amounts of wood produced fraudulently were at least equal to the amounts reported. [44] And even above and beyond the amount of fraud, forest agents estimated that commercial operations actually cut down two or three times what they ever managed to remove and market, leaving enormous quantities of wood to rot on the forest floor. [45] Thus we must reduce by a factor of two or three the proportion of wood produced from reserve areas reported by the Annuaire statistique de l’Indochine. In that case, only three percent of commercial wood and twelve percent of firewood, at most, were removed from the reserves between 1924 and 1941. Finally, if we observe that in 1943, only 573,470 hectares of reserves had undergone the preparation necessary for methodical felling to be practiced, which was only seventeen percent of all reserve areas, then we understand that methodical felling, in relation to the amount of wood removed from Indochinese forests during the colonial period, had no effect whatsoever. [46]

30The objective of substituting methodical felling for unrestricted felling remained so far from implementation that the people working for the forestry service cannot have been ignorant of the fact. This is an important point, because it removes all possibility of good faith with regard to what the forestry service says it did and reduces its actions to an ecological imperialism based on the exclusion of local people from reserves, and the restriction of their right to use the forest.

The Preservation of the Richest Forests

31We still have to examine the policies that were maintained in order to protect the forests of Indochina insofar as they were useful for maintaining the equilibrium of very large ecosystems (such as water and rainfall systems) or, insofar as they were pristine, for preserving them as such. Here once again the practice of designating reserves provides valuable answers from examination of the localities. During the colonial period, the creation of reserves depended on the possibility of monitoring them, that is, providing a forest guard heading up a division of the forest service. Divisions of the forestry service were places where taxes and fees were paid. They were always situated at the confluence of rivers, not in the most remote areas or the deepest forests. As a result, the richest forests were never designated as reserves; as we have seen, only the poorest forests received this designation. The principal reason for this choice was related to the productive mission of colonial silviculture, because the forestry service, by making the production of cheap firewood its main objective, limited their field of action to the forests that were closest to centers of consumption, as Figure 4 shows. In addition, by conforming to the pattern of making forests in protected areas produce as much commercial-quality wood as they could before these forests were ever made reserves, they prevented themselves from preserving the forests that contained the largest populations of valuable species of trees.

Figure 4

Figure 4 – Forestry Map of Tonkin

Figure 4 – Forestry Map of Tonkin

Locations of forest reserves of Tonkin (based on the 1931 map). Map drawn by MM. Mangin and Forbé, Service Géographique de l’Indochine, 1931.

32Foresters who really worried about preserving the richest forests were thus rare. Auguste Chevalier in the early 1920s was, as far as we know, the first to show such concern in Indochina. [47] In his inventory of the forest of Tonkin, after showing that forest regeneration in the future would make possible the sustainable exploitation of all forests (thanks to forest reserves rich in a few sought-after commercial species), he laments the disappearance of the primitive forests and in effect demands that they be saved in the form of “natural contiguous reserves... the remnants of virgin nature.” [48] This imperative of preservation thus appears in Chevalier’s reasoning as the logical consequence of the negative effects of the necessity of promoting just a few species in repopulating the forests, in order to make the tropical forests commercially viable. The same logic was outlined a few years later by Henri Lecomte, who wrote that “the heterogeneous forests that now exist, as they are exploited, must be replaced by forests that are as homogeneous as possible,” and then solemnly declared,

33

I would like to express a wish. I demand the immediate creation, within our immense tropical forest domain, of “Botanical Reserves” that would be essentially different from what we now call “Forest Reserves.” The latter are just regions set aside for later exploitation, to be carried out methodically. The “Botanical Reserves” I wish to see created should be areas that will remain untouched by development for an indefinite period. It is in fact clear that whether their exploitation is regulated or not, it will cause to disappear from the primitive forest, in an irremediable manner, a multitude of mature trees and young trees that will not reappear in the secondary forest. Our knowledge of the tropical forest is very incomplete, from a botanical point of view, and from the special point of view of uses for different woods that have not yet been studied. It must remain possible for this study to be continued in the future. Destroying the primitive forest may mean risking the permanent disappearance of interesting plant species, which up to now have escaped the notice of naturalists on their voyages. I plead for the creation of “Botanical Reserves” in order that there may be a chance to conserve these plants, which may at present be unknown, for the greatest benefit of the generations that will follow our own. [49]

34One may observe the same train of thought in Henri Guibier, who also in 1926 called for the creation of “botanical reserves” on the island of Phu Quoc, which was “of interest because of the great number of genera and species that live there”; and upon the mountain of Núi Chua Chan, where “there is... an immense forest at an altitude of seven hundred meters, where development is quite unlikely, [and] it would make a superb botanical reserve without interfering with any commercial operation.... Botanists in the future would have at their disposal large forests conserved with their proper flora.” [50] Guibier still manages, without a hint of paradox, to congratulate himself, because alongside a few preserved forests,

35

thanks to better tools and the opening up of access roads, we have managed to exploit populations that had not been developed until then, and to remove from forests protected from the axe by their location all the trees that are too big or too old, which encumber the forests in many regions; these had constituted capital one might almost characterize as wasted, which does not add to the value of the forest, but on the contrary is in the way of the renewal and the enrichment of the forest. [51]

36“Strict nature reserves” for Chevalier, “botanical reserves” for Lecomte and Guibier: we note that the motivations that underlay the two designations are not the same. With Chevalier we are close to the idea of protecting nature through the establishment of national parks, while Lecomte and Guibier foreshadow the spirit of Rio in June 1992, with the “planetary summit conference” and the necessity of inventorying a range of biodiversity one also plans to allow to erode. It is remarkable that, among these colonial scientists, the idea of natural reserves was a direct result of the homogenization of tree populations induced by tropical silviculture, for which they were the most active agents. The colonial idea of preservation of nature emerges less from observation of the destruction that is underway than from the need to set up sanctuaries for diversity to counteract the homogeneity of tree populations caused by a colonial silviculture that aimed to standardize those populations.

37We end up with a picture of the development of colonial environmentalist thought quite different from the one suggested by Richard Grove. Colonization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries becomes a stage in the standardization of tropical ecosystems for industrial and commercial purposes, during which there was no concern for the environment or for the preservation of nature, but only for the exploitation of resources; only later on would industrial methods of optimizing the exploitation of resources give rise to concerns about the necessity of creating sanctuaries for diversity. [52]

38All in all, one can say that forest conservation failed utterly (the forestry service did not succeed in replacing unrestricted felling with methodical exploitation) and preservation was lacking (because no policy of forest preservation for the richest forests was ever implemented). The writings of members of the services try to excuse this by talking about the lack of means and personnel and the poor training of local officials. [53] But the failure simply points to a lack of acceptance of colonial forestry policy both on the part of colonials and the local people.

Colonial Hostility

40The colonial agricultural lobby was an important opponent of the efforts of the forestry services. According to various Chambers of Agriculture (in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina...), forest reserves had been established on land suitable for agriculture, especially inasmuch as the forest administration did not consult the Chambers of Agriculture before 1914. In Tonkin, large areas were designated as reserves in the Central Region, where eighty-four percent of European agricultural concessions were also located. [54] In the province of Phú Tho alone, typical of the region, reserves covered forty thousand hectares at the end of the colonial period, or almost eleven percent of the total, as opposed to six thousand five hundred hectares for the European concessions (shared among a dozen colonists), or two percent of the surface area of the province. [55] Colonial forest policy, in spatial terms, placed restrictions on forest access that weighed more heavily upon the local people than the agricultural concessions did. [56] According to the Tonkin Chamber of Agriculture, it interfered with the normal development of those concessions. The secretary, H. Maldan, maintained that three fourths of the land designated as reserve within the Central Region was well suited for growing coffee, tea, and latanier palms; in his opinion it was heresy to want to preserve a forest on such soil. [57] In 1928, during the second phase of creation of forest reserves, the Chamber of agriculture unleashed a war against the new designations of reserves, and Maldan advised the forestry service agents to occupy themselves with the real forests of the Northern Region, which were unsuitable for agriculture but had not been the object of forestry service activity and were furthermore being destroyed by the minorities. [58] Gambini, chief of the forestry service for Tonkin, answered that the so-called designations were actually speculative operations concerning the wooded areas on the perimeter of agricultural concessions, and that crops failed after a year or two of mountain rice or manioc. Stung by the attacks concerning the forests of the Northern Region, Gambini insisted that they were carefully monitored wherever there were agents, but that personnel and money were lacking for the job of keeping an eye on remote forest areas. Since the delta had no forest, and the Central Region was being deforested, if one had followed the policy suggested by the Chamber of Agriculture, the enormous demand for wood of the region of Tonkin would have had to be supplied from very distant forests. [59]

41Mining companies represented a second source of opposition to the forestry services. In the province of Quang Yên, around the Hông Gai basin, forestry agents were responsible for a rise of twenty-five percent in prices for roof supports for mines between 1908 and 1915. [60] In that province, in order to maintain production, the forestry service of Tonkin created thirty-two reserves between 1908 and 1932 (28.5 percent of the total number of reserves created in Tonkin), representing a total of 86,700 hectares or twenty-six percent of the total area of the province. But far from solving the problem, reserves meant a form of management that would limit production in the short term. The problem of Ducamp – how to protect the forests without slowing down production – was particularly acute here, because the systematic development of the forests generated discontent among the very people on whose behalf it was undertaken. Many mining companies refused to sign up for the program of methodical felling proposed by the forestry service, preferring to get their wooden supports from indigenous cutters who cut down trees in the reserves clandestinely, feeding a large traffic that from that point ruined the policy of creating reserves. [61] At the end of the 1920s, there was a real shortage of roof supports, and as a result colonial mining interests went up against not only the forestry services but the colonial administration. [62] The Governor-General of Indochina intervened in 1925, ordering the Resident-Superior of Tonkin to see to the “immediate opening up of reserves to commercial activity, which up to now have been left idle or for regeneration, and in which the vegetation allows for methodical felling.” [63] Gambini then embarked on a grand inspection tour of reserves that were supposed to produce the mining supports that were needed. At the end of the tour he told the governor that the reserves must be allowed to regenerate, because the destruction of tree populations due to “fraudulent exploitation has slowed and compromised the natural regeneration of many clear-cut parcels.” [64] The response of the governor was icy. In his view, the experiments with reforestation with the Charbonnages had yielded no result since 1922, and Gambini’s forestry service had produced “no apparent progress in a situation that is critical in nature.” [65] In the name of the development of agricultural and mining interests, colonial capitalism repudiated the principles of sustainable development that forestry service officers attempted to follow. Little by little, these lobbies, allied with the highest colonial authorities, would win out over the forestry services, which were losing their standing and influence in the government.

Submissiveness and Secret Resistance on the Part of the “Natives”

42It is difficult to speak in general of submission or opposition to the forest policy by “local populations,” because that designation encompasses an infinite ethnic, cultural, social, and economic variety, and the forests meant very different things to different groups. [66]

43We should note first that the indigenous populations often had more respect for the rules of silviculture imposed by the administration than the European colonists did, as attested by Georges Capus at the end of the nineteenth century: “Although indigenous woodcutters quickly adapted to the rules [of methodical felling], European companies have raised many protests against ground-level felling and balivage.” [67] Indigenous woodcutters regularly signed up for the kind of marking and felling proposed by the forestry services, practices the mining companies rejected. Even the Montagnard people, who practiced slash-and-burn agriculture (the colonial administration tried early on to prohibit the rẫy), appear to have been more respectful of colonial forest policy than the colonists. With regard to the destruction of forests in the region of Cao Bang, which were perpetrated by a company that was mining tin in Cao Bang, a Lieutenant Wendt pronounced the Mans innocent – initially they had been accused of conducting rẫy – and added that “the indigenous populations, particularly the Mans living in the châu of Nguyên-Binh, have long respected the regulations and laws concerning the conservation of forests.” [68] This statement agrees with the provocative observation expressed by N. C. Saxena, who emphasized that the most remarkable thing in the history of colonial forestry in India was not the history of the resistance to the British colonial forest policy, but the history of cooperation with it. [69]

44Nonetheless, despite this relative degree of cooperation with forest regulations, it is no exaggeration to say that in general the forest reserves were never welcomed by the people who lived near the rivers, first because legally they were connected to the despoilment of uncultivated land by the colonial state, [70] and second because they involved a loss of the right of these people to use the forest; the people were restricted to using a miniscule portion of the reserves that was referred to as the série communale. Study of administrative orders for determining the boundaries of the reserves shows that, in most cases, the people made no claims in opposition to the designation of reserves. Only after their establishment did complaints surface, showing that, at the moment when the reserves had been designated, the people had not understood the constraints upon their access to forest resources that would be implied. In the case of the creation of the reserve of Nang Yên, the archives show that representatives of two neighboring villages protested. These produced the đia ba of the communes (cadastres from the imperial period) to assert their rights over the lands in question. [71] The decision of the Commission on Forests nonetheless states that the villages had no opposition “to assert.”

45The reserves were symbols (among others) of colonial domination, and thus throughout the colonial period they were objects of silent hostility. The archives of the Resident-Superior’s house in Tonkin are full of files having to do with a war of attrition between harried forest guards, often incompetent, and countless marauders. [72]

46Resistance to forest policy was part of opposition to colonialism. We have already seen that mining companies rejoiced in the violations of forest regulations by the people of the region; since the mining companies were violating the same regulations, it was to their advantage. In the agricultural area, the same sort of convergence of interests between the indigenous people and colonial capitalism occurred. In 1937, Nguyên Dinh Thanh, a tea planter from the village of Dao Gia (province of Phú Tho), submitted a petition to the Resident-Superior in which he asked for “the suppression of all these remnants of forest reserves, which are nothing but screens concealing from the forestry service the farming going on in the interior.” The argument is based on the fact that the reserves had been cleared without authorization by poor people who, “without proper knowledge, grow tea that is of very poor quality, devaluing teas that have been properly grown, and then the tea grown by the indigenous people, of whatever quality, costs no more than half of the price of the teas Phu-Ho.” [73] Nguyên Dinh Thanh thus demanded the Resident-Superior to set right this anarchic situation by giving property rights to those who were serious about growing tea, who alone, according to him, were able to internalize “the value of the tests” made in the Phú Hô station. [74]

47This correspondence shows that French “protégés” made use of the colonizers’ knowledge as a form of capital that could be used to dominate other people. It shows the colonial discourse on values passing from one person to another, from small property owners to leading local citizens, who working in their own interests succeeded in transforming local patterns of use of land and resources where the colonial administration failed. There thus is nothing surprising in the fact that the Resident-Superior of Phú Tho should respond favorably to petitions and initiate inquiries that would lead to the removal of the reserve designation from many of the region’s reserves, within the framework of a policy called “petty colonization,” which favored the immigration of Vietnamese into the Central Region. [75] The de-classification of the reserves of Dai Luc and Nang Yên, carried out in order to award land outright to Vietnamese who requested land, was accomplished in 1937. [76] The declassification of reserves during the 1930s shows that indigenous resistance to forest policy was never conducted openly. There were no large resistance movements as in India, but rather a movement of agricultural colonization by local societies, against which forestry policy came to resemble a desperate Sea Wall against an ocean. These local dynamics, working unseen, naturally frustrated the efforts of the agents of the forestry services, allied as they were with some colonial interests and above all aligned with the “more indigenous” policy of the 1930s; and they reduced the agents’ influence to nothing in the Central Region.

Indigenous Knowledge and Colonial Silviculture

48The colonized people often seized on colonizers’ knowledge as capital to be used for domination in the internal games of their society, but only rarely did things work in the other direction. With regard to forest management, the colonials did not think that the people of the Indochinese peninsula had any expertise in silviculture. Seeing the manner in which forest people used slash-and-burn agriculture no doubt was the basis of this close-mindedness. The members of the Special Commission on Forests, which as we saw was established in Cochinchina, affirmed this early on: “One should not assume that the forest-dwelling populations have any clear ideas or any really positive theories.” Why then do they burn off areas of the forest?

49

They set fires because their indifference and laziness are well suited to this easy method of clearing. They often burn areas without any reason just for pleasure, like children or savages, and we would be defending their interests against their own actions, if we did something to stop their senseless mania for destruction. [77]

50For the foresters, the rẫy destroys a natural capital that had taken centuries to come into existence, in order to produce poor crops not worth the thousandth part of what was sacrificed to the flames. The colonists worked to refute the arguments in favor of this kind of forest-agrarian system. The members of the Special Commission declared, definitively, that the ashes “to which the indigenous people seem to attribute such a fertilizing action” did not actually make the soil more fertile, but rather made soils rich in humus quickly deteriorate. [78] The same point of view prevailed among geographers like Pierre Gourou, Jules Sion, and Charles Robequain, who proved unable to use the concept of a “way of life” in the service of the human geography of the forests of Indochina. [79] Pierre Deffontaines observed that “monographs on forests that make a place for the life of men are rare.” [80]

51This obscurantism stands in contrast to the attitude toward vernacular knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Richard Grove has shown the importance of Hindu holistic philosophy and of indigenous classifications of plants in the reconstruction of European natural sciences at the time of colonization. He particularly highlights the interest shown by the Dutchman van Reede in the botanical and forest knowledge in the Malayali and Ezhava languages in his edition of the Hortus Malabaricus at the end of the seventeenth century and the influence of the forest policy of the Mughal emperors on the forest policy of William Roxburgh in India. [81]

52In Indochina, on the other hand, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth, there were few French foresters or agronomists who attributed any rationality at all to the forest-agrarian systems of the mountains or appreciated them as specifically local practices. Commandant Henry was an early exception. He became interested in the rẫy, no doubt in order to control them, but he recognized their productivity: “It was demonstrated to us that a good rây of a hectare could yield 1,250 kilograms of paddy per year, and that this quantity of paddy would suffice for a family of moï [this term, “savages” is now considered pejorative] of five persons during that same time.” [82] In fact, a few years later, Henry’s reflections would develop into attempts at “co-management” of the rẫy, shared between indigenous people and agents of the forestry service. [83] A first attempt at a “shared rây” was made by the forestry service in 1907 in the village of Dong Phat in Cochinchina. We learn from Chapotte, then chief of the forest service of Cochinchina, that “the surface necessary was determined in accordance with the baselines marked out by the people, in order for the rẫy to return to the same point every ten years; and from the spring of 1907, the village prepared to clear an area based on the clearing of 1907.” [84] These experiments in co-management of rẫy(s) ended up demonstrating, without this ever being emphasized, that so far from being barbarous practices, the rẫy were based on a rotating system of fallow, fire clearing, and planting that is technically comparable to the system of methodical felling used by the forestry service, the objective being the continuous regeneration of available biomass. The famous bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, in his experiments with planting quinquina, was no doubt the first to make the connection between the rapid degradation of tropical soils and the fire-fallow rotation systems, which are a good method of not exhausting the soils.” [85] Henri Guibier, chief of the forestry service of Annam, adopting Yersin’s hypotheses, maintained that any “exhaustion of the soil” was often due to intense microbial activity that was counteracted by local populations with the help of fire. [86]

53Apart from these few exceptions, the forest practices of the indigenous people were never taken into account as knowledge, but rather treated merely as information. In 1889, Msgr. Puginier, vicar apostolic of western Tonkin, published Renseignements pratiques sur les bois du Tonkin et les bambous. Leurs usages, leur qualité, leur durée, etc. This text was the first description written by a European of the species living in the forests of Tonkin, consisting entirely of information Puginier gathered “from informants” among the Vietnamese; but he never speaks of them and never asks about the connection between his information and the general knowledge of the people in relation to agriculture and forestry, etc.

54In the writings on forestry of Commandant Henry in Cochinchina, the place of indigenous knowledge as an element of colonial knowledge appears more clearly. Henry made a list of seventy species that needed to be protected, in his view, by the establishment of minimum diameters for permitted felling, and he listed eighteen more species whose felling should be prohibited. He explained that the list was based on the fact that “the indigenous people themselves divide their wood into three categories, namely: those that survive when planted in damp soil; those that resist sun and water, but do not resist damp soil; and finally, those that are not resistant,” and he goes on to say that “with the help of many indigenous foresters,” between 1865 and 1871 he had made a list of more than a thousand forest species, not counting palm trees. In order to decide which species deserved to be protected, Henry says that he chose “all the trees the wood of which was used preferentially by the indigenous people, either for a particular use, or for several different uses, but uses that were specific and well-known to them.” The reasons for choosing some species to be completely protected from felling also were derived from local knowledge. These were first of all fruit trees that were an important source of food (chôm-chôm, mít, truong, vai, etc.), and then there were ebony trees, true or false, but all first-class wood, which all had been “almost exterminated.” [87] The chai and the dâu rai both furnished an oleo-resin the price of which had tripled since 1865 because it was becoming scarce. Henry tirelessly praised the virtues of the tram, a species that thrived in freshwater wetlands, especially the fact that it helped purify swamps. In the end, we understand why the theories of silviculture imported from Nancy would have been nothing without the botanical and artisanal knowledge of the indigenous people, who made them take root on foreign soil, but the indigenous knowledge that appears here is never mentioned as a constitutive element of forest botany. That is supposed to have been constituted elsewhere, particularly at the National Museum of Natural History, from the chair held by Lecomte, who classified, compared, and named the botanical specimens of explorers, and little by little transformed vernacular knowledge into Linnaean species that were the objects of a stabilized colonial forestry policy. [88] Indigenous knowledge is therefore information. It is gathered, stored, processed, compared, integrated, and dissolved in the tropical silviculture in the making, to be re-injected into indigenous society as a subject of colonial law. It was never thought of as knowledge validated by local theories and experiments going back generations. [89]

55All these exchanges remind us of a truism in the sociology of science: knowledge is not diffused, but circulates along certain vectors: human beings and the institutions that appropriate items of knowledge for various social purposes. The question is not knowing which one contributed more to the other – European or vernacular knowledge, modern or traditional, rational or analogical, etc. – and then to determine which is superior; the question is knowing the vectors of circulation, why they are vectors, what is circulating, and how is the asymmetry arranged, between what we hold to be scientific and universal on one side, and irrational and local on the other. [90]

56To imagine the encounter between kinds of knowledge in this way allows us to enumerate the acts of mutual borrowing, to reveal the appropriations, to take account of the game of domination played by the possessors and transmitters of knowledge; and ultimately allows us to examine the co-construction of colonial sciences and the place of indigenous knowledge, to turn back toward classic social history, less nationalistic, in which there are no longer ancient forms of wisdom being extirpated by universal and then imperialist science wielded by the colonizer, but simply more or less curious colonizers, who sought in local knowledge arguments on which to base their social philosophy of the new worlds under construction, and colonized people who selectively adopted colonial knowledge as they found it socially useful.

57Applied to European silviculture in French colonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this approach produces a disappointingly poor history, in contrast to what Richard Grove observed with respect to preceding centuries. The knowledge and silvicultural practices of the forest-dwelling minorities of the peninsula, as well as the majority of those in the lowlands, did not figure in the great corpus of tropical silviculture then under construction. They were rejected as archaic; they were opposed to all the teachings of the Forestry School of Nancy, to say nothing of the conceptions of forests, “social space and spirit realm,” upon which they were based. In turn, colonial science was silently resisted by a population that did not find it useful. Was this isolation the great weakness of French colonial forestry, in comparison with what the British and the Dutch are supposed to have succeeded in building with the help of the populations in India and Insulindia? Nothing is less certain. After all, it is not the communitarian forest management defended by Dietrich Brandis that succeeded in India, but the forest-statism of Baden Powell, who was no less deaf to local knowledge than officials in Indochina. [91] Nor is it certain whether the “taungya system” (which allowed people who cleared by burning to plant food crops in the forest in exchange for replanting teak trees) or its Javanese relative, the tumpangsari, had more in common with Thorel’s principle, which granted rights of use to the people so as to demand repayment in days of corvée labor, than with any “participatory management” of the forest. In short, French colonial silviculture was neither better nor worse than its British and Dutch counterparts.

58That leaves what was in circulation: respect for the saplings on the part of some indigenous tree-cutters, in order to obtain their timber cutting permit; vernacular names of local species and local customs regarding the nomenclature for fees to be collected; some experiments of joint management with clearing by burning, a few questions about the wisdom of burning, and... little else. [92] We may thus state that reciprocal borrowings did not amount to much; that the colonizers were particularly closed to the knowledge and practices of their subjects, and for their part the local populations adopted European knowledge that was useful to them sparingly.

59These observations undermine the idea that local knowledge made an important contribution to the construction of tropical silviculture. Once again we are very far from the picture Grove paints of an environmentally sensitive colonial elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an “enlightened” elite that had the ear of colonial powers – thus managing to get their environmental recommendations implemented on the ground – elites not only aware of indigenous knowledge, but engaged in fundamentally recasting European naturalist knowledge on the basis of vernacular classifications. The colonial elite of the last part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth in Indochina were as far as possible from any empathetic examination of indigenous knowledge with an eye toward reevaluating their own knowledge; quite the contrary. The confrontation with the practices and conceptions of the colonized people reinforced the stiffly held belief of foresters in the superiority of European science and techniques.

60* * *

61The example of French colonial silviculture in Indochina undermines rather than supports approaches that would consider colonial experiences an important element in the development of environmentalist thought. First, there was no rapid transition between the earliest observation of forest destruction and the implementation of policies designed to correct these imbalances. The colonial attitude preferred to blame indigenous modes of cultivation in order to exculpate itself and pursue non-intervention. Second, the colonial forestry services never succeeded in implementing practices that promoted the sustainable development of forest resources on the peninsula in order to stop the destruction being hastened by colonization. This was because, politically, colonial opinion was very hostile to any measure to protect the forest that might impede its commercial exploitation in any way. Nor did the forestry services succeed in protecting the densest forests; the designation of reserves never covered a single hectare of dense forest. Thus we have at one and the same time a failure of policies for forest conservation and an absence of policies for preservation. Lastly, the colonial attitude consisted much more in denying the rational knowledge possessed by local populations concerning forests than learning from their practices in order to build a shared management system for these areas. [93]

62These facts amount to a violent break from what Richard Grove showed with regard to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grove claims, for example, that “early colonial conservation policies... resulted in governments’ attempting to restrict the activities of private capital... in the prior, and longer-term, interests of the state,” but here everything shows that French forest policy in Indochina consisted in creating a favorable market for private operators (preferably European), while limiting as much as possible the regulations enforced by the forestry service. Grove also emphasizes the fact that the first colonial environmentalists had much more influence on colonial regulations than their counterparts in the metropole had. The influence of Pierre Poivre and the physiocrats of Mauritius is exemplary for Grove. [94] This is also the opinion of Peter Boomgaard, who attributes the Dutch in Insulindia a real concern for the protection of nature and even thinks that at the end of the nineteenth century, “the first efforts of Dutch people to protect nature occurred in Indonesia, before this was done in Holland.” [95] The administrative history of the forestry services in Indochina shows the opposite: the agents of the forestry services were always kept under the thumb of the civil administration, and their initiatives were most often rejected, as we have seen, in favor of private coal-mining interests and agricultural colonization both European and indigenous.

63All in all the theories, practices, and results of colonial silviculture do not allow us to consider it an important element in modern environmentalist thought. But, on the other hand, it would be wrong to conclude that nothing was ever done with regard to forest management in the French colonies. [96] All the material collected in this article proves on the contrary that there was real interest in the sustainable development of renewable resources. The near-total subordination of conservation goals to production goals can even be thought of as an important moment in the creation of the discourse and practices of what we call “sustainable development” today, which, because it is based on the sustainability of the exploitation of resources, is largely foreign to the environmental sensibilities Grove observed in the colonization efforts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

64From this point of view it is noteworthy that the main concerns of the first environmentalists were theories of desiccation, the influence of forests on average rainfall and the global cost of imbalances – epistemic objects belonging to what we would today call “environmental services,” which obviously reach toward local knowledge – while such questions (although they occurred to the foresters of the nineteenth century) were relegated to the background by the central question of methodical exploitation, for which the epistemic object of choice was not the “service” but the “resource.” [97] Thus there is an epistemic disconnect between the science (still holistic) of naturalist philosophers and the science (technocratic) of officers produced by the School of Nancy, influenced by the requirements of colonial capitalism and managing a forest as if it were capital, a reservoir of primary ligneous material, and this disconnect was particularly evident in the lack of attention to vernacular knowledge.

65These conclusions can be extended to other French colonies. The work of Guéhi Jonas Ibo shows that no law established a forestry policy (more or less comparable to that of Indochina) in Ivory Coast until 1900, although destructive exploitation had been going on for twenty years; a forestry service was not created until 1912, and it would remain practically embryonic until 1929; and not until 1925 would the first forest reserves be created. The problem of nature preservation nonetheless seems to have arisen sooner than in Indochina, in response to a dwindling stock of big game animals. This is how the national parks – refuges for wild animal species – were set up beginning in 1925; and not until 1947 was the forest of Yapo in the circle of Abidjan declared a “botanical reserve.” [98]

66In Senegal, as Claire Bernard also observed, the first decades of colonization exhausted the tree populations of the Senegal River valley, during a very brief cycle of exploitation between 1825 and 1877; the first reserves still were not established until 1932. Bernard shows that the establishment of a reserve was rarely followed by any improvements (taking for example the reserve of Maka-Diama). She shows how the methodical cuts offered for sale by the forestry service failed to find a buyer in the absence of a regular professional tenant (as was the case at the reserve of the island of Richard-Todd) and how “managing the reserves with a view to methodical exploitation in order to put an end to unrestricted felling” became a race against time, one lost in advance by the forestry services having to meet the needs of local pastoral agriculture. [99] The same sequence of events could be observed in Algeria a few decades earlier, and in western Africa, equatorial Africa, and Madagascar a few decades later. In these colonies, as Anne Bergeret shows, initial periods of destruction were followed by restrictions on operators, limiting rights of usage; later, after the creation of forestry services and the constitution of a large reserve domain (on paper), partial de-classifications took place to make more room for agricultural development. In the end, unrestricted felling prevailed over methodical felling almost everywhere. [100]

67Ultimately, it seems to us that too many historians have hastily projected a reading of Richard Grove onto the industrial colonization undertakings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, forgetting the basic changes that had occurred in the way knowledge was produced and in particular overlooking the fact that the sciences of engineering that accompanied this industrial colonization systematically subordinated the ever-vague objectives of the global preservation of ecological environments inherited from a previous century to very precise objectives of developing colonial products. These hasty assumptions have often been based on noting the mere existence of forest administrations and policies for designating reserves. But these administrations and reserves clearly are not good indicators of the environmental concerns of colonial states. Neither the number nor the extent of forest reserves, and still less colonial discourse about forests, permit us to speak of the preservation of tropical forest environments.

68The great weakness of contemporary historiography in its necessary reexamination of colonial policies for the preservation of the environment is ultimately the fact that it does not produce enough work based on raw data, quantitative sets, backed up by micro-histories based on archival material that allows us to go beyond published colonial sources and to establish very accurately an inventory of tree populations designated as reserve areas, as compared to those that were not, the exact amount of wood removed under methodical felling in forests classified as reserves, as opposed to forests where unrestricted felling took place, etc. Careful study of the sources that permit such an examination proves that these reserves were in the best of cases production reserves that had little to do with the preservation of tropical forest environments, and in most cases merely screens concealing forest policies that simply favored free exploitation of the richest forested areas.

69It remains to explain why the theses of Richard Grove, operative in certain places and at certain times, were so quickly projected onto the entire group of European colonies worldwide. These theses enjoyed a very favorable reception in the academic world, particularly among historians of science, because they allowed us to re-evaluate the role of the colonial periphery in the production of globalized science and to restore the point of view of dominated peoples, the role of subalterns, indigenous speech, and the importance of non-institutional places in scientific production. Many international conferences in the 1990s re-evaluated the place of science in the European imperialism. These were followed by important publications. [101] The diffusionist thesis of George Basalla, who makes Europe the unique center of diffusion of a universal science to receptive peripheries has been called into question; [102] and the work of Lewis Pyenson, holding that the colonial experiments did not redesign the contents and contours of the exact sciences, has been discussed at length. [103] The works of Grove appeared in this context and to some extent encouraged the approach used in “colonial encounters studies” or “subaltern studies,” showing that colonial sciences often proceed from a rewriting of indigenous knowledge in the language of the colonizer [104] or that at the very least are the result of a broad mixing of ideas between western and non-western scientific traditions in the reconstruction of national identities during and after the colonial period. [105]

70The work of Grove and his colleagues thus is part of a double reversal of the center-periphery model (which is Euro-centric) that has been at work in the field of the history of colonial sciences: for the diffusionist thesis we substitute a localist thesis (colonial knowledge is locally produced knowledge, co-constructed by colonizers and the colonized); for the thesis of the minor role of the peripheries, there is substituted the thesis of a major role played by colonial experiences and local knowledge in the construction of a global science. The immense interest in this perspective has lain in considering colonial sciences, not sciences of the colonizer, serving only the imperial project, but science produced locally through the “hybridization” of more than one kind of knowledge (imported from different European schools and practices and from different local traditions). The stance taken by Grove in Green Imperialism is situated at a particular point within that movement; it is not so much an offshoot of Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, based on the power of western knowledge and the weakness of local knowledge, as it is a broadening of it, sensitive to the influences of other cultures and to the contribution of indigenous knowledge to western environmental thought. Richard Grove never hid the fact that environmental concerns could have been occasions to oppress indigenous populations, or that resistance to policies of conservation was a central element in the formation of many national independence movements. But he notes that the arguments in favor of the “ecological imperialism” thesis as opposed to the thesis of “green imperialism” are first valid only from 1850, thus recognizing the rupture that we have thrown into relief here, between conservationism and preservationism of the eighteenth century and the concepts of sustainable development that emerged from the industrial colonization of the late nineteenth century. [106]

71Refutation of the idea that the industrial colonization of the nineteenth century was interested in conserving and preserving ultimately appears to contradict, not the conclusions of Richard Grove for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but rather their extension to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.