Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 16

Humans’ earliest sources of energy were renewable. The wind filled sails, sending adventurers off in search of raw materials or their substitute, gold. Commodities floated downstream, and animals hauled goods upstream. Always on the front line of technology, shipbuilding sent people back to the forests. Ships required timber of the highest quality and of various sorts: straight oak for the planking, crooked oak for the ribs, pine for the masts, beech and spruce for the decks. And ships needed other products from the northern lands – tar for caulking the hull planks, hemp for ropes and linen for sails. But, in Southern Europe, forests remained only in the most inaccessible areas, on islands or on mountainsides. Wars were fought over these vital supplies of timber, and they were turned into colonies – Cyprus and Sicily, Istria and Macedonia, and later the Tyrol and Galicia. Sawmills and quays had to be constructed at river estuaries. All this activity depended on the population living on the river banks and sea coasts. But the imperial exploitation of the forests came into conflict with the native ways of using them and led to the policing of increasingly distant and inhospitable lands.

The Roman trireme had a wooden hull and deck, about 200 oars and two masts. Building such ships required thousands of trees of rare species. The Vikings’ ships were simpler and lighter, but more seaworthy thanks to their use of tar. This sticky, impermeable substance, produced by the dry distilling of pine or birch wood, protected the craft from leaks and rotting. The Vikings dug a big clay pit, filled it with chunks of pine, covered them with turf, and set them alight. After several hours, tar trickled down out of an opening at the bottom of the pit. The sailors of antiquity also knew the recipe for making tar, but it required pine trees in quantities which they could hardly obtain. The Vikings produced tar on an industrial scale, 300 litres at one go; two such distillations would produce enough tar to caulk one craft. The sails, which the Vikings made out of wool, were also soaked in tar – they turned black. It is only thanks to the archaeologists who found these tar pits that we understand why the Vikings were better seafarers than the Romans or the Phoenicians.⁸

Republics and empires alike were preoccupied by the shortage of oak for hulls, beech for decks and pine for masts. It took up to 2,000 oak trunks, preferably from hundred-year-old trees, to build one large warship; but oaks grow in rich soil suitable for agriculture, and they were always in short supply. The Venetians invested in planting and protecting forests along the Adriatic.⁹ Powerful religious orders – Benedictines in the Alps, the Teutonic order on the Baltic – cleared forests at the European frontier, pushing it to the north and the east. Combining wood and metal, new implements – axes, yokes, wheels and ploughs – increased the productivity of the cleared land. Later, wooden palisades and stockades – no match for firearms – were replaced by clay and stone. But there was nothing to replace the floating fortresses built from choice timber.

The treeless Dutch Republic imported timber from Norway and the Baltic lands, floated rafts down the Rhine from the German princely states, and procured rare species from Java. In England, Queen Elizabeth I banned her own subjects from felling trees within 14 miles of any coast or river bank; Peter the Great followed suit in Russia with similar decrees. Portugal imported timber from Brazil, Spain from southern Italy and, at the time of the Armada, the Baltics. As was often the case with raw matter, the cost of transportation exceeded the production cost. The price of timber delivered to an English port was twenty times higher than its purchase price in the Baltic forests. In the eighteenth century, it took 4,000 oak trunks, or 40 hectares of mature forest, to build a British battleship. Contrary to the ideas of mercantilism, it turned out that building ships in the colonies was cheaper than transporting timber across the ocean. Almost half the Portuguese fleet was built in Brazil, a third of the Spanish fleet in Cuba, and much of the British fleet in India.¹⁰

Firearms intensified the great powers’ dependence on their forests. Making guns and gunpowder required an enormous supply of firewood. The smelting of a ton of iron took 50 cubic metres of firewood, or a year’s growth of 10 hectares of forest, and then the forging process needed charcoal. Deforestation was one of the reasons for the decline of Venice and then of the Ottoman Empire. The abundance of firewood was one of the reasons for the success of metallurgy in Sweden and Russia. The pan-European shift from the Mediterranean to the North Sea followed the exhaustion of the southern forests.