[S3 Discussion] Seeing Like a State, chapter 1

[tarngerine]

James C. Scott, analysis of the authoritarian approach to complex problems

https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf

[frnsys]

timber, and thus forests, were crucial to European states for all sorts of construction or energy (firewood); this one function of trees (and other plant life) came to blur out all others (including roles in ecosystems but also things like fruit, ritual/worship, etc):

In state "fiscal forestry," however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood.
...
The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably.

even the language used reflects this, categorizing the natural world according to economic value:

Thus, plants that are valued become "crops," the species that compete with them are stigmatized as "weeds," and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as "pests." Thus, trees that are valued become "timber," while species that compete with them become "trash" trees or "underbrush".

Scientific forestry was originally developed as part of a broader effort of "cameral science", "an effort to reduce the fiscal management of a kingdom to scientific principles that would allow systematic planning."

It involved systematically tallying trees and mathematically estimating their yields, generating an abstracted forest in the form of a spreadsheet. The forest was then grown and managed in such a way to facilitate this measuring and calculation process - they were planted in neat rows and underbrush was regularly cleared, making the forests easy to systematically count, chop down, etc. All together this is the process of making the forest "legible", i.e. applying a structure/regimentation to make it more amenable to these kinds of abstract representations, analyses, and experimentation, as well as stabilizing it to make it's output more reliable/predictable (well, not entirely).

People living nearby still tried to use these regimented forests as they used the forests prior (grazing animals, poaching firewood, etc) and natural forces such as blights, storms, insect populations, etc continued to affect them. So these forests were never entirely regimented.

Forests are typically composed of multiple species "but the commercial profits from the first rotation [of Norway spruce] were so stunning that there was little effort to return to mixed forests." So future plantings were monocrops, ruining these forests for the nearby people that still used them for grazing and so on.

At first it was a huge success, very high yields and so on, but "As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying 'outside the brackets' returned to haunt this technical vision."

Over time the negative effects showed - "the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped....This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent."

An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutriet uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora...was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
(the following paragraph goes into a lot more detail)

The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value.

Monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are. ... A diverse, complex forest, however...is far more resilient....Its very diversity and complexity help to inoculate it against devastation"

---

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its "raw" form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest--nor should they--in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives"

[michaelpace]

Seeing Like a State, chapter 1, James C. Scott, analysis of the authoritarian approach to complex problems
...
"I'm only realizing now that the Seeing Like a State reading should just be up to page 25, not the whole first chapter...I was mainly interested in the part on scientific forestry!"

---

narrowing of vision
    ...helps certain forms of knowledge and control, by bringing into focus
        certain limited aspects of an otherwise complex and unwieldy
        reality.
    combined with various other simplifications/abstractions/narrowings,
        "an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality
        is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic
        knowledge, control, and manipulation"

scientific forestry
    ...serves as a demonstration of the value of this narrowing of vision
    invented in late eighteenth-century prussia & saxony
    "used <in this paper> as a metaphor for the forms of knowledge
        and manipulation characteristic of powerful institutions with
        sharply defined interests, of which state bureaucracies and
        large commercial firms are per­ haps the outstanding examples"
    "Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation
        operate in forest management, we can then explore how the modern
        state applies a similar lens to urban planning, rural settlement,
        land administration, and agriculture"

history of forestry
    early modern european states viewed forests primarily through the fiscal
        lens of revenue needs. "Exaggerating only slightly, one might
        say that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through
        its fiscal lens into a single number: the revenue yield of the
        timber that might be extracted annually."
        ...
        trees could be interpreted so many ways, but "In state “fiscal
        forestry,”however, the actual tree with its vast number of
        possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a
        volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the
        forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism
        confined to the direct needs of the state."
        ...
        "From a naturalist's perspective, nearly everything was missing
        from the state's narrow frame of reference.", and "From an
        anthropologist's perspective, nearly everything touching on
        human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state's
        tunnel vision."
    "utilitarian discourse replaces the term "nature" with the term "natural
        resources"", "plants that are valued become "crops", the species
        that compete with them are stigmatized as "weeds" and the insects
        that ingest them are stignamtized as "pests"", etc...
        so... these things were happening with other fields, but forests
        in particular allowed their abstractions to shape our very
        conceptions of forests, the author claims.
    there used to be a primitive attempt at forestry; just split them into
        equal plots where the number of plots represented the number of
        years in the assumed growth cycle. then stagger the plots one
        year apart and harvest one plot at a time. this yielded poor
        harvests because of poor maps, uneven distribution of the most
        valuable large trees.
    at some point, some dude becmann precisely measured some forests by tagging
        them with color-coded nails by size. then some mathematicians
        derived a formula for amount of usable wood for a given size class.
        by reducing the forest into these numbers, the foreter had a view
        of the entire forest.
    over time, the forests began to be grown in very regimented ways
        too, in lines, with no underbrush. "Although the geometric, uniform
        forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction,
        it quickly became a powerful aesthetic as well"
    this cleanup also helped knowledge transfer as relatively unskilled ppl could
        follow written instructions to grow and maintain these plots. something
        like "beaurocracy and $$$ uniting"
    however, "The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants
        who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials,
        and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had af­ forded."
    "The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity
        machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry
        science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline
        that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was
        that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all
        variables except those bearing di­ rectly on the yield of the
        selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them.
        As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory,
        collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying
        “outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision."
    but... after one rotation of confiers, shit went bad. the nutrient cycle
        got outta wack, and "Waldsterben" (forest death) entered the german
        vocabulary.
    "Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way
        of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate
        term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits,
        its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast
        array of consequences it had res­ olutely bracketed came back
        to haunt it."
    "the consequences of not seeing the forest for the trees sooner or
        later became glaring. Many were directly traceable to the basic
        simplification imposed in the interest of ease of management
        and economic return: monoculture. Monocultures are, as a rule,
        more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease
        and weather than polycultures are"

social facts, raw and cooked
    "The administrators' forest cannot be the naturalists’forest.
        Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were
        known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated
        as to defy easy short­hand description. The intellectual filter
        necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions
        was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and
        revenue."
    "If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too uwieldy
        in its "raw” form for administrative manipulation, so
        too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with
        nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form"

summary
    abstract the natural world to understand it better and to teach it to others,
        and to profit from it
    (but, these abstractions will fail if they are not maintained over time, it
        seems)