Introduction – The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Abstract

It is impossible to look objectively at European society’s relationship to the forest without examining the history of ideas which have influenced our perception of nature, landscape and the forest. Man employed axe and fire as his principal agents of disturbance in forested landscapes. He used fire in three phases; as hunter-gatherer, as agriculturalist and ultimately as industrialist. Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo painted a conjunction of seminal themes regarding anthropogenic landscape change by juxtaposing wild animals, man and domesticated animals against the backdrop of a forest fire. Societal development is also fundamentally linked to the axe, made continuously for 1.5 million years it is iconic, symbolic and ubiquitous. Over-exploitation of the forest for iron-making coupled with dramatic landscape change and the growth of science with rationalism caused a Romantic backlash against industrial culture. The gaze of philosophers, writers and artists focused back onto society’s relationship with nature. As a result the forest is not simply a landscape. It is an intellectual interface between Romantic and scientific philosophies and contemporary perceptions of the forest have been moulded by ideas echoing through the centuries from the likes of Herder and Nietzsche.