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In modern history, most countries have lost the vast majority of their forests. Japan is a well-known exception. In the 17th century, the Tokugawa regime outlawed logging on penalty of death. The ban was successfully implemented, partly because Tokugawa controlled an island nation effectively isolated from the rest of the world. Nowadays, almost 70% of Japan is covered by forests. A much less-known exception is France.

The First Industrial Revolution...
At the end of the 20th century, France possessed more forestlands than 800 years earlier, in the late 1200s. Perhaps surprisingly, the rapid disappearance of the medieval forests of France was not caused by fires or plant disease, but by a more familiar foe: rampant industrialization. In The Medieval Machine, a masterpiece of science writing, Jean Gimpel tells the fascinating tale of France’s rise to become the industrial powerhouse of Europe, long before the steam engine was commercialized in England.

Like other European countries, France gained access to the technology of the waterwheel via the Moorish kingdom of Granada, whose rulers had brought it from the Middle East. France was in a better position than other countries to reap the benefits of this new device, not only because it had an abundance of fast-flowing rivers where waterwheels could be put to good use, but also because it was already a major agricultural producer. A waterwheel was mainly used for the milling of flour—the staple of European households. In a later stage, it was also used extensively for sawmilling.

...And the First Case of Nationwide Environmental Mismanagement
And now we stumble on a sad paradox. On the positive side, the waterwheel was a clean technology that improved the lives of the entire population by lowering the cost of food (through flour milling) and the cost of construction (through sawmilling). Sadly, these two factors conspired to create rapid urbanization, which required large amounts of wood both for buildings and fuel, which in turn led to rapid deforestation.

Gimpel reports that nobles complained to King Philip IV about the loss of hunting grounds and the rising price of wood, but the king did not respond. We will never know the full impact of his environmental mismanagement because in 1348, the construction of new waterwheels suddenly came to a standstill for an altogether different reason. In that year, at the height of the world’s first industrial revolution, the Black Death reached France. The population suffered mightily, but the forests again began to flourish.

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