Forests, Fuelwood, Pulpwood, and Lumber in Spain, 1860–2000: A Non-Declensionist Story

Abstract

This article analyzes wood consumption in Spain between 1860 and 2000, taking into account underlying forces and exploring the effects on Spanish forests. The use of wood as a source of power tended to decline in Spain after the dawn of its industrial development, but this was compensated for by the use of wood as a raw material for industrial and urban purposes. The transition between those two models of wood consumption was very slow. Until the 1960s, the consumption of firewood remained high due to the difficulties in extending modern energy networks, and this coincided with a slow but continuous growth of wood consumption as a raw material. From the 1960s on, firewood consumption collapsed, but the use of wood as a raw material grew rapidly. This article shows the links between those transformations and major changes in the economic, technological, social, and political evolution of the country. It also explores the effects of wood consumption on the Spanish forests, highlighting the complex relationship between those two variables. In the long run, the growth of wood consumption

The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long‐Term Material Flow Analysis (1860–2010)

“…As internal and external trade rose, a clear process of urbanization started to take place and crop monoculture area spread expanded (Carreras and Tafunell ; Infante‐Amate ). The introduction of FFs also changed the nature of forest management, more increasingly focused on the extraction of industrial timber (Iriarte‐Goñi ).…”

“…We have calculated the extraction of timber from the statistics for Spain available since the 1950s. For previous years, we have calculated extraction on the basis of estimates of consumption plus imports minus exports (Iriarte‐Goñi ). For firewood from forests, we have reconstructed the evolution of land use at the provincial level, applying firewood yield per hectare and considering geographical and time variations (Infante‐Amate et al ).…”

“…This fact reinforces the idea that, until the 1960s, Spain did not significantly join the globalization process and, in a way, lived on an “island of scarcity,” as Rolf P. Sieferle () called the preindustrial territories. However, this fact did not prevent significant qualitative transformations in agricultural societies up to the year 1960, for example, in the use of forestry resources (Iriarte‐Goñi ), the functionality of crops (Infante‐Amate ), the integration to global markets (Ayuda y Pinilla and Ayuda ), the population change (Collantes y Pinilla ) or the diet of the Spanish people (González de Molina et al ). Together, this is what we have called the weak transition.…”

Should Forest Transition Theory include effects on forest fires? The case of Spain in the second half of the twentieth century

“…They can be started by natural causes unrelated to human activity or caused by mere negligence or accidents. They can be due to economic and social causes related to land use, natural resource management, activities developed in the forests and the interests associated to all of them (Martínez-Fernandez et al, 2009 and2013). They can even be caused by problems that are not environmental, economic or social (for example, in the case of random fires started by arsonists suffering from a mental illness).…”

Environmental factors in trade during the great transformation: advancing the geographical coverage before 1950

“…A recurrent finding is that the industrial transition shifted the uses made of wood and biomass but did not result in decreased use in absolute terms. 88 This argues against the idea of absolute environmental savings from trade, and speaks in favour of another narrative in environmental history: the rebound effect, or take-back effect, introduced by Stanley Jevons in 1865 to explain why the use of coal would not diminish when more efficient machines were invented and introduced. 89 As the energy services become cheaper, they would be used more.…”