Coppicing Part 1

The History and Sustainability of Coppicing 

Part 1 of 4: Deforestation 

Since before the development of agriculture, humans' presence in an area could periodically result in deforestation. This forest removal could be temporary, as when primitive hunters intentionally used wildfires to drive game or to clear an area to create meadows for game. Usually, in such cases, the forests grew back as soon as the nomadic humans moved on. These brief deforestation events did little permanent harm, since the tree roots and seeds remained in the soil and the woods could recover quickly.

When humans did not move away quickly, however, a more permanent form of deforestation appeared. The constant human demand for wood (for fuel, for construction, for tool handles and fences and all other daily infrastructure) could lead to the total destruction of forests, as mature trees were cut down without adequate time left for the regrowth of saplings to replace them. A standard oak tree can take 50 years or more to reach maturity, and only provide enough wood to last a single winter of hearth fire burning. Furthermore, that same tree can only provide a few wide planks, for domestic construction or ship-building. Without careful management, it does not take long for a small community to entirely use up a forest's worth of timber. The young saplings that grew to replace the older trees were also harvested, and any seeds left in the soil, when they sprouted new saplings, were likewise cut, as humans desperate for fuel took what they could get. Ultimately, there would be no tree, no root, and no seed left to regrow the forest.

Deforestation on this scale occurred with the advent of the earliest human civilizations. In Syria, Lebanon and Mesopotamia, the vast cedar forests disappeared to furnish palisades, palaces and fuel. The Epic of Gilgamesh even includes timber harvesting, for building the city doors, as a major plot point that brings Gilgamesh into conflict with Humbaba (in Tablet 5), who guards the Cedar Forest. The Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc, all harvested this resource freely until the majority of the forest disappeared. Today, only small remnants of the Lebanon cedar tree species survive, protected in pockets by the inaccessibility of their mountainous habitat.

The Romans initially understood that forests were a valuable, fragile resource, and they invented a triad system, “sylva-saltus-ager” (forest-pasture-field) that attempted to make the best use of wood crops (1). Unfortunately, the Roman needs for fuel and building materials, and demand for open pasture land, drove excesses in harvesting, and the Italian peninsula was largely deforested by the first century BCE (2). This deforestation increased erosion and drainage problems, resulting in tremendous soil loss and creating mosquito-infested swamps (with resultant increases in malaria). Next, the Romans turned to their conquered colonies for fuel; “thus large areas of forest in North Africa and Spain were cleared... when Rome ran short of timber in Italy, it imported timber from Spain, North Africa, Gaul and Britain” (2).

As a sidenote—it is easy to judge the Romans for causing such vast deforestation when they knew better. With the clarity of hindsight, it is tempting to say that they should have guarded and used their resources more sparingly. However, a modern example may help provide a more humane perspective on their situation. In large areas of modern Africa, desertification spreads rapidly as the locals continuously harvest the trees and over-graze their pastures. Humanitarian aid representatives frequently urge these locals not to cut the trees, and to keep fewer animals, trying to get them to protect these dwindling resources. However, telling a mother to chose the life of a tree sapling over the need to boil water, so that her children do not die of dysentery, is never successful. Urging a starving community to keep the animals off the grass, when those animals represent food for their empty bellies, is like asking them to kill themselves—slowly, and painfully. Even when the aid workers offer to provide limited quantities of food and fuel, a community may still desire independence and a way to support themselves and their families in the way that they have always done. Thus, many tree-planting and education campaigns to these areas have simply ended with the newly planted trees being cut down for fuel. Desertification continues, because the lives of hungry children matter more than the lives of grass roots. So far, no one has found a solution for protecting resources when a local population is in crisis mode and desperate for those resources. The Romans may have started with grand ideals, understanding the need to provide for posterity, but the more immediate demands of the present needs eventually overwhelmed these future-oriented plans.

Not all ancient cultures fell into this crisis-mode trap, however. At some point around 6,000 years ago (if not earlier), people in northern Europe began to realize that they could protect their forest resources, and save themselves much labor, if they cultivated particular trees with the deliberate intent to harvest them repeatedly at specified intervals—every 10 years, for example. By managing a large quantity of these cyclically harvested trees, called coppices, the community could provide a constant supply of wood without harming the forest. They found that the trees, thus managed, actually grew back faster, and provided greater habitat for hunting game, while also providing the nut harvest of a mature forest. The wood was also straighter and denser, and easier to harvest with primitive tools. Since these methods were so blatantly superior, coppicing continued over millennia and, in some cases, is still in use today.

The earliest definite evidence of coppicing comes from England, where a wooden track (an elevated walkway for crossing a bog) shows the use of straight, long, branchless poles of even diameters. This track, built across the Somerset Levels in 3,807 BCE, was only in use for about a decade before the rising water table submerged and preserved it. Oliver Rackham has pointed out that the poles of this track display the characteristic “butt” sections where the coppiced poles grew from their stools, confirming that these were cut from deliberately cultivated coppices (3). This suggests many years of thoughtful management, creating rotational harvest plans that allowed for a good crop of poles every year, even though each pole took many years to grow to harvesting diameter.

Understanding of the principles of coppicing may have begun while humans were still nomadic hunter-gatherers. Someone must have observed that deciduous hardwoods, if they were cut down in the winter, did not die, but would regrow from their stumps, straighter and faster than the saplings around them. Perhaps they returned to a winter camp where they had hunted a few year prior, and noticed that the stumps of the trees they had cut down last time had all put out new growth. Perhaps they cut these new trunks, since they were convenient and just the right size for cutting easily with a stone axe. Returning a few winters later, perhaps they again found that the old stumps had grown new shoots that were just the right size for harvesting again this winter—and so on, down the years. This is all that would be required to begin accidentally coppicing a grove. If the tribe that made such an observation began to intentionally locate their winter camp sites where the coppices would be at the right age for easy harvest, and to maintain many such sites, they would be practicing the most basic form of silviculture; one that would fit well with their nomadic lifestyles, and could easily predate pastoral agriculture and domestication by millennia. Unfortunately, such practices leave no archaeological evidence until the development of more permanent dwellings and infrastructure (crannogs, causeways, tracks, houses, etc). Thus, until more evidence comes to light, this must remain in the realm of speculation.

What is certain is that by the Bronze Age, stable communities practicing agriculture in northern Europe were also practicing coppicing. This fed well into the invention of charcoal production, a necessary technology for the smelting of iron and the transition into the Iron Age. The use of coppiced woodlots for the cyclic production of bulk charcoal provides much of the evidence in archaeology for prehistoric coppicing.

To read about the invention of charcoal, see The History of Charcoal. To continue reading about coppicing, proceed to the next blog post, Coppicing Part 2.

Sources:

1) Messier, Christian, K Puettmann, & Dave Coates. “Managing Forests as Complex Adaptive Systems: Building Resilience to the Challenge of Global Change.” Routledge, 2013. Page 217.

2) Sands, Roger. “Forestry in a Global Context.” CABI, 2013. Page 21

3) Rackham, Oliver. Woodlands International Edition. William Collins, 2015.