PERCEPTIONS OF THE WOOD CRISIS AND THE NEED FOR FOREST PROTECTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSYLVANIA
PERCEPTIONS OF THE WOOD CRISIS AND THE NEED FOR FOREST PROTECTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSYLVANIA

Summary/Abstract: In the Eighteenth Century, Europe witnessed its first major wood crisis as pre-industrial societies overused wood as a source of energy and building material for both economic and household purposes. In Transylvania, the crisis was felt locally and was characterized by an acute shortage of wood in areas where localities did not have direct access to forests and where roads and transportation means did not make supply possible. Presently, there is a relatively small number of scholarly works on the wood crisis. It is worth mentioning Professor Johann Wolff's article on Transylvanian forestry, where he describes the forestry policy promoted by the Magistrat in Sebeș (Mühlbach in German, Szászsebes in Hungarian) in 1766. It presents not only the local civil servants' perception of the wood crisis, but also the concrete measures they took in order to solve it. Other scholars later wrote various histories of forests in Transylvania or in Romania, but none dealt in detail with this crisis. Over the last few years, several scholarly works published by Dorin Ioan Rus have focused on the wood crisis from the perspective of eighteenth-century scholars and peasants, in the wider context of forests and resources in eighteenthcentury Transylvania, and within the environmental history before 1918 in Romania's historical provinces.

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