Forest Cover Changes and Landscape Sustainability – A Retrospective Study in Cultural Borderland, ed. by Jan Marek Matuszkiewicz, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw 2020, 397 pp

Szabó, Péter

English

Akademicka Platforma Czasopism

Changes in forest cover have long been as-sociated with the ebb and fl ow of Europe-an civilisation, as symbolised by landscape colonisation. Ever since Tacitus, woodland has been the barbarian antithesis of culture,and any advance in agricultural land clear-ance was for a long time seen as some-thing to be encouraged, especially in that hallmark of the High Middle Ages called the Great Clearances. More recently, ho-wever, deforestation has taken on a much more problematic image as essentially the symbol of the destruction of nature by hu-mans; and any number of empires and ci-vilisations from Easter Island to the Maya are claimed to have owed their downfall to cutting down their forests (and somehow preventing regeneration, one should add). Historical geographer Michael Williams’ vast survey Deforesting the Earth is a chro-nicle of this process on a planetary scale. On the fl ip side of the coin, reforestation is now seen as a universal means to mitigate the eff ects of global warming, including far-fetched plans, such as the Great Green Wall in the Sahel.Th ere are many ways to study forest cover change, including palaeoecological sources and methods (e.g. pollen analysis or anthracology) as well as historical ones. Th e collection of essays under review here, entitled Forest Cover Changes and Land-scape Sustainability – A Retrospective Stu-dy in Cultural Borderland, has chosen the second option and the well-trodden path of historical GIS. Under the editorship of Jan Marek Matuszkiewicz, this book was written by ten authors joining forces in various combinations for the individu-al chapters, of which there are fourteen. Published by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the book appears to be the translation of an earlier Polish version, even though the exact relationship be tween the two works is not specifi ed in detail. In any case, with the Polish text already available for local audiences, the English version has been clearly intended for an international readership. It is, the-refore, with this in mind that I have read through the 396 pages of the volume. At this point, I am afraid, I need to mention the quality of the English in the book, which varies between the individual chap-ters but in general leaves a lot to be desired, starting with, alas, the very title.After the rather cursory Introduction, which says little about why the book was written or what the reader may expect from it, Chapter One explains the physi-cal and geographical characteristics of the study area, which includes some 2800 km2 in what used to be the Polish-Prussian borderland. Chapter Two introduces in great detail the historical and recent maps available for the area and the process of selecting those suitable for the target analyses. Th is being a border area with Forest Cover Changes and Landscape Sustainability – A Retrospective Study in Cultural Borderland, ed. by Jan Marek Matuszkiewicz, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw 2020, 397 pp.Recenzje i omówieniaStudia Geohistorica • Nr 09. 2021 229somewhat diff erent mapping traditions on either side of the boundary, locating suf-fi ciently homogenous datasets was a great challenge, and its author (Jacek Wolski) must be congratulated on his remarkable eff ort. Th e generally positive experience is somewhat spoilt only by tell-tale spel-ling errors in some of the original Ger-man expressions (’nafse’ instead of ’nasse’, ’hultung’ instead of ’huttung’). Chapter Th ree informs the reader how the maps were processed in GIS. Chapter Four brings in the concept of potential natural vegetation, arguably the most infl uential product of twentieth-century phytoso-ciology (a particularly European way of plant community description). Potential natural vegetation connects the geological and environmental characteristics of a site with what is known about plant commu-nity assembly and succession to create an essentially static image of vegetation cover that would develop if people somehow dis-appeared overnight. Potential vegetation maps have been produced in many regions and resolutions, and a very detailed map was created for the present volume with exhaustive supporting information even though I could not interpret Table 4.3 in its current form. Chapter Five introduces the results on forest cover change obtained from data described in Chapters Two and Th ree. As basically expected, deforestation peaked in the late nineteenth century and was followed by aff orestation, especially in the early years of the communist regime, similarly to other countries in the region. Chapter Six neatly connects the previous two chapters to examine which habitat types changed the most. Already this chap-ter introduces the concept of ‘sustainable landscape’, which will assume high im-portance in later chapters. Chapter Seven, one of the longest in the book, analyses landscape changes in an original, if some-what technical manner, focusing on va-rious types of decrement and increment. Chapter Eight is a traditional narrative history of the area and, as such, provi-des welcome background information to the study site. Chapters Nine and Ten deal with wild animals in the region and were, for the present reviewer, among the most interesting in the entire book. Re-constructing animal pressure for periods before modern statistical surveys is a ma-jor challenge and the general conclusion of the chapter that current high animal numbers are historically unique is very si-gnifi cant. Chapter Eleven analyses forest landscape development from the perspec-tive of ecological services, a concept that gained high political importance especially through the Millennium Ecosystem Asses-sment of 2005. Chapters Twelve and Th ir-teen continue with sustainability and use select rules from the Rio Declaration, human ecology, and Polish legislation to evaluate much of the data described in previous chapters in a complex manner. Chapter Fourteen rounds up the book with a short evaluation of landscape sus-tainability using less formalised methods inspired by the NATURA 2000 system. Th ere is clearly a huge amount of work behind this volume. Th e combination of various disciplines from cartography to history to ecosystem service analysis and the meticulous and time-consuming pro-cessing of the sources eff ectively make this bit of Poland one of the best-studied areas in the whole of Europe, off ering many opportunities for thought-provoking com-parisons. In this context, I think it is a pity that the authors did not put more emphasis on presenting their fi ndings in an interna-tional context. Th ere are exceptions (such as Chapter Eleven by Andrzej Aff ek), but I generally feel that much of the material was the English version of  texts prepared for a Polish audience. Th is naturally has its own niche in scholarship but appears to be somewhat of a missed opportunity for the present volume. To name but a few topics: ‘forest transition’ is a central theme in international research describing the Recenzje i omówieniaStudia Geohistorica • Nr 09. 2021230change from deforestation to net forest area growth that happened from the 19th cen-tury onwards practically everywhere in the global north. Clearly, the Masuria--Kurpie case forms parts of this global trend, and I would have very much wel-comed an interpretation of the results in this context. Potential natural vegetation is a tried-and-tested system; however, there have recently been many heated debates around the concept (especially ‘climax’ vegetation), its historical contingency as well as its potential uses and misuses – it would have been again very instructive to read how the results of the present volu-me may contribute to these discussions. Th e term ‘forest’ is far more problematic than the present volume suggests, to bring another example. No ink has been spared in recent literature on making a diff erence between contemporary landscapes, where the forest–non-forest boundary is sharp and preindustrial landscapes, where it was often diffi  cult to tell where one land co-ver ended and another one started. Th is – combined with coeval mapping techni-ques – naturally aff ects any results gained from historical maps. Without relativizing the volume’s conclusions, it would have been useful to see these matters discussed in the same amount of detail (especially regarding interpretation) as was devoted to the ‘accuracy’ of various maps.Another important issue fo r a volume of this type is whether or not it works as a whole. Here I think the authors (and especially the main editor) did an admi-rable job. Inevitably there are unnecessary repetitions (the sets of maps used to detect forest cover changes are described several times, both Chapters Eleven and Twelve start off  by referring to the Brundtland Commission, etc.), but the book reads well as a whole: the data-oriented chapters at the beginning merge seamlessly into the more analytical ones at the end. Once againfocusing on an international audience, I think it would have been better to pla-ce the historical chapter somewhere at the beginning because non-Polish readers will fi nd the intricacies of Polish history dif-fi cult to comprehend, and the historical outline presented in Chapter Eight would have made understanding the rest of the volume much easier. At the same time, many of the chapters can also be read as stand-alone essays as well, undoubtedly a useful feature for a volume of this size and complexity that few will read from cover to cover. In general, I do recommend the volume for all those interested in his-torical geography, forest change and sus-tainability studies. Making the results of this signifi cant eff ort  by a large group of Polish scholars available in English is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the historical relationships between forests and human societies. Péter Szabó(Brno)Recenzje i omówieniaStudia Geohistorica • Nr 09. 2021 231

Forest Cover Changes and Landscape Sustainability – A Retrospective Study in Cultural Borderland, ed. by Jan Marek Matuszkiewicz, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw 2020, 397 pp.

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Forest Cover Changes and Landscape Sustainability – A Retrospective Study in Cultural Borderland, ed. by Jan Marek Matuszkiewicz, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organisation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw 2020, 397 pp.

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