Lecture Abstract:

Much of our understanding of forestry outside of Europe and Japan considers forestry to be part of a logic of empire: the metropole’s efforts to rationalize, survey, record and above all simplify for the purposes of legibility and control of resources as part of “science” and “modernization”. While not denying that this impetus is an important part of the forestry in the 20 th century, I suggest that it is itself an oversimplification. Building on the talk I gave last year on tree planting campaigns in China, here I place the experience of post 1945 Taiwan in a wider regional context that includes Japan and (South) Korea under first the Japanese imperium and the American informal empire. By considering the ways in which Chinese foresters understood science and modernization, adapted a series of Japanese and American norms to the sub-tropical ecosystem of Taiwan, and worked within the
context of an authoritarian and militarized state, we come closer understanding how informal empire worked on the ground, and what kinds of historical legacies it has left in wooded landscape and natural resource use today.