A French colleague made a comment on our new book- Scotland 2070- Healthy, Wealthy and Wise. He pointed us to one of his political heroes, Napoleon III, and his leadership role in the economic stimulus in France during the middle of the 19th Century.
One of the chapters of our book describes the potential planting of 5 billion trees in the ‘wet desert’ of Scotland’s land. Our colleague reminded the authors that Napoleon III had triggered a massive clearing of the swamp in Les Landes in the 1850s. Les Landes, a wet desert of about 1 million hectares, nicknamed the French Sahara, was turned into one of the largest industrial forests of Europe. A very different type of ‘swamp clearing’ than Trump’s in Washington!
Before becoming the greatest forest created in France during the nineteenth century, this infertile land of sandy ground, truly merited the name of moor – la lande in French. “Crossing the moor was dreaded by pilgrims going to Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle…. they could find no bread, no meat, no fountains…… marshes with practically no paths, the pilgrims……up to the knees in the invading sea sand.” Because of the need for wood for fuel and construction, and an expansion in sheep grazing, the aboriginal forest had been depleted between the 15th and 18th centuries. A vast landscape of barren moors that became marshland in winter when the rivers flooded. The subsistence sheep herding and wetland grain-growing culture produced the iconic image of shepherds on stilts!
Napoleon III changed all that. He encouraged Henri Crouzet to clean up Les Landes. Crouzet and his relatives succeeded so well that the imperial land in the region became an experimental zone. They created numerous agricultural roads, established new cultivation and dried marshes. They inspired Napoleon III to pass a law in 1857, ordering all the communities to drain the land and plant maritime pines.
Bit by bit pines changed the landscape and reduced more than 100,000 hectares of moors. This made room for the young forest that triggered the economic turnaround. In the first part of the 20th century, extensive commercial development of wood, paper, and pine resin began to become an important part of the regional economy. Local people are still employed in forestry, sawmills, paper mills, joinery and furniture making, as well as products like cardboard and fibreboard.
Presidential decrees in that era were perhaps easier that our complex democratic processes in place now. But what is necessary now is a similar process to turn the wet desert that best describes 2-3 million hectares of Scotland’s landscape into thriving forestry. This time, the environmentalists will insist on minimising ‘pines in lines’, and creating a mixed forest, but the economy of Scotland is desperately in need of a boost from commercial forestry also.
Do we have a Napoleon III and Crouzet family equivalent amongst us, willing to stand up and declare a country-wide programme of tree growing in 2020 on an even greater scale than les Landes?