Michael Becker

Sawmill

Hot coffee spills from the plastic lid of my cup, dripping over the Greggs logo as the bus judders out of town and through the snow flecked hills and deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. We stumble, bleary, into the visitor centre and are battered by the corporate yes-man with percentages and other statistical triumphs. Donning hi-vis and hardhats we are wizzed round the mill. Deafening sawblades roar mutely through earguards as timber, bark and sawdust fly all around us. But before long we are herded into the bus again.

James Jones Sawmill, Lockerbie

What is the value of a tree? Of a forest? Through these two sites we began to question how might trees and forests be valued. Lockerbie presents us with one kind of value, that of timber - of processed material. When the Forestry Commission (FC) was created in 1919, this was its purpose: to secure Britain’s supply of timber as a standing timber reserve. Forests were a strategic national security asset spurred on by the development of the German U-Boat which blockaded Britain from receiving timber from its overseas colonies.

With the arrival of the Atom Bomb in the late 1940s, the British government no longer saw a use in cultivating Britain’s forests towards a future war effort. As conventional warfare was replaced with atomic deterrence, the forestry commission repositioned itself as a kind of nationalised industry, however struggled to justify itself due to its untenably low economic returns. Following the war, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government of 1957 was concerned with rural depopulation and this political objective continued to prop up the forestry commission despite its fading strategic importance. 

Forest as Weapon

With the arrival of the Atom Bomb in the late 1940s, the British government no longer saw a use in cultivating Britain’s forests towards a future war effort. As conventional warfare was replaced with atomic deterrence, the forestry commission repositioned itself as a kind of nationalised industry, however struggled to justify itself due to its untenably low economic returns.  Following the war, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government of 1957 was concerned with rural depopulation and this political objective continued to prop up the forestry commission despite its fading strategic importance. 

The Treasury applies an economic practice called ‘discounting’ in its management of the national budget. ‘Discounting’ is a measure of how much something is worth now rather than, say, in a years time. When it is applied to forestry, the economics always tell us to cut all our trees down right now and never plant them back. With no economic or military incentive, forestry has always been a political project. By the 1970s, the FC was in trouble again and there was little to justify the poor economic performance of British timber. In light of the growing environmental movement of the time, the commission began to rebrand itself as a public service rather than nationalised industry. By starting to include its non-timber outputs, the FC began to value forests by something other than as a supply of timber to be grown and harvested. The FC now includes an ever expanding remit of values for forests including mental and physical health, flood protection, social cohesion, cultural and recreational space, education, carbon sequestration and so on. 

Cardrona Forest

Cardrona forest represents this new idea of forests, once a farm for timber now for dog walkers and cyclists, squirrels and snails. Modern forests and forestry are foremost a political project rather than an environmental or cultural one.  Our current socio-political climate prohibits many alternative readings of forests. Through our investigation of the two sites, Lockerbie and Cardrona, a kind of dialectic emerges, where the FC’s two ideas of forest valuation begin to scrape up against one another. 

Modern forestry has its roots in the colonial exploits of the Empire and the Scottish enlightenment. These happened in parallel and are inextricably bound up within one another. 

1827 - David Douglas, sent by the Royal Horticultural Society to the Pacific Northwest, returns, among many others, with the eponymously named Douglas Fir and the Sitka Spruce. These species (along with the Scots Pine) form the basis of most timber production in 20th & 21st Century Britain. 

1854 - the Scottish Arboricultural Society is established, creating the field of scientific forestry. 

1864 - Indian Forestry Service is created to manage the empire’s forests, this is the seed of the modern Forestry Commission.

1884 - The first international Forestry Exhibition is held in Edinburgh.

1889 - A lectureship in forestry is created at the University of Edinburgh.

1919 - Forestry Commission is established. 

How are Scotland’s forest’s planted? 

Cardrona plays host to a jumble of strategies: densly packed plantation forests to thin arrays of Larch with a thick undergrowth. This thick undergrowth is vital to the health of the forest. Its where all the insects and bacteria break up and churn the soil, where new saplings sprout and reach for sunlight.

Site

Our drawings become a kind of value judgement, what to draw? What not to draw? Allowing us to not only direct our attention towards some aspect that interests us but to observe it closely and say something about that thing. At best something which cannot be communicated through words or other media. Having developed this mode of research and representation (which can now be considered as, more or less, one and the same). We turned our attention to a third and final site - a damp and mossy backlot in Leith. This is to be the site of our architectural ‘intervention’. However, so as not to forget the lessons we learnt in Lockerbie, we repeat the themes and language of our research again.

A Habit of Building

‘The true meaning of this unceasing metamorphosis is therefore this: quantities are continually being raised to the level of qualities, and since this is the level of consciousness, this last transformation can only take place in the mind of man.’ 

Das Bildnerische Denken (The Thinking Eye), Paul Klee pg 15.