Roots of Sustainability in the Iberian Empires: Shipbuilding and Forestry, 14th – 19th Centuries

Three main themes are discussed in depth here: firstly, the roots of current conservationism in the Iberian Peninsula; the evolution of the forest policies set in motion at the local, regional and national levels to meet the demand for wood and timber; and the long-standing impact of naval empirical forestry on the conservation and transformation of the forest landscape. Therefore, the book attempts, on the one hand, to unravel the forest policies and empirical forestry implemented in the Iberian Peninsula as the roots or origins of what we refer to nowadays as “sustainability”, to assess the contribution of imperial forestry to landscape planning and the conservation of forest resources, on the other, and, finally, to break away from the prevailing theological narrative that shipbuilding was the main agent of forest destruction in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula, for which both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be conducted.