Fantasin om totalt skydd av samhällskroppen

Det svenska skogsbrukets försumpningsdebatt, 1900–1930

Abstract

This article examines the Swedish forestry debate on swampification (försumpning) from the turn of the 20th century to the early 1930s, when concerns about declining forest productivity were framed as threats to the state body and the future. Using a biopolitical perspective, it shows how the debate reflected broader societal discourses on risk, degeneration, and national improvement. Imagined dangers and protective measures were part of the same rationality that shaped welfare, hygiene, and population governance. The forest’s swampification was cast as a degenerative process requiring state-led intervention, yet this protection also concealed internal contradictions. Alongside fears of decay, the debate was driven by science and a modernizing optimism that emphasized control, regeneration, and progress. Drawing on the concepts of immunization and fantasy, the article analyzes historical scientific reports, media sources and opinion pieces. The results illustrate how forest management was shaped both by anxieties about disorder and by desires for a better future. This article situates a specific forestry debate within the discursive logics of modernity and societal transformation and thereby connects environmental history, the history of science and ideas, and political theory.