Det svenska skogsbrukets försumpningsdebatt 1850-1930

Fantasin om totalt skydd i samhällskroppen

Abstract

This article examines the Swedish forest policy debate on swampification (försumpning) from the mid-19th century to the early 1930s, when concerns about declining forest productivity were framed as threats to the state body and 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 reveals how forest management was shaped by both anxieties about disorder and desires for a better future. It contributes to environmental history, history of science and ideas as well political theory by situating forest policy within wider discursive logics of modernity and transformation.