Vol. 80 No. 1 (2025)
Reviews

Thinking like a forest: Aldo Leopold, Dauerwald and the European silviculture in the XXI century

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  • Luigi Portoghesi
Luigi Portoghesi
Dipartimento per la Innovazione nei sistemi Biologici, Agroalimentari e Forestali (DIBAF) - Università della Tuscia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/ifm-1160

Published 2025-05-06

Keywords

  • Aldo Leopold,
  • Dauerwald,
  • close to nature silviculture,
  • systemic silviculture

How to Cite

Portoghesi, L. (2025). Thinking like a forest: Aldo Leopold, Dauerwald and the European silviculture in the XXI century. L’Italia Forestale E Montana, 80(1), 23–33. https://doi.org/10.36253/ifm-1160

Copyright (c) 2025 Luigi Portoghesi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Aldo Leopold is an American forester from the first half of the last century considered one of the fathers of environmental thought as he was among the first to propose extending the rights of human beings to the entire biotic community including plants, animals, soil and the whole earth. During a trip to Germany he sees in the Dauerwald, the type of forest management proposed to overcome the paradigm of the normal forest, the application of the concept of nature as an organism dear to him. In the post-war period, the principles of the Dauerwald were the basis of the Closer to Nature Forestry, today a key element of the EU forestry strategy, which looks at the forest as a complex system to which to assign only an instrumental value. Yet, already at the end of the 20th century, in Italy, Systemic foresilviculture was proposed which attributes an intrinsic value and rights to the forest with a vision of the relationship between man and nature common to that of Leopold.

PDF (Italiano)

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