ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the evidence to support the model as well as some of its limitations. It describes a heuristic model of the transition and divergence in forest use and wood sourcing evident in wood and forest social-ecological systems. Wood production is undergoing a fundamental shift analogous to the evolution of agriculture emerging from earlier methods of food sourcing from natural ecosystems. Economic and technical pressures lead to the application of increasingly agronomic models to tree growth, creating regimes of wood cultivation more akin to agriculture. Growing demand for non-wood values from forests act as a source of pressure in the stewardship forestry basin by also forcing innovation. Many national/colonial wood and forest social-ecological systems were subject to the importation of European ideas about forest management. Technology as applied to wood harvest, processing and cultivation is also influenced by technologies developed in other fields and other social-ecological systems.
