POSTPONED INDEFINITELY: Ass. Prof. Liliana Doganova (The Center for the Sociology of Innovation): What is a forest worth? The future as a temporal and political domain

Drawing on a broader research project on the historical sociology of discounting, I will discuss different conceptions of the future that were brought to light by early attempts to determine the economic value of forests. Discounting is a technique that derives the value of an entity from the future flows of costs and revenues that it is likely to generate; it translates these future flows into present values by means of a number called the discount rate. Forests were one of the first non-financial assets to which this technique, which originated from finance and the idea that ¡°one euro tomorrow is worth less than one euro today¡±, was applied. In forestry, discounting came as an answer to a twofold question: how much is forest worth, and at what age should trees be felled? I will analyse the debates to which these two questions, and the answer that discounting provided to them, gave rise in France and Germany in the 18^th and the 19^th centuries. I will show that forests were the arena of clashes between different conceptions of the future and the actors who carried them: the short-term future of rural populations who used the wood and fruits that forests offered them readily; the long-term future of the state which saw forests as a source of fiscal revenues and high-value timber; and, somewhere in between, the future of private owners who managed forests as a form of capital whose returns were to be maximized. I will conclude on the need to analyze the future not only as a temporal domain that has certain specificities related to the degree to which it lends itself to knowing, but also as a political domain over which some actors have the capacity to act while others do not.