Abstract This article examines the sylvan political ecology of late colonial New Spain and the colonial government's attempt to address deforestation through the Council on Forests, the first body in the kingdom's history dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. Drawing primarily from the corpus of documents produced by and remitted to the council, this article gives a trans-regional perspective on colonial forest use and argues that the Spanish crown's usurpation of indigenous communities’ eminent domain over forests was the first step in a process that over centuries progressively severed the cultural ties that bound communities and forests by converting common-pool resources into open-access commons. The catastrophic mortality of the Spanish invasion was the second step, which rendered conservation measures seemingly unnecessary among both woodcutters and officials. But it was during the eighteenth century that older Habsburg notions of protectionism intersected with economic and political changes associated with Bourbon rule to further compel this cultural severance. While previous works have studied the ecological impacts of mining, ranching, and flood control, this article moves beyond the study of a single industry to suggest some of the larger ecological consequences of Spanish colonialism.

中文翻译：

---

“森林不能成为公地”

摘要 本文考察了晚期殖民新西班牙的森林政治生态以及殖民政府试图通过森林委员会解决森林砍伐问题，森林委员会是王国历史上第一个致力于保护自然资源的机构。这篇文章主要从理事会制作和提交给理事会的文件库中汲取了一份关于殖民森林使用的跨区域视角，并认为西班牙王室对土著社区对森林的征用权的侵占是这一进程的第一步几个世纪以来，通过将公共池资源转变为开放式公共资源，逐渐切断了社区和森林之间的文化联系。西班牙入侵的灾难性死亡是第二步，这使得伐木工人和官员似乎都不需要采取保护措施。但正是在 18 世纪，哈布斯堡王朝的保护主义旧观念与与波旁王朝统治相关的经济和政治变革相交叉，进一步迫使这种文化隔离。虽然以前的工作研究了采矿、牧场和防洪的生态影响，但本文超越了对单一行业的研究，提出了西班牙殖民主义的一些更大的生态后果。