State conservation institutions emerged in Venice to police timber use and punish poachers.

Evidence

A conservation consciousness was first developed by the Venetian Arsenal beginning about 1470. New regulations provided that the Arsenal, rather than local officials, would determine the cutting of oaks. Private timber and shipping interests were excluded after 1520, although enforcement through penalties was fraught with bureaucratic difficulty. Regular surveys of oaks were instituted in 1568, followed by a policy of marking trees reserved for the Arsenal with its own seal, while those allocated to private shipbuilders were branded with a double seal. … In the region surrounding Montello, one of the more important forests, all furnaces of charcoal burners were destroyed, and peasants were prohibited from receiving alms from a monastery within its confines lest they poach wood during the visit. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 329

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the polyad’s law/institutions thread and to ch21 (commons enclosure) — here the state itself, not private capital, polices natural resources against commoners.
• SEED: Angle: conservationist restraint on nature and the exploitation ideology Merchant tracks coexisted from the start — states conserved resources for extraction, complicating any simple ‘restraint vs. exploitation’ binary.