Abstract
Two pine forests, one in France, the other in the United States, gave birth to two distinctive naval stories industries. Faced with economic difficulties, these industries resorted to science to improve the extraction methods and the quality of their final products. As a consequence, a new discipline, naval stores chemistry, developed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the service of two competing industries. A new set of complex knowledge circulation patterns also emerged between scientists in both countries as they sought to protect their economic environment, and at the same time to reform the increasingly obsolete industries that had given rise to their field. Paradoxically, what was initially considered a disadvantage of the American industry became the most important factor in the development of naval stores chemistry in the United States after World War II, thus exemplifying the “messiness” of the relations between science and environmental policy.
