This paper uses the lens of forest administration to examine the construction and application of modern environmental policy in late Ottoman society. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman administration hired French forest agents to promote sustainable forest exploitation in the Ottoman Empire. These consultants established the first Ottoman forest school, trained local agents, developed an Ottoman forest code, and contributed to the 1858 Land Law (Arazi Kanunnamesi). They also promoted French environmental perspectives, including a condemnation of mobile pastoralism. My paper first highlights the role of these and other European experts in shifting Ottoman environmental perspectives and state policies. It then considers the impact of nineteenth-century environmental administration on Ottoman subjects, contrasting the experience of sedentary peasant farmers with that of semi-nomadic tribes in the Anatolian countryside. Together, these developments reveal the complex nature of the onset of the Anthropocene in the Ottoman Empire. They demonstrate how, even as the Ottoman state ostensibly sought to reduce its ecological footprint, its policies impacted Ottoman inhabitants and their environment in new and dramatic ways. This study of nineteenth-century Ottoman environmental administration is based on Ottoman and French archival sources as well as scholarship in history and related fields. It will form a key chapter in my current book project, The Nature of Empire, a global history of the environmental dimensions of imperialism since 1800, under contract with Routledge Press. By chronicling environmental administration in a non-Western empire and by linking conservation ethics in the Ottoman Empire to those of Europe, it contributes to scholarship in world environmental history and in Middle Eastern / Ottoman history.