Countries like Indonesia and Brazil are often criticized for replacing vast areas of forest with agriculture, but if the land is suitable for agriculture, preferably sustainable agriculture (but see “Slash-and-burn shifting cultivation” in the book), then such conversion from forest to farms can benefit mankind. After all, some of the best farmlands in Europe, Java and elsewhere were once forested. As someone said, “If primitive man had strong conservationist tendencies, we would still be primitive”. To criticize developing and emerging countries for doing the land conversions that we did, is nothing but eco-imperialism (see that entry in the book, and also “Deforestation and reforestation”).

What is sad is when sites which are suitable for forest but not for agriculture are deforested, leaving an empty desolate landscape. I saw such derelict land in the State of Pará in north Brazil.

The angst which deforestation gives us may be due to the tree-dwelling stage which our prehistoric ancestors went through (see “Evolution of early man”). Also, the word “Paradise” (see entry) is derived from a Persian word meaning “park”, i.e. an area with trees. Perhaps our angst is related to the angst felt by hens when they leave the protection of their coop (see “Fowl”), fearing to be seen by — in their case — birds of prey. But we are more complicated than fowls, and although we feel angst about deforestation, we also fear the forest. See “Tolkien” and “Tree and forest spirits”.

Mikael Grut, 12.10.2014

Most paper is made from wood, and below emails there is often a “footer” asking us not to print out the message unless we really need to, in order not to waste wood. Of course any waste is reprehensible, but fortunately wood is not a finite resource like oil or coal. There are 4 billion hectares of forest in the world — see the entry “Global forest cover” in the book — and the total annual consumption of fuelwood and industrial roundwood is 3.5 billion cubic metres (m3), i.e. 3.5 / 4 = 0.9 m3/ha. The average annual wood yield from forests can be a lot higher than that. Even in the relatively cool climate of Europe it can exceed 30 m3/ha/year, and in high-rainfall subtropical areas it can be even higher, although the global average will of course be much lower than 30.

Mikael Grut, 10.10.2014

Feudalism is characterized by land-users leasing rather than owning land. It does not encourage tree-planting, because the leaser is not sure to benefit from the trees, and the owner fears that the trees may establish a claim on the land. In the 1990s the Scottish Law Commission recommended that “the existing feudal system [be] replaced by a system of absolute ownership”, and the Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act 2000 was passed. Since then about 100 hectares a year have been “decrofted” in Scotland, and crofters have become land owners. See the entry Feudalism and treeplanting in the book. Scotland seems to have been more active in this field than England or Wales.

The Magna Carta (see that entry) contained many forest clauses, but it mainly affected the relationship between the king and the barons. The Charter of the Forests (vide) in 1217 was much more people-oriented, and rolled back feudalism a little. It remained valid until 1971.

Mikael Grut, 7.10.2014

M. Merlo and L. Croitoru write in Valuing Mediterranean Forests (Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, 2005): “Between 1971 and 1999, the forest area [in Palestine] decreased by 23%. … The lost forest area can be attributed to [illegal] Israeli settlements (77%), military camps (2%) and by-pass roads (1%); … for example, 670,000 fruit and forestry trees were uprooted during 2001 by the Israelis”.

While trees are being uprooted in Palestine, the remnants of the villages left behind in Israel by the Palestinians expelled in the ethnic cleansing which began in 1948 have since then been pasted over by tree plantations financed by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to provide places where people can relax and have picnics on the weekends. You might call it “greenwashing”. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes in his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications Ltd, Oxford, 2006): “In this way, the JNF ‘ecologises’ the crimes of 1948 in order for Israel to tell one narrative and erase another”. A liberal Israeli organisation has recently put up plaques in some of those “nature reserves”, telling visitors what was there before 1948.

See the entry “Palestine” in the book.

Mikael Grut, 6.10.2014

Today most people live in towns and cities, even in the developing countries, and the trees they see are the urban trees in the avenues, the parks and the gardens. There are often more trees and biodiversity in the urban areas than in the surrounding countryside with its ploughed fields and its fertilisers and insecticides. See the entry “Urban forests, urban forest fires, and urban forestry” in the book.

Unfortunately, there is an obsession in urban areas about pruning trees and cutting shrubs into squares, spheres and triangles. Gone is the traditional “English garden” with its free-flowing forms and its ambition to allow trees and shrubs as far as possible to grow as nature wants.  As a result, our urban forest is sometimes as noisy as an industrial estate, what with all the chain saws and other mechanical aids. All this cutting is not only noisy, but also “uglifying”. Of course there are cases when trees need to be pruned, but our tree “surgeons” go far beyond that. We plant tree species which grow big, when we actually want small trees, and so we periodically massacre the big trees, instead of planting species which grow less tall. If we also planted more evergreen species, there would be less noise from leaf-blowing in the autumn. In 1998 the architect Lord Rogers sad at a conference: “We must … stop the terrible pruning, when specimens are mercilessly hacked to pieces supposedly to fit in with the local scene”; and the arboriculturist Mike Lawson said: “We are on totally the wrong track … All we keep talking about is chainsaws. We need to put them to one side. We need to be concerned about the decline of the whole urban forest and doing something about it”. See the entries “Pruning, topping, pollarding and mutilation of trees” and “Small trees”.

Mikael Grut, 5.10.2014

Today there is much concern about the increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) content of the atmosphere, because it increases the global temperature, which melts the ice sheets and makes the sea level rise. When a tree grows, it absorbs (captures, sequesters) CO2, a building block of wood. An unmanaged virgin forest does not absorb CO2, because growth is balanced by wood decay and its associated CO2 emission — see the entry “Carbon Dioxide (CO2), carbon credits, carbon sequestration” in the book. After all, if a virgin forest went on and on absorbing CO2, where would it end?

In managed and logged forests, on the other hand, there is no wood decay. It is true that the forest products derived from the logged forest do not last forever, and when they eventually decay they too emits CO2, but some of these products have a very long life; e.g. wood panelling, high quality paper, structural timber.

I should like to see some virgin forest preserved in every type of forest, for scientific and other reasons, and they do serve as carbon sinks, but from an active CO2 capture point of view they are no good.

Mikael Grut, 30.9.2014

Some people think of the forest as a finite resource, like a coal mine or an oil well. To them “logging” is almost a dirty word, so I prefer to use a term like “harvesting”, because nobody denies the farmer the right to harvest his crops.

However, the forest is not static, it is dynamic, it regrows. The forests of Sweden have been harvested for more than a thousand years, yet they get more and more productive — see the entry “Sweden” in the book. And much of the “pristine” forest along the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia was farmed in the past, and prairie before that — see “Shenandoah …” in the book.

Logging in a production forest produces wood, jobs, ground vegetation for the fauna, accessibility for walkers and fire fighters; it reduces the fire load, removes dead and dying trees, keeps the best trees so that they can regenerate the stand, and increases CO2 absorption. — I’ll write a blog entry on that soon.

So don’t knock logging!

Mikael Grut, 29.9.2014

Putting Back The Forest

One of the better defined tree species in terms of geographic distribution is that of Pinus caribaea var hondurensis that grows on the Mountain Pine Ridge in the Maya Mountains of Belize, formerly the British Honduras, bounded by Guatemala, Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.  At the beginning of this century the population of pines was decimated by the southern pine bark beetle which killed virtually every tree.  There weren’t any pine cones to produce seed and conditions were unfavourable for germination of the seed already on the ground.

Seed had been collected in the area by Sias Loock, a graduate of Stellenbosch University who was in the employ of the South African Department of Forestry during the years of WWII.  The early growth of the trees produced by the seed was so impressive that he returned to the area for a more extensive collection of seed and stands of the species were established on the coastal plain of Zululand, South Africa and also in Australia.

A team consisting of Brian Bredenkamp, Jolyon Hodgson and Riaan Webb, all foresters from South Africa, Kevin Darrow, an American colleague who worked in South Africa and Rene Gendre, a Canadian economist who saw to the financing of the project through the sale of carbon credits, built a nursery in Mountain Pine Ridge in 2002 and raised seedlings from seed imported from both South Africa and Australia.  The seedlings were planted by teams of Mayan Indians and the Pinus caribaea var hondurensis forest of Belize was thus re-established with trees having exactly the same genetic constitution as the best of those destroyed in the insect attack.

Posted by Professor Brian Bredenkamp, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa