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It takes five hundred years from the time a national park is established to get to this point.
In contrast to this, there is much more light in managed forests, because trees are constantly being removed.
we use living things killed for our purposes.
The real question is whether we help ourselves only to what we need from the forest ecosystem, and—analogous to our treatment of animals—whether we spare the trees unnecessary suffering when we do this.
What organic farms are to agriculture, continuous cover forests with careful selective cutting are to silviculture. In these forests (called Plenterwälder in German), trees of different ages and sizes are mixed together so that tree children can grow up under their mothers. Occasionally, a tree is harvested with care and removed using horses. And so that old trees can fulfill their destinies, 5 to 10 percent of the area is completely protected.
Healing Harvest Forest Foundation
The constitution reads, in part, that “account [is] to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.”
Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouses for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species, which is the way modern forestry currently treats them. Completely the opposite, in fact.
Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination—in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!
We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system.
