Forest is the most important ecosystem on Earth. Forests provide fuel and oxygen, provide a uniform climate and soil moisture, and simply provide basic survival for hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, the forest as a resource is restored quickly enough for its renewal to be noticeable during the lifetime of one generation.
Such speed plays a cruel joke with the forests from time to time. People begin to think that there will be enough forest for their century, and, rolling up their sleeves, they take up the felling. Almost all countries that call themselves civilized have gone through periods of almost universal deforestation. First, forests were destroyed for food - the population grew and needed additional arable land. Then hunger was replaced by the pursuit of cash, and here the forests were not at all good. In Europe, America and Russia, millions of hectares of forest were planted at the root. They began to think about their restoration, and even then extremely hypocritically, only in the twentieth century, when logging moved to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Tellingly, people have found many ways to quickly make a profit from the forest, sometimes without even touching the ax, but they did not bother to invent the same quick way to compensate for the damage caused.
1. A lot of modern concepts about the history of medieval Europe, such as “innate diligence”, “frugality bordering on stinginess”, “following the biblical commandments”, and “Protestant ethics”, can be illustrated in two words: “slipway law”. Moreover, which is typical for the classical substitution of concepts, in this combination there was no question of stocks (structures for the construction of ships), or of law in the meaning of “law, justice”. German cities located on rivers convenient for timber transportation declared “slipway rights”. The timber cut down in the Germanic principalities and duchies was floated to the Netherlands. There he was consumed simply in indescribable quantities - the fleet, dams, housing construction ... However, the rafting went through the cities, which simply prohibited through rafting - they had a “slipway law”. The industrious townspeople of Mannheim, Mainz, Koblenz and a dozen other German cities were simply forced to buy timber at a cheap price from loggers and resell it to clients who came from the lower reaches of the Rhine and other rivers, without banging a finger. Isn't that where the expression “sit on the streams” came from? At the same time, city dwellers did not forget to take tax from the rafts for maintaining the river path in good condition - after all, if it were not for them, the river path to the Netherlands would have fallen into disrepair. It is not hard to guess that all the way from the headwaters of the Rhine to the North Sea was done by one and the same composition of raftsmen, in whose pockets mere pennies settled. But the Baroque Cathedral of Mannheim, built with money from this racketeering, is considered the largest and most beautiful in Central Europe. And the craft itself is very simply described in Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale "Frozen": the Black Forest has been rafting wood to the Netherlands all their lives, and they earn their hard work just for a piece of bread, opening their mouths at the sight of beautiful coastal cities.
2. For a very long time in Russia, forests were treated as something self-evident, what was, is and will be. No wonder - with a small population, the forest spaces seemed really a separate universe, which a person cannot influence in a noticeable way. The first mention of the forest as property dates back to the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (mid-17th century). In his Cathedral Code, forests are mentioned quite often, but extremely vague. Forests were divided into categories - patrimonial, local, reserved, etc., however, no clear boundaries were established for forests of various uses, nor punishments for the illegal use of forests (excluding products like honey or extracted animals). Of course, this did not apply to slaves, who were responsible for illegal felling in accordance with the cruelty of the boyar or patrimony who caught them.
3. The views of Europeans on the forest are fully reflected in the famous book of the German Hansajorg Küster “History of the Forest. View from Germany ”. In this fairly complete, referenced work, the history of the European forest in its direct meaning ends around the 18th century with stories of rulers cutting down forests for enrichment, leaving peasants with branches to feed their livestock and turf to insulate their homes. In place of forests, ominous wastelands formed - gigantic tracts of land covered with underbrush from stumps. Regretting the disappeared forests, Kuester emphasizes that the aristocrats eventually came to their senses and planted parks with many kilometers of straight paths. It is these parks that are called forests in today's Europe.
4. Russia has the largest forest area in the world, with an area of 8.15 million square kilometers. This figure is too large to be estimated without resorting to comparisons. Only 4 countries in the world (not counting, of course, Russia itself) are located on an area larger than Russian forests. The entire Australian continent is smaller than Russian forests. Moreover, the figure is 8.15 million km2 rounded down. In order for forest land in Russia to be reduced to 8.14 million km2, it is necessary that the forests burned out on an area approximately equal to the territory of Montenegro.
5. Despite all the contradictory nature of his legislative activity, Peter I created a fairly harmonious system in the field of forest management. He not only strictly regulated the felling of forests suitable for shipbuilding and other state needs, but also created a control body. The Special Service of Waldmeisters (from German Wald - forest) united persons who are now called foresters. They were endowed with very broad powers, up to the application of the death penalty to those guilty of illegal logging. The essence of Peter's laws is extremely simple - timber, on whose land it is not located, can be cut down only with the permission of the state. In the future, despite all the perturbations with the succession to the throne, this approach to forests did not change. Of course, at times, here too, the severity of the law was compensated by the non-binding nature of its application. The border of the forest-steppe, due to deforestation, moved a couple of kilometers to the north every year. But in general, the attitude of the authorities to forests in Russia was quite consistent and made it possible, with great reservations, to protect forest resources on state lands.
6. Forests have many enemies, ranging from fires to pests. And in Russia of the XIX century the landowners were the most terrible enemies of the forests. Fellings devastated thousands of hectares. The government was practically powerless - you couldn't put an overseer to every hundred oak trees, and the landowners only laughed at the prohibitions. A popular way of “mining” excess wood was a game of ignorance, if landowners' forests were adjacent to state ones. The landowner chopped down the forest on his land, and accidentally grabbed a couple of hundred dessiatines (a tithe a little more than a hectare) of state trees. Such cases were not even investigated and were very rarely mentioned in the auditors' reports, the phenomenon was so massive. And the landowners simply cut down their forests with rapture. The Society for the Encouragement of Forestry, created in 1832, has been listening to reports on the destruction of forests in Central Russia for two years. It turned out that the Murom forest, the Bryansk forests, ancient forests on both banks of the Oka, and many lesser-known forests were completely destroyed. The speaker, Count Kushelev-Bezborodko, stated in despondency: in the most fertile and populated provinces, the forests “have been destroyed almost to the ground”.
7. Count Pavel Kiselev (1788-1872) played a huge role in the creation and development of the Forestry Department in Russia as a key state body for the conservation of forests and the extraction of income from them. This well-rounded statesman achieved success in all positions that the three emperors entrusted to him, therefore, successes in forestry management are in the shadow of military (commander of the Danube army), diplomatic (ambassador to France) and administrative (transformed the life of state peasants) successes. Meanwhile, Kiselyov designed the Forestry Department practically as a branch of the army - the foresters led a paramilitary lifestyle, received titles, length of service. The provincial forester was equal in position to the regiment commander. Titles were given not only for seniority, but also for service. The presence of education was a prerequisite for promotion, therefore, during the years of Kiselev's command, talented forestry scientists grew up in the Forest Service. The structure created by Kiselyov, in general terms, remains in Russia to this day.
8. Forests often remind that people should not exaggerate the degree of subordination of nature. The way of such a reminder is simple and accessible - forest fires. Every year they destroy forests on millions of hectares, simultaneously burning settlements and taking the lives of firefighters, volunteers and ordinary people who were unable to evacuate from dangerous territories in time. The most devastating wildfires are raging in Australia. The climate of the smallest continent on the planet, the absence of large water barriers to fire and the predominantly flat terrain make Australia an ideal location for wildfires. In 1939, in Victoria, a fire destroyed 1.5 million hectares of forest and killed 71 people. In 2003, the third year in the same state, the fire was more local in nature, however, it took place closer to settlements. In just one day in February, 76 people were killed. The most ambitious so far is the fire that began in October 2019. Its fire has already killed 26 people and about a billion animals. Despite extensive international assistance, the fire could not be contained even at the borders of relatively large cities.
9. In 2018, Russia ranked fifth in the world in terms of timber harvested, behind only the United States, China, India and Brazil. A total of 228 million cubic meters were procured. m. of timber. This is a record figure in the 21st century, but it is far from 1990, when 300 million cubic meters of timber was cut and processed. Only 8% of wood was exported (in 2007 - 24%), while the export of wood processing products increased again. With an overall increase in workpieces in annual terms of 7%, production of particleboard increased by 14%, and fiberboard - by 15%. Russia has become an exporter of newsprint. In total, timber and products from it were imported for $ 11 billion.
10. The most wooded country in the world is Suriname. Forests cover 98.3% of the territory of this South American state. Of the developed countries, the most wooded are Finland (73.1%), Sweden (68.9%), Japan (68.4%), Malaysia (67.6%) and South Korea (63.4%). In Russia, forests occupy 49.8% of the territory.
11. Despite all the technological advancements of the modern world, forests continue to provide income and energy for billions of people. About a billion people are employed in the extraction of fuelwood, which is used to generate electricity. These are the people who cut down the forest, process it and turn it into charcoal. Wood produces 40% of the world's renewable electricity. Sun, water and wind provide less energy than forest. In addition, an estimated 2.5 billion people use wood for cooking and primitive heating. In particular, in Africa, two-thirds of all households use wood to cook food, in Asia 38%, in Latin America 15% of families. Exactly half of all wood produced is used to generate energy in one form or another.
12. Forests, especially jungles, cannot be called “lungs of the planet” for at least two reasons. First, the lungs, by definition, are the organ that breathes in the body. In our case, the jungle should supply the lion's share to the atmosphere, about 90-95% of oxygen. In fact, forests provide a maximum of 30% of all atmospheric oxygen. The rest is produced by microorganisms in the oceans. Secondly, a single tree enriches the atmosphere with oxygen, but the forest as a whole does not. Any tree, during decomposition or combustion, absorbs as much oxygen as it released during its life. If the process of aging and dying of trees goes naturally, then young trees replace the dying old ones, releasing oxygen in greater quantities. But in the event of massive felling or fires, young trees no longer have time to “work off the debt”. Over 10 years of observation, scientists have found that the jungle has released about twice as much carbon as it has absorbed. The corresponding proportion also applies to oxygen. That is, human intervention turns even healthy trees into a threat to the environment.
13. With the morale method of timber rafting along rivers, now banned in Russia, but often used in the USSR, tens of thousands of cubic meters of logs got stuck along river banks and in lowlands. It was not wasteful - the sale of timber, even with such losses from the northern regions of the USSR in the 1930s, saved hundreds of thousands of people from starvation. For more productive methods of rafting, then there were neither funds nor human resources. And in modern conditions, if you do not pay attention to the hysterics of ecologists, an increase in the average temperature by 0.5 degrees in the Northern Dvina river basin alone will release 300 million cubic meters of timber - this is more than the annual timber production throughout Russia. Even taking into account the inevitable damage, you can get about 200 million cubic meters of business wood.
14. For all the sound similarity of the words "forester" and "forester", they mean different, albeit related only to the forest, professions. A forester is a forest watchman, a person who keeps order in the area of the forest entrusted to him. A forester is a specialist with a specialized education who monitors the development of the forest and organizes the necessary work to preserve it. Often, the forester combines with his work the position of director of a farm or nursery. However, possible confusion remained in the past - with the adoption of the Forest Code in 2007, the concept of “forester” was abolished, and all working foresters were fired.
15. In the film “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed,” the character of Vladimir Vysotsky threatens the criminal to send him “either to a felling area or to sunny Magadan”. Magadan did not raise questions from a Soviet person, and the fact that thousands of prisoners are engaged in logging, too. Why is the “cutting area” scary, and what is it? During logging, foresters determine areas of the forest suitable for felling. Such plots are called “plots”. They try to place and process them so that the path for removing the logs is optimal. Nevertheless, in the middle of the twentieth century, in conditions of low mechanization, the primary transportation of huge logs was hard physical labor. A felling area was called a forest plot on which the trees had already been cut down. The most difficult work remained - to clear the huge trunks from branches and twigs and almost manually load them onto a skidder. Labor in the felling area was the most difficult and dangerous in the logging camps, which is why Zheglov used the cutting area as a scarecrow.
16. Forests on Earth are infinitely diverse, but most of them have a roughly similar appearance - they are clusters of trunks with branches on which green (with rare exceptions) leaves or needles grow. However, there are forests on our planet that stand out from the general row. This is the Red Forest, located not far from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.The larch trees growing in it received a fair dose of radiation, and now stand red all year round. If for the rest of the trees the yellowish color of the leaves means illness or seasonal wilting, then for trees in the Red Forest this color is quite normal.
17. Crooked forest grows in Poland. The trunks of trees in it, at a low height from the ground, turn parallel to the soil, then, making a smoother bend, return to an upright position. The anthropogenic impact on the forest planted by the Germans during World War II is obvious, but why such trees were grown is not clear. Perhaps this is an attempt to make pre-bent wooden blanks of the desired shape. However, it is obvious that the labor costs for the manufacture of such blanks are much higher than the labor costs required to obtain curved blanks from straight sawn timber.
18. In the Curonian Spit National Park in the Kaliningrad Region, pines grow in any direction, but not vertically, forming the Dancing Forest. The culprit of the dance is considered to be the species of butterflies, whose caterpillars gnaw the apical bud of the young shoots of the pine. The tree lets the main shoot through the lateral bud, as a result of which the trunk bends in different directions as it grows.
19. The stone forest in southwest China is not a forest at all. This is a pile of lime rocks up to 40 meters high, looking like a forest after a strong fire. Erosion has worked on karst sediments for millions of years, so if you have imagination in the rocks-trees, you can see a wide variety of silhouettes. Part of almost 400 km2 stone forest has been transformed into a beautiful park with waterfalls, caves, artificial lawns and areas of already real forest.
20. The attitude of mankind to wood and wood products shows that there are still islands of common sense in the collective consumer madness. In developed countries, more than half of the total volume of paper is already produced from collected waste paper. Even 30 years ago, a similar figure of 25% was considered a serious environmental breakthrough. The changing ratio in the consumption of sawn timber, wood-based panels and panels is also impressive. In 1970, the production of "clean" sawn timber was the same as from fiberboard and particleboard combined. In 2000, these segments became equal, and then fiberboard and particleboard took the lead. Now their consumption is almost double that of conventional sawnwood.
