Forests?! Where?

Forests... all the time we hear about them, but it seems like they are not a part of our everyday life...

Since we came on this World, our forests seem to be in the same place, all along national roads, on the edge of mountain resorts, on top of the hills that we picture from the hotel parking, and all over the country on the green colored map. Hardly a change can be noticed - so it seems - or maybe we really wish to think that we didn’t blast so much.

Few acres of worthless trees... do they count? Maybe they moved over for some more valuable crops, or factories, roads or neighborhoods we really needed. I can’t take out of my mind the image of a nurse trying to put a band aid on her patient’s head, stepping on his oxygen supply tube...

The two images above are showing the deforestation process the World has suffered lately. It looks like the civilization destroys everything coming in its way. If you wish to have some fun/get back on Earth, I recommend you to click on the following link:

http://www.globalforestwatch.org/english/interactive.maps/index.htm

We Romanians aren't quite well, "we did our job" too, we laughed out loud at the matter, as the rest of Europe.

We think that cutting down the trees is about making fire, or building homes or furniture, or paper. News: nowadays the fire is made with gas... OK, so that eases a bit our concerns, we think! Also we make concrete buildings. I don’t even wish to imagine what on Earth will happen with so much brash when we will build using other less invasive materials!?

The furniture is made out of wood, at least if we had kept the real wood, but nowadays we chop forests and shred them into shivers for MDF (Medium-Density Fiberboard) and Aggregate Panels. You thought that panel shivers are from scraps? Dozens of wagons of healthy logs are chopped daily so we could change our furniture by the color that we love this year, which is in fact a pattern printed on a piece of paper applied on the pressed shivers and bounded with toxic glue... Glorious, isn’t it? And this is much more expensive than the real wood. It's just like buying some sausages from the supermarket instead of preparing a steak. I will now stop talking about furniture; unfortunately I know what I am talking about...

With the paper is another sacrilege... each day, that corner stand receives piles of waste paper for which about 20 trees were cut, this it is just like they're being delivered a truck full of logs, or a clump of trees that took a hundred years to grow. OK maybe I exaggerated a bit, let's say that it took them 50 years to grow up to that glorious moment of their lives when they become support for our information, to keep us updated about the latest gossips in the VIP frivolous world. Really, can’t we live without? The printed media was invented before the digital era and should've stayed there...

Multiply this with the number of media stands in the whole country, maybe there are a few thousand? So we are doodling more than ten thousands of trees every day? And once we finish reading we throw the newspaper/magazine away, without recycling?

Now think of all the supermarkets that are jamming into our mail boxes what? - trees... already killed. I think I have received a few acres until now. A "successful action" means a few tons of paper x 20 trees/tone, this is a glorious day, when the marketing guy sleeps happily for having accomplished his mission and as a consequence we are poorest with two acres of shadow and fresh air, in fact.

The carton... I would like to introduce a new type of police, called "The Package Police". Why do they have to pack a product in boxes 50% larger than the size needed? To look like we receive more? More we juggle ourselves... A store collects every day between a few trees and hundreds of trees at the garbage can.

I won’t discuss here the books, it seems be the only good thing made out of our woods at a large scale, to transmit the knowledge... maybe it won’t be bad not to keep all the books for ourselves, but to let them flow as much as possible?

Hold on, did you think I’m done? News: we eat forests, in fact we eat forests when we eat our stakes, salami, sausages, milk, cheese or eggs... the main purpose of the World's deforestation is to make room for cereal crops, to feed the livestock!

Tropical forests are replaced with soybean crops... So the animal breeding for the consumption industry is the main cause of deforestation. With each day passing we need larger areas to feed them, because we consume more and more meat: today almost every meal contains meat, we're not having it only on Sundays as our grandparents used to... Maybe you didn’t know, they need now enormous surfaces to cultivate fodder. But this will not happen in Germany or Austria... they always find a weak link somewhere on Earth and so you read in the news they cut the forests in Brazil. And this way the global market blooms, and we carry fodder from South America to North America, then the American chicken ends up to be sold to a market in Amarasti, a far country village in Eastern Europe. People buy it, because it is cheaper...

It doesn’t matter where the animals are breaded, or what nationality we hold, if we are 3 billiards of beef-eaters 7 days from 7... but why worry? the forests will pay off our debts, wherever they still exist. Think that when you buy a chicken or a piece or salami, you say goodbye to a hundred years old tree somewhere. The vegetarians are less invasive persons, of that I can assure you...

This is also about the atmosphere, the air we don’t have anymore. Portugal is becoming a desert, were the people were those who have destroyed their country... they had the trees cut down until there was no need in doing it, as the entire ecosystem collapsed. The soil has changed its composition and now they can hardly grow anything there, except for their own despair...

What is our guilt in all these? What power do we have?

The entire fault belongs to us, if we know and we do nothing. Maybe we did not know, maybe we did not understand, we did not wish to know... And we have all the power, for doing both good and bad.

So, each one of us is part of this. We consume trees, this is a fact and rarely have I heard of someone having planted trees.Maybe one tree, on a Sunday, in a mediated action to all friends... or maybe ten in the courtyard of their holiday house. Or as a business... two acres of rapidly growing beech? Or are we leaving this in the (not)care of the state only? Or maybe we should relax as several NGO’s were created and will take care of these problems? We don’t even pay attention to them or even offer our help.

In Tamera, reforestation is a daily deep care activity... they collect seeds, all kinds of seedling plants, not just those meant to be used by humans. It sounds a little impersonal, but this is about people who truly believe in what they're doing, about people taking action... So first they inoculate and take care of the seedling plants in the tree nursery, until they become able to be transplanted in the ground. In charge of this process in Tamera is Herman, a German forester engineer. He says Romania is his favorite country, he has traveled to Apuseni and worked for a project in a forest there and that he is totally fascinated by the natural abundance we (still) have in our countryside zones. On the very first day, he had us to take care of some beds where trees saplings were planted...