good idea. Some points...

Use all the forest floor debris for insulation/ waterproofing and try a model using a long ridge pole against a tree ( like a pup tent shape). easy and fast.

T

debris hut instructions #1

PS I was always taught to build up an arm length of materials - about 1 m
of debris

I think the thread is about what to teach kids about the outdoors and the resources they include. While I couldn't disagree more with BigDaddyTX, it is more important to clue kids into both sides of this discussion. They are the future stewards of the planet and this debate will be alive and well for some time to come.

As for us, I think we should agree to disagree on this point, and move on. We have plenty of areas where we are in agreement and can learn from one another.

I didn't sense any anger or animosity from the poster who didn't like that the first poster took some tree boughs to teach shelter-making - with the same lack of any animosity or anger, I'd like to politely disagree with those who would take a few boughs from tree to tree and not think it does harm. Its not just you who might take a few boughs from different trees, but the several to the hundreds to eventually the thousands in popular places who take only a bough or two - to make a bed, a shelter, to make fire or smoke. A bough or two, multiplied a hundred times or more over the lifetime of a grove of trees, means a pretty well stripped down forest, a forest of striplings.

I think the ethos you should apply when practicing forest shelter making is leave no trace - scavenge your shelter materials, and then disperse them when you're done. Only in a real emergency, if you are outdoors, can't go home, and in need of shelter or risking exposure to the elements, should you take live branches and boughs and make a shelter. Honestly, in my neck of the woods there's no shortage of downfall and downed branches for shelter-making, and its alot quicker to use this than to cut fresh boughs.

Anyway, I didn't sense the poster was castigating anyone for raping the forests, or blaming survival practices for the fall of the Amazon rainforest, just asking you to leave no trace when no more urgent need arises.

We are currently volunteering in a state park campground in the Pacific Northwest. Picking up deadfall is prohibited, yet there is nothing on the ground. Cutting a live tree is almost a shooting offense, yet there are nothing but stubs up to a height of six feet or so, many of the limbs broken off, not cut. What does this mean? Not sure, since most of the trees are still alive. But they sure are ugly. And without the rules, I suspect that a lot of the trees would be dead or gone entirely...

Truly we have to protect our National Forests from over use and harm. But from what I've seen of the world and the United States in specific is that camping and hiking, even building the occasional debris shelter is not much of a threat to our environment (I like to say our environment, because that's what we're worried about. Something that looks and feels comfortable to us. We can no more destroy the Earth then we can save all the planet's species.) But what bothers me is the continual march of subdivisions out into wilderness and agricultural land. I went to Tucson, Arizona and the desert where my dad went out to shoot in college because there was no one to hit was all shotgun houses. The same goes for my parent's house near Houston. What had been out in the sticks with deer moving through the back pasture is now entirely surrounded by houses. Denver, Colorado Springs they're the same way. More land paved over and parceled and manicured lawns of a single species. Leave the poor man alone for cutting a few branches and look around at what's really making an impact. More and more people driving further to work, every single day. Instead of lots of people all in one building we have lots of people each on their own little plot of land.

When I leave my current situation, I'd like to live in the city and walk to work five times a week. I can commute to the country on the weekends.

There is no thing as a rainforest, it’s a jungle. Rainforest is an invented term to make people more willing to send money to and protest for the jungle.

Tarzan Lord of the rainforest
Tarzan Lord of the jungle.

What one sounds right?


As far as the original poster, I would bet he is sorry he posted the pictures and will likely not do it the next time. It’s not worth all the grief over a few branches.

My goal is to move to a rural setting with no neighbors in sight. I don't think that it's such a great idea for thousands of people to live in one building or millions to live in a city but I'll gladly leave them there to deal with the inherent problems.

"Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley
with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the vastness for something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost."

I fully understand the longing to be where no one else has been or is likely to follow. But there's getting to be fewer and fewer places like that. I'd rather visit them, then have them disappear. The days of the Daniel Boone and Robert Service are over, there are far too few places where you can truly say you are far from civilization. Or saying, not have someone else walk up and agree with you.

I think the cities, with their many facets, are far healthier then subdivisions which are all the same, from one coast to the other. Burger King, Applebee's, Starbucks and Best Buy. Doesn't matter where you're at, its hard to tell you've even moved.

So I choose the city to live in and the country to commute to.

If a single small tree used for building a shelter makes somebody cringe...

Then, my Lord, they must go out of their mind with rage when they see a beaver dam. Heck, a single family of beavers probably cuts down more trees each year than all the debris shelter makers in North America. Those rascals will go up and down the river chewing rings of bark and cambrium off from 300 large trees and leave them to die. And yet, somehow the forests have managed to survive the continuous onslaught of millions of beavers.

The forests around here can produce new trees at a rate faster than nature, primitive man included, can cut them down. There's gazillions of saplings struggling for the chance to get some sunlight through a break in the canopy. Sure, clearing forests for development, agriculture, lumber, etc, can destroy a forest. But taking an occassional small tree here and there amid a thriving forest has no detrimental effect whatsoever and can even be beneficial. I know... it's not the single tree it's the aggregate effect. But I still don't think the aggregate effect of all the hikers and campers in the world amounts to a fraction of the trees destroyed by other living creatures like deer and beaver.

Conservation! Not preservation.

I think the point was people are taking this way to seriously. A few branches on a tree dopes not kill nor does it even harm it. Everyone is not running around chopping down trees wherever they stand. Those people whining are probably putting more pollution into the air with the cars which is doing more damage.

Who will think of the trees!?