A couple years after I came home from my first (and only) tour in the Navy, I was disappointed to see that the whole forest had been cleared by a developer, and all our special little forts and camps and gathering areas in the woods were gone. ... Nothing we ever did, it seemed, could ever make a dent in that forest, but I was told it took the devleoper's contractor a week to log off all the trees, rake the stumps into a slash pile, and basically turn the hillside into another fenced in row of ticky tacky houses.
Get your kids out there and hack as many limbs as it takes to make them proficient at doing something in a natural setting and find some value in doing it often, before it is gone. Lopping a few limbs on a regular basis isn't going to devastate any forest; it may actually benefit the land, much like selective logging does.
People who fanatically insist we must leave the forests unperturbed and pristine just don't understand how nature works. If I could, I would send every school-age kid out into the forest as often as possible and do just what red did. That might be the best way to insure that at least some of the forests aren't turned into tract housing. This notion that limbing a tree or two or two hundred is somehow going to cause global deforestation is just not realistic. Heck, the forest service does far more of that in a year as maintenance in the places I roamed than me and all my friends could ever have hoped to in our entire childhood.
Argh - you're missing my point. I'm not drawing a line to global deforestation from limbing trees to demonstrate shelter-building, I have no agenda here except leave no trace, and can make my shelters from downfall and deadfall, thank you - I have the luxury of plenty of material to use out here. Your experience in your populated neck of the woods isn't all that relevant, unless a forest is protected from development the bulldozer is eventually the way of all such woods. When a forest is protected, the question is what kind of forest you want to preserve. I would agree, hack and burn and build your shelters all you like, except the environment you cut up with be that much less desirable for you and the thousand of kids who might enjoy it, until the developer comes. Developers come to the most pristine little forests, if they're in the wrong (or right) spot. In a typical suburban backyard it doesn't matter one whit.
I know a thing or two about tree pruning, if not nature. You clip branches on a pine, and they won't grow back in place. The tree will eventually grow taller, with no branches where you clipped. You can see the remains of such enlightened wood gathering from decades ago near camp sites all over the pacific northwest. Eventually branches fall and are blown off, naturally. Only when the trees topple and give another tree a chance to grow to you get any new growth. Who said limbing a tree for shelter causes deforestation? It creates an ugly tree, faster, that's all. Fill your temporary forests with ugly trees, see if I care.
There are all sorts of folks who know better how to treat our forests. A popular trail near here along Mt Washington is fairly rocky and unappealing in the summer, but a great snowshoe in the winter. This past winter, some wise person found saplings bent over the trail from the weight of snow. Instead of going around, he lopped off the top of 30-40 trees, and they stood straight up, clearing his way. This summer you see columns of saplings along the trail, lopped off at the top. Those won't grow anywhere, they'll die out. Sure, its not the most appealing trail in summer, but tell that to the folks who have spent their spare time improving it. Just more of the idiocy you see from well-meaning folks who can't see past their own path through the forest.
I'm convinced my way is better than yours. That doesn't make me a better person, or a better outdoorsman necessarily, it doesn't make my shelters more holy, just that I know my path through life is light. The forest may burn down behind me, woodcutters may harvest a few trees here and there for their profit or comfort, that's life, but I'd rather leave the place for the next guy just like I found it. If you think that's smug then maybe so, its what I believe and I see the results in where I live.
One more while I'm venting - jungle vs. rainforest, semantics, not a green political agenda. Rainforest because the predominant feature is, well, rain. Stand on the Olympic Peninsula for a while and decide if its a jungle or a rainforest. Jungle is a word that doesn't meant anything to me. Rainforest, I understand.
Previous Topic
Index
