Due to the climate upheaval, the forest collapse is watching. However, it is urgent to define ambitious policies based on a diversified forest, guaranteeing soil formation and water cycle. So let’s talk about growth – but trees growth !
Due to the climate upheaval, the forest collapse is watching. However, it is urgent to define ambitious policies based on a diversified forest, guaranteeing soil formation and water cycle. So let’s talk about growth – but trees growth !
“” Back to the trees “, This is the watchword of Uncle Vania in the famous fable on the technical progress of Roy Lewis, Why did I ate my father. Uncle Vania does not see any other solution to the vital and existential problems of Pithecanthropes in the Pleistocene. This is a bit of the conclusion to which the two authors of Thinkwhich offer us to abandon the anthropocene to enter the “ Sylvocene », By entrusting our future (especially climatic) to the forests.
Help the forest
There is no shortage of reasons for this, and for the reader who would have missed an episode of the series “ How we will destroy the planet with full knowledge of the facts », The essay recalls the main principles. The growing forest stores considerable quantities of carbon, gas which with methane is one of the major contributors to the greenhouse effect. Isn’t the nominees of fossil fuels not the fossil biomass of past forests ? But it is still necessary that current forests can push.
In addition, and this is less well known to the public, forests play an irreplaceable role in soil formation, their maintenance, as a space of biodiversity and finally as actresses of the water cycle, both at the local and global level.
At the local level, particularly in damaged terrain, the forests and the soils they have formed amortize excessive precipitation and promote water infiltration in the tablecloths. It is not for nothing that the solution found at XIXe century to protect Nîmes from the floods was the very large scale reforestation of the Aigoual massif.
On a large scale, the forest massifs, by their evapotranspiration, generate most of the continental rains. Cutting the forest is therefore making the rain disappear. “” The forests precede peoples, deserts follow them “Written the Revellier Lépaux in 1839. In the absence of something else, here is which demonstrates the remarkable progress of agnotology in our societies” knowledge ». The drunkenness of growth makes it amnesiac.
Precisely, let’s talk about growth – but growth of trees. Admittedly, the trees are not lacking in good will when it comes to producing a little biomass in often Spartan conditions, but too much, it’s too ! Due to the climate upheaval, recurring water stress that is associated with it, the radoucing which allows under our climates to increase the number of generations of insects, aberrant forest practices, from overexploitation to the register of “ renewable energies », The forest collapse. Supersilvawhich had to save us, is sometimes in bad shape. If we want the forest to help us, we should give it a little help.
Colbert and Robin des Bois
Our ancestors have not always been smarter than us. The fact remains that a retrospective look is not lacking in interest in nourishing a prospective reflection. If, in the universe of tales, the forest is often the wild location par excellence and as such potentially disturbing, in practice, wood as material and fuel and forests as providers of food resources (picking, hunting, glandage of pigs, etc.) have attracted the populations and the lust of the powerful. If there is a subject of which Robin des Bois deals with, it is that of the conflict of use of the forest between central authority and populations !
The stake was in size. In the Capetian kingdom, in the first half of the XIIIe A century, the forests of the Royal Domaine constituted with 60,000 pounds almost a quarter of the revenues of the monarchy. Its management and use very early justified the development of a powerful administration, which will be strengthened over time.
We can not do otherwise than mentioning the 1669 ordinance by Colbert, “ Cathedral among cathedrals of forest policy (P. 21). However, faced with needs-notably of the monarchy itself for its ambitious maritime policy-, the forest has greatly fell to the middle of the middle of the XIXe century, where it only covered 19 % of the metropolitan territory. She occupies 31 today %. But these figures can be misleading, because it all depends on the state of the forest. France is not yet at the time of deforestation, but the inventory drawn up by the national forest inventory notes an increase in mortality over the last decade of 54 % ! We will have to manage the forest, and better than in the past.
Given the anthropogenic pressure, most of the forests we have in front of us, starting with the most emblematic (like the oak of the Tronçais), are the result of forest practices. With the exception of a few inaccessible corners that can claim an almost natural state, the question that arises is therefore not between naturalness and artificiality, but between different modes of intervention. And there, the match is open.
On the one hand, the industrialization of practices, with mass management of forests (rather “ tree culture »), Monoculture of clones of the same age facilitating an early mechanized harvesting, the Drill Baby Drill forest ; On the other, the continuous covered, diversified and requiring a tree treatment by tree.
Obviously more respectful of the ecosystem, this forestry therefore requires more numerous forest staff and the provision of particularly robust forest management control tools to ensure that the forest heritage preserves, at a minimumthe same level of overall quality. (p. 57)
Between these two poles, there are a whole range of nuances between natural regeneration and planting, size and dimension of possible shaved cuts, against the background of debate on the capacity to adapt current forests to climate change, role of hunting, sampling potential, that this document document.
Relegate the planet
The supporters of Drill Baby Drill Argue on the need to quickly produce as much biomass as possible and on the fact that artificialization is the best way to adapt to climate change, current forests being condemned. The proponents of the permanent methods respond that the resilience of a diversified forest will always be better than a monoculture subject to collapse phenomena and that, moreover, the continuous cover is the system which fixes the most carbon. The French forest is indeed very young, and it has to do much that it has reached a point of balance, if it exists.
Forest trajectory will first depend on the ability of public opinion to grab it and the possibility at the national level, but also international, to define (re) forestry policies, which the authors are largely sketched, to respond to the concern of Tin to rebust the planet. We will have to garden the earth, failing the chimeras of geo-engineering, but all of this will only be possible with a profound change of gaze on humans and living. The authors write:
Whole sections of our economic activities are questioned and possibly doomed to considerable mutations in practices, until the disappearance of some of them (p. 155).
In short, we will only have an ecological forestry in a society itself become ecological. Suffice to say that the evolution of theIp in the last decades, under the impact of New Public Management And short-termism, don’t take the way, which the authors deplore several times.
This is where Keynes joins Louis XV : In the long term, we are all dead, and afterwards we delude him. The good news is that the problems are now in the short term and that we directly undergo the deluge and droughts of our pusillanimity. THE “ Future generations », It’s already us. It is therefore possible that, drowned or scalded, we ultimately responded to the wishes of the authors and that we were passing an alliance with the trees to enter the Sylvocene frankly.
In any case, we will welcome that the authors, weaving technical, historical and legal considerations, offer a solid base for a public debate on forest management. This excellent popularization level is a remarkable contribution to a living democracy. The only defect in the book is to address a reasonable animal, while history tends to show thatHomo sapiens is not. Have the pithecanthropes did better ? “” Back to the trees “I tell you !