Update to Harvesting The Forest

Radio Prague has just reported:






Sumava National Park director resigns





The director of the Sumava National Park, Frantisek Krejci, has tendered his resignation to the Minister of the Environment, Pavel Drobil. A ministry spokesperson told the press that Mr Krejci had
resigned in order to facilitate the new conception for the park promoted by the ministry. Frantisek Krejci was appointed by the Green Party in 2007 when it controlled the environment ministry in order to fulfil a policy of non-intervention against the bark beetle infestation that has devastated parts of the forest. Environmental organisations say the resignation was forced by the new ministry, which want to take a head on approach to the problem.




As I said in the previous post a lot of people are very cynical about the Government, suggesting that it is using the bark beetle as an excuse to justify wholesale removal of trees in the forest. This news seems to confirm this.

Harvesting the Forest

I am spending a lot of my leisure time up in the forest at the moment. There are still mushrooms for the collecting. My love of mushrooming has always been accompanied by a love of being in nature. The Czechs have both of these loves – but for me there is the added attraction of novelty.



It is for these reasons I am hurt by what I see on my silvan jaunts – the wholesale destruction of tracts of my beloved Mytsky Les. These Czech forests are not natural, but the legacy of generations of foresters, who have carefully harvested and restocked the forest. Trees were cut down when their time came and not before, treecover was maintained to ensure that the forest floor did not become scrubland and suited to the flora and fungi, that also supplied the contents of their wives' store cupboards. No longer – instead I arrive at some of my favourite mushroom collecting sites to find devastation, whole areas stripped bare, unwanted branches and stumps strewn over the ground, my paths are rucked up by the monster machines used by the tree harvesters. After a year or two the open space thus created is covered by impenetrable brambles.

Why is this? The forests have survived communism only to fall foul of capitalism and privatisation. These new "tree harvesters" are interested only in short term profit, they harvest but they do not farm. The large machinery is easier and quicker. If all this wood was for domestic consumption I might be less annoyed, but I regularly nearly get run off the road by large timber lorries taking the best of the Czech forest to Germany and Austria. I am not alone in my alarm at developments. They are a regular topic of conversation with my Czech friends - one said recently that the Sumava Forest will be destroyed in ten years. Most are of the opinion that the excuse that some of the clearance is needed to fight the bark beetle is simply a ploy to justify the pillaging of the forests, indeed that the beetle scurge is a consequence of profit-driven monoculture.

The news from the UK that the British Government is proposing to sell off half our national forests fills me with horror. I have seen at first hand what that means and I urge British readers of this blog to sign the following online petition http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/save-our-forests#petition/url
or better still write to your mp, for details on how to do this see http://www.parliament.uk/about/contacting/mp/

Timber

Forestry is a major industry in the Czech Republic and timber a major export. If you are sitting on a train waiting, the chances are you are waiting for a freight train loaded with wood to pass. Worse, you could be driving along a road in the Sumava National Park when you meet a huge lorry, laden with logs, coming in the opposite direction at a speed totally unsuited to the width of the road.


In the old days the logs were transported by water for example by the Schwarzenberg Canal At an exhibition in the history of the Sumava that I visited at the South Bohemian Museum in Ceske Budejovice I saw a wonderful film on work of the woodsmen. The film showed all stages in the journey from forest to sawmill, including its transportation first on wooden sledges and then by river. On the last stage the woodsmen used iron hooks to bind the logs into rafts, that they then rode down to the sawmill. The photo above comes from a site about these timber rafts, you will find it here.