The down-to-earth English already figured it out: 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs'. It is no different with wood and trees: a healthy, thick tree is cut down to make a wooden table. And that change is sometimes, and for some people, a painful experience. Not surprising of course, especially when it concerns thick trees in your familiar walking or living environment.
Due to the distance between the product, wood from the hardware store or in the furniture store, and the source of the wood, the forest, most consumers see no connection between wood use and the felling of trees. In other words: personal wood use is not automatically associated with the forest where the wood grows. A morning walk in a forest is not associated with the purchase of a table or wood for the garden fence in the afternoon.
An interesting paradox: people who are most strongly opposed to the felling of trees often prefer natural products to plastic items in their daily lives.
When forest managers, or their PR colleagues, communicate about logging, it is often mainly about flowers, bees, the meaning of dead wood, and the like. Or worse: 'We have to saw to make the forest healthy'. (sawing can be useful, but timber harvesting is never 'necessary'). But the use of wood and the fact that beautiful things can be made from it is often missing from the stories. The AVIH labels to clarify the (many) different destinations of the wood on the woodpiles along forest roads should be mandatory. Especially in a busy area.
The omelet is smiling at you in the pan, you can already smell it. Eating it is even better. Maybe in a while we will all be vegetarian, it will turn out that we can do just fine without eggs. But our society without wood? That is unimaginable – in fact, there is a tendency to build a lot in wood.
So the forest manager keeps the 'pain' of egg breaking small: work with respect for the forest visitors when felling and be honest and CLEAR about WOOD.
Background information: Houtfabriek.nl
Column by Simon Klingen
This column also appeared in the trade magazine NBL in March 2024
