Tree Farming

I love trees.

I have planted trees whenever I have been able to - which is not often

I have also, with great sorrow, had to cut down diseased trees.

What I don’t like is tree farming - particularly the way it was done in the 60’s and 70’s in the Scottish Highlands.

There were big tax breaks then for owning a bit of forest, so bit s of countryside would be ploughed up by massive machines, creating huge furrows. These would make walking there impossible for ever after.

Non-native fast growing trees were planted in straight rows, jammed tightly together. 

Usually there was no idea of landscaping or protecting the beauty of the countryside.  The trees were not looked after as would happen in our old ancient woodlands. The trees were never thinned or pruned.

Now these are being “harvested”, leaving ugly areas like giant scars. No effort is made to re-landscape as that reduces profit.

Sometimes an area is planted with trees in such a way, that a beautiful view is blocked from view.

We lived in Canada for a while and that was very much the case, where we were.

 All you could see anywhere - were trees and more trees.

But sometimes you get used to a nice bit of forest somewhere – It has always been there – as long as you can remember.

Then – one day – you drive past –and it is gone – shock horror.

I don’t like my landscape changing.

But what really upsets me is this

Biofuel

Last week on our way south from Sutherland, we were parked next to a huge lorry stacked high with beautiful logs from big trees. On the side of the lorry it said Biofuel

It made me want to weep

The thought of all those trees being taken off to be put in some giant furnace where they will burn up in no time at all and produce  a pathetic amount of energy is awful

Surely the two sides of the energy equation here do not make sense

If one tots up all the energy /fuel and man hours involved in the production of those trees, from the machine to plough the ground and the machinery to fell the trees, the machinery to turn the tree into neat trunks and the fuel of that lorry to transport those trunks to the biofuel plant, I suspect that as much energy /fuel has been used in production as will be obtained after burning.

It surely cannot be an efficient way of doing things.

In times gone by one saw lorries carrying logs to the pulp mill to produce paper. Somehow that did make sense. Something tangible was being made.

But the UK no longer has a pulp mill. Our trees have to go to Norway to be pulped - Crazy

Biofuel in general seems a crazy thing.

To be growing edible products for biofuel when half the world is starving just seems bonkers.

To be felling precious Amazonian rain forest to grow biofuel is beyond crazy

But

I suspect that tree farming in Scotland will seem wonderful compared to fracking