Forestry and forest history

Solymos, Rezső

Keywords: forestry, sustainability, historical lessens, natural laws, forest associations

The basis of forestry is the sustainability, cultivation and manifold use of the forest. As world population grew over the history so did people’s demands of the forest. In satisfying the demand for forest products it soon transpired that their supply is strictly limited. On long term the forest can provide for society and economy sustainably the most if it is managed according to its needs. The present state of earth’s forests is the outcome of thousands of years of growths and human intervention. The prevailing concept of up-to-date forestry developed on the various continents only over the last one or two hundred years. If we take the relationship between humanity and forest as the basis, it is pertinent to consider forestry in a wider sense together with the history of humanity and changes in people’s demands. Throughout history humanity has always intended to utilise the most the forest can provide. People soon discovered the quality and quantity of forestry products can be improved by intervention into the growing stock. However, such intervention did not always lead to the desired outcome. At all times it is a forester’s job to evaluate and utilise any lessens provided by the forest history. This is a significant factor in successful forestry management as “History is life’s teacher”. Considerations such as this lead to the concepts ideas in this paper.
Every tree in a forest constitutes a page out of a history book, whose title is “The history of forest”. The tree rings represent the lines on this page and the width between rings indicates the width between lines. Tree rings embrace the heart of a tree and retail the story of its life. Long historical periods are embodied in stands that follow each other. They are the well experienced “witnesses” of great times. Thousands of years of evolution resulted in stands of various wood species from fern trees of the Devonian age to today’s forests of hornbeam, beach and oak. As time went by people intervened increasingly more frequently into the composition and constitution of the forest (forestry eco-system) to satisfy their demands of forestry products. Trouble begins when people’s interests make them forget about the truth, that the forest is the society of trees, where natural laws dictate the unwritten rules of co-existence to be taken into account when managing the forest!

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