A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
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Claude Monet’s Mills in the Westzijderveld near Zaandam, 1871
October 22, 2007 - There are pictures hanging in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam by a group of artists from the 1800’s. They depict workers in fields and forests and wind mill powered sawmills. In one is a group of fallers clear cutting a stand of timber. It captures the dignity of the work and their connection with nature at a time when Dutch citizens were losing theirs.
With the harsher elements of the industrial revolution in full force, artists and the Dutch intelligentsia pined for the “good old days” when nature was a part of their everyday life. It is abundantly clear that the artists viewed these woodworkers with great respect.
A simple question arose; does replacing the two man saws (we use to call them misery whips) in this painting with chain saws in anyway alter the dignity of the work or the respect for which it should be held? Likewise if a mechanical harvester replaces the chainsaw does the technology make this work less meaningful or less important?
Certainly the skill sets are different, the productivity greatly enhanced. Yet, it is still a worker in the woods cutting trees. Many of today’s intelligentsia would not only look at this work as demeaning, they would also tend to see it as destructive. As a result these workers have become the poster children for large private institutions who exploit what we do as a way to raise money to create jobs for themselves in comfortable offices miles and frequently states away. They use this money to attempt to convince public officials that these wood workers are bad and that they should be prevented from harvesting trees like their fathers did and in many cases their grandfathers.
It is clear that there is legacy of overharvesting in this industry. In the past we frequently harvested more than was sustainable. Certain types of logging resulted in erosions and soil degradation. However, the worst and largest clearcut in the US in 30 years time would look like a forest and in 70 years would look and be biological more productive however defined than the forest it replaced. When logging is based on the principles of sustainable management the forest is more protected than it is if no management is permitted or worse if it is allowed to be converted to a non-forest use.
It is becoming increasingly clear that wood from a sustainably managed forest used within the area from which it was harvested has a smaller environmental foot print than any other commercially available building products. This means that instead of releasing carbon and other gases into the air like steel and plastic, wood products actually store carbon. A wood building requires less energy to heat because of its insulation properties than steel. In short, wood products really are the environmental choice since they are renewable, sustainable, and natural. Storing green house gases and requiring less energy to produce than almost any other substitute.
If wood products are the desired environmental alternative and sustainable forest management strives to protect high conservation value areas and ensure bio diversity then why are wood workers vivified for the act of cutting trees? We do not pave over forests to make vacation resorts for the urban rich or build superhighways to get them to these resorts in their polluting automobiles. What we do is to plant, grow and harvest trees.
We live in rural communities and live our lives by the seasons. We plant our gardens in the spring, stack wood for two winters ahead in the summer (it needs to dry for about a year), and harvest and can in the fall. It is not an idyllic life. It is physically demanding work. It is isolating in the winter and buggy in the summer. We work in the snow, the rain and the heat. In dry summers we start hours before sun up. When the equipment breaks we fix it. But is it still honorable work. With the help of our union it is work where we can raise a family and with a little help send our children to college.
It was noble work in 1890 and it is just as noble today. I wonder what Anton Mauve would have painted in the 1880’s if those who oppose using wood products had been around then?
