In northern mountains there is another factor at play when forests are cut - avalanches! In Europe, by the Middle Ages, numerous settlements existed in the beautiful valleys of the Alps. People needed wood for constructing houses, fences, tools and fuel. No problem, the forests were right there, further up the slope from the village, it even made it easy to skid the logs downhill to where they could be sawn and used. And, early on, there was no end in sight to the forest. After the trees were cleared, it was a great place to graze the sheep, goats and cows. Sound familiar? The trees couldn’t grow back, even on the moist mountain soils, the animals liked to eat them. So, the forest receded up the slopes. Wood for fires, tools and houses had to be hauled further and further, but the people probably thought a lot like we do today about oil, coal and electricity, “There’ll be enough for us, turn up the heat, honey”.
One of the things the forests did was hold winter snows on the steep mountain slopes, but nobody noticed. As the forests were cut and the slopes grazed, the deep winter snows had no anchor to the ground. The mountains had become steep slippery slides for snow and at the bottom of many of those slides were villages. In the 1400’s these villagers began dying in violent snow avalanches roaring down the slick slopes of the high peaks (Colin Fraser, Avalanche Enigma, pg 11). Avalanche events that destroy villages and kill people continued through the centuries because the mountain forests had been cut and not allowed to grow back. It is estimated that from 1915 to 1918, during World War I, forty to eighty-thousand Austrian and Italian soldiers died in avalanches that overtook their armies (Colin Fraser, Avalanche Enigma, pg 20).
Sawtooth Mountains
Since WW I people of the Alps have put engineering to work to divert avalanches around buildings and villages. Large, fence like structures have been constructed high on mountainsides in avalanche paths and in snow accumulation zones to hold the snow in place. Trees have been planted between the structures to reestablish the forest and allow nature to hold the snow on the mountain slopes. More foresight would have been good, but it is one of those “Tragedy of the Commons” deals.
Heinrich Cotta
What’s a forest worth? How could people allow their forests to be so reduced to cause these huge environmental problems that destroy property, societies, economies, nations? Heinrich Cotta may have hit on the answer in 1816. Cotta, born in 1763 in Germany, was a person of the forest. When Heinrich was 53 he wrote his thoughts about forests in what he called “Cotta’s Preface.” His conclusions are worth thinking about, “Three principal causes exist why forestry is still so backward; first, the long time which wood needs for its development; second, the great variety of sites on which it grows; thirdly, the fact that the forester who practices much writes but little, and he who writes much practices but little.”
“The long development period causes that something is considered good and prescribed as such which is good only for a time, and later becomes detrimental to the forest management. The second fact causes that what many declare good or bad, proves, good or bad only in certain places. The third fact brings it about that the best experiences die with the man who made them, and that many entirely one-sided experiences are copied by the merely literary forester so often that they finally stand as articles of faith which nobody dares to gainsay, no matter how one-sided or in error they may be.” Heinrich Cotta, Dec. 21, 1816. (“Forestry Quarterly,” Volume I, 1902-1903)
Since Cotta wrote his Preface, there has been another wrinkle, capitalism, it demands short planning periods, quarterly reports need to show profits or investors lose “interest.” But, more on that later.
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