🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32404948.5F27@compuserve.com>, LDNPA
<100063.3401@compuserve.com> writes
>The Lake District National Park Authority has produced a leaflet setting out
>the facts with regard the Rusland Beeches.  It is being sent to all who write
>letters of objection to the proposals to fell the trees.

>The Rusland Beeches - the facts behind the decision to fell.

Among the various headings in Guy Waller of LDNPA's leaflet is this one
below:

>15. This decision was based on the advice obtained from the more
>    highly qualified and experienced consultant from the AAIS, that 26
>    trees are in a dangerous state.  Members of the Committee also felt
>    that the tree surgery work required to make the remaining trees safe
>    would leave them disfigured and not as people remember the
>    Rusland Beeches once were.  They felt that the time has now come
>    to fell all of the remaining trees and to replant a new row for the
>    benefit of future generations.

I disagree with the statement from the the Committee that a new row of
trees will benefit a future generation.
 
Future generations will NOT benefit from new trees.

The UK suffers from a lack of old and decaying trees as virtually all
British woodlands have been managed for hundreds of years for productive
timber. Few trees have been left to grow to their full age, and then
fall and rot, so becoming hosts to fungi, lichen, mosses and
invertebrates, and a food source and habitat for woodpeckers, bats and
other speies that prefer or are dependent on old trees.

Britain needs old, decayed and fallen rotting trees, not new ones.

The Forest Commission belatedly recognises this need in their new draft
forestry standard, presently in the consultation stage. The new
standards recomend *indefinite retention* of one percent of large
forests *allowing large standing and fallen dead wood to
develop...(being)...necessary for the development of parts of the eco-
system which depend on more mature woodland*.

Environmentalists would wish a much larger percentage of old wood to be
retained. The noted academic and woodland consultant George Peterken,
who is the foremost authority on our Ancient Semi-Natural Woodlands
(ASNW's) has replied to the consultation that 15 percent of all
woodlands should be left to (fruitfully) decay. This is obviously
difficult for commercial woodland owners is but is exactly the sort of
thing that conservation woodland owners -such as the LDNPA- should
initiate.

In environmental terms, that the beeches are decaying is the very reason
for the keeping them.

Anyone can, and it is delightful that many people do, plant new rows of
trees but what no one can do is plant a row of fungi-friendly 150+ year
old trees.

-- 
Theo Hopkins
Native Forest Network.england.
TEL: 01398 324122

For the forests and their fungi.