The answer is we are feeling well and healthy when we are being loved and able to pass this love on to others. It is well known that people who speak to and touch their plants lovingly have the most beautiful flowers.
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Every tree is an amazing living being which connects heaven to earth. The plant and animal communities which live in and around trees constitute the forest. The question is when is a tree well? What is the foundation of our wellbeing?
However, this is a big mistake which is about as erroneous as the planting of monocultures 20, 50, and 100 years ago.
Imagine your child has measles. The doctor does nothing else but counts all the red spots on your child's skin and records it in a highly bureaucratic way. Would you trust this doctor? It is a similar situation with our forest. Statistics alone will not do the trick. Forest managers and farmers have learnt much and nowadays, monocultures are rarely being planted anymore in middle Europe.
Is the decline of forest still an issue today? Our technically advanced world, where all decision-making is done by the logical left brain, has tried to capture the phenomena of forest dieback with environmental impact studies, percentages and statistics. We also registered tree diseases of particular types such as elm, oak and spruce to name just a few.
On the other hand, most of our forests have survived the catastrophic storms of 1990 (violent storms Vivian and Wiebke) quite well. A sign post to a positive development?
In the early 1980's, forestry death was brought to the attention of the public for the first time. Dire reports predicted that there would not be a single tree left standing in Europe took turns with appeasements and playing down the problem. I have met people who swap industry regulations for the 'New Moon Calendar' in the same fanatical way.
Nothing ever benefits by fanaticism, pretension and narrow mindedness. To live in harmony with nature has to do with appreciation and consideration and the same goes for wood. The wood would have been sprayed against the bark beetle and possibly been dipped into a fungicide. This wood would be perfectly graded and comply with all standards. Nevertheless, I would not use wood that has been so badly mistreated to build a winter garden...
Branches are the organs of a tree and are a big part of the wood story.
For the winter garden I could have used an industrial 'high grade' wood without any knots. It could have grown in an unnatural monoculture, harvested while still juvenile, in the middle of a growth spurt and dried fast in a kiln. We have used beams which have up to 10cm 'splay knots' to support large glass panels. According to standards, these beams are of low grade. However, they have performed perfectly for many years and they will do so for generations to come.
These regulations don't say anything about the right selection or the right time for harvesting trees. They do not mention the markedly different qualities of juvenile and mature trees. There is no comparison between wood drying naturally slow and super-fast kiln drying.
I own a wonderful table which shows a very beautiful grain. This table continues to uplift me when I just sit down and let my hand touch and slide across the top. It actually provides me with a sense of peace and strength.
"It would be foolhardy for me to deny phenomena and linkages of things only because it hasn't yet been proven scientifically. Of course I cannot confirm either as long as they haven't been investigated appropriately. However, I myself am a lover of nature.
Intellectually we have analyzed and registered this information and we know that the production, use and disposal of these products are very harmful to our environment.
We are aware that by burning treated wood dioxins and other harmful substances are being released into the atmophere and cause health and environmental problems. This inability to swiftly adjust our instinctive and emotional reactions to new dangers turns out to be a disadvantage for us. Timber preservatives which endanger our health and environment however are available in hardware and trade shops even though these products are causing disease and sometimes even death to children and adults.
We all have inherited a natural dislike for spoiled food. No one ever has the idea to eat rotten and smelly meat and a butcher who sells rotten meat would be punished by law.
Only in the past century have we been confronted with a huge amount of new unknown dangers. The negative effects from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, the chemical accidents from Seveso and Bhopal to the court cases regarding wood preservatives can be rationalized, however our reflexes and instincts can't adjust as quickly.
Human behavior studies show that it takes a very long time for new protective reactions to anchor in our DNA and a few generations are just not enough. Rotten meat for example, has always existed and for generations we have been protected by our genetic information.
The interesting bit of this story is:
Outdoors, untreated wood from slow-growing trees such as alpine Larch, Oak and Robinia will actually last and even outlast treated pine or spruce. We actually arrive at the same goal without the use of preservatives. Tourists, Sharks and Wood Preservation
A shark attack in the Mediterranean summer season would receive sensational reports by the press. They would discuss at length the danger of sharks for the upteenth time and many people would instinctively perceive the danger. 2) Synthetic chemicals such as insecticides and fungicides on their own or in combination with salts. One variation, which often is thought of harmless, is the treatment with chromium salts. However, trivalent chromium is suspected to be a carcinogenic. Synthetic preservatives turn wood into toxic waste and pose severe health threats to humans, animals, and the environment.
This has triggered reactions from the population and city councils. More and more communities refuse to use wood treated with poisonous heavy metals for their playgrounds and this is a good development. Their reason is that the expected cost of disposing of this toxic wood would be too high! I keep wondering why their first and utmost concern isn't the health of the children.
Why? We have learnt to be aware of dangers which have been known to us for the past 20,000 years of human history. To be eaten by a big animal is one of the dangers which have always threatened us and we have adjusted to that not only mentally and physically but also instinctively and emotionally and specific protective reflexes are being passed on to the next generation to stay clear of sharks, wolves, and bears.
Wood Outdoors
Timber treated with insecticides and fungicides for outdoor use are often used in sensitive areas such as playgrounds and vegetable patches. There are two different ways to impregnate: I just cannot figure out, what all this imported chipboard is being used for or where it is dumped. There must be a gigantic hole somewhere in Austria, Germany and other west European countries where it all ends up. Or is it being sold as locally produced and formaldehyde-free panels?
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