While our focus rests primarily on coppice woodland management and other related means of symbiotic silviculture, a much deeper theme underlies the nuts and bolts of system design, establishment, and maintenance. This book attempts to reconnect our culture with the woodlands that we are part of. As we’ll explore in later chapters, when well-managed and maintained, coppice woodlands and their biological community are exceedingly healthy, robust, and resilient, host a broad diversity of species, age classes, and forms, and yield an array of forest products for human use. While the modern ecoforestry movement also places humans as active and beneficial participants in the landscape, the longevity of coppice woodlands, stools, and pollards the world over pay testament to the widespread suitability of this land management technique. Industrial culture has enabled this disconnect to become the norm, but today our need to reconnect with our woodlands grows ever clearer.Ĭoppice forestry is an ancient silvicultural practice that provides one of the best living examples of a symbiotic, cooperative relationship between humans and forest ecosystems. Historically, only a privileged few were affluent enough to detach themselves from their relationship with woodlands for anything other than hunting and recreation. Most of us have no idea where the wood that shelters us, keeps us warm, cleans and oxygenates our air, and stabilizes our soil actually comes from, and even more importantly, how it’s produced and managed.
For the vast majority of us in the one-third or “developed” world, that relationship is virtually unconscious. Keeping all this in mind, take a moment to reflect on your relationship (and more broadly, our cultural relations) with the forests that support us. In fact, life as we know it would not be possible without them. It’s hard to imagine life on Earth without the myriad benefits proffered by trees. Food: for humans, livestock, mammals, birds, insects, fungi, and microbes.Fuel: for heating, cooking, electricity.Even in modern times, when we are so dramatically dissociated from the resources and landscapes that support us, it’s remarkably enlightening to reflect on all the ways trees influence our lives and our experience of the world around us. The lives of humans and woody plants have been inextricably linked for as long as our species has populated the planet. NY Climate Week – Equity, Fairness, and Climate Change
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