Destruction of forests

How can I tell you so that you understand how wrong we have done ourselves by treating the biosphere, including forests, as an unlimited resource and destroying everything we touch. How easy it is to take ownership of a natural resource and turn it into money. It's pure business. Really? We have practically eaten the very basis of our lives, sold it, filled it with rubbish. We are behaving in exactly the same way as the simple baker's yeast, which considers its potential as a limit in a good lukewarm dough until the heat of the oven reaches it. The same thing happens to us. Only this time we've lit the oven. While I like disaster movies, I don't like the fact that I'm living in one as I enter the second half of my life. It's practically a war with ourselves and we're losing. As living beings, we cannot transcend the instincts that control us. In that sense we are really on the same level as lemmings. Don't be fooled by the fact that you wear clothes, drive a car, have a complicated job, if you think about it, everything serves one purpose, not to thirst, not to starve, not to get cold, not to eat another, just like animals. It's unfortunate that the civilisation that is the basis of our prosperity was made possible by fossil fuels, which burned up the carbon sequestered by life and put it back into the atmosphere. And the life that could be reabsorbed is destroyed. It will be hell. Worse than the two world wars combined. This is not an alarm. It is accurate foresight.

The hellish cancer of our age is the crisis of values, that we only ask the price of everything, but do not think about what the real values are. And we don't care about them at all because they seem limitless to us. They are not. I can see our handprints in the forests, even in the spruce forests above 1,000 metres. But in this post, I've included my photos from the Bükk. The opening picture was taken on the edge of a chert oak, where the new growth meets the older growth. If you look closely, you will find three dead trees. It was scorching sun and heat on the forest edge, which was beating down on the trees. I hiked back to the denser part where the cool water evaporated from the moist soil and plants, and the forest looked considerably more beautiful. I did notice, however, that the oak canopy was just as stunted as it was here in the backyard. They did not look vigorous. Interesting, but I've never been in a beech forest in the Beech. I've been mushrooming in mature oak groves and hornbeam-oak groves. It was like being in the Mecsek. I wouldn't have been able to tell which mountain region I was in from the summer picture of the plant community. The mountains are also simply becoming a featureless cultural landscape due to "cultivation". Because the most important thing is our comfort, our timber supply. The second picture was taken on the border between the oak "freed" from hornbeam and the part still covered with hornbeam. Needless to say, the latter was the more natural looking and better. Now I'm wondering if I saw a natural forest when I was running around in the interior of the Beech, i.e. a stand of different species of trees of different ages, plus shrubs and herbaceous plants. I shake my head. No.

Ironically, the part that made the deepest impression on me was also man-made. However, it had been cultivated centuries earlier, and time had blurred human intent with the will of nature. Stepping into the wooded pasture of the Cherry Village and seeing the old cherry oaks, their sad relatives in the 'woods', ready to be cut, made my heart beat. I hurried with silent steps to the nearest one to touch its sturdy trunk. I feasted my eyes on its foliage, then, entranced by the first one, I looked over its closer kin. Indulgence at 110%. Rarely does one get to a place that has been undisturbed for a long time. The only one here is the grey cattle gully, which was fortunately at its overnight resting place. These animals are semi-feral and not afraid to use their horns. They don't want to meet one face to face. They are efficient guardians of the area. There are places where the crowds don't need to go. Crowd tourism is one of the worst things. It actually does more harm than good. But here too, self-interest prevails and no one has any regard for the interests of the community, of nature. Very few people understand what is wrong with our civilization.

On the map section of hikingtrails.com, the Long Valley Pine is the point. Because I saw the felled spruce pines piled up on the side of the road, and the loader went to get another load. I'm sure you've heard that climate change is killing the planted pine plantations and they are all being harvested. If you visit the Mátra, you will see the gutted, suffering, dying trees. But you don't have to go far, today I saw two dead spruce trees in my home town. And they were older specimens, about 15 metres tall. Beech is also in decline, with barely 1% of beech trees remaining in our country. Here in the south-east, the woody vegetation is completely disappearing, leaving only the bush. The upsurge in tree planting is commendable, but it is good to bear in mind that water should also be provided. Remember this spring, when there was a ban on fires in March! Forests become extremely fragile in prolonged drought. It's hair-raising to experience the rattling drought and imagine a single spark turning a cooling shelter into hell. Plant a forest! Wonderful. It really is. It could go up in smoke at any time. See this year's wildfires around the world, which are increasing in extent year on year. The process is spinning. We're falling off the chain of life because we can't control our animal urges. How is that bad? I doubt I should condemn man, the animal that thought itself a god. We are, after all, naked lemmings. Nothing more. A cog in the machine of life. I'm sure plastic will be a breeding ground for new life forms, just as some form of machine intelligence will also outlive us. But as a species, we humans and most of the plant-animal-fungus species of the natural environment that allows us to exist will be destroyed along with us. We are an evolutionary dead end. But there is nothing wrong with that. We have started an interesting process. Although it is sad to see the destruction. But out of the ruins, new life is emerging. After our twilight comes the dawn of something else.

The original article in Hungarian was published on 23 August 2019. Translated by DeepL.