Timber Products Are Useful Every Day

Forest products have been in the mainstream of human activities for thousands of years and long before Jesus worked as a carpenter. Woodcutters feature in many children’s stories as people who lived secret lives in the shadows and produced charcoal and timber.

In countries where trees grow plentifully lumber is used for building. In countries where there are hardly any trees houses are built out of mud or stone but some timber is needed for roof trusses so poles are transported up mountain sides on the backs of donkeys. This shows how great the demand for lumber is in building.

Timber growing lush in equatorial forests has been left largely undisturbed until recently. However, northern countries have used timber in a sustained manner for centuries. In the reign of Henry V111 and Elizabeth 1 in England forests of oak were decimated in order to build great navies. Massive trees were hauled by horsepower to coastal shipyards to serve as masts for sailing ships.

Perhaps the most important forest product is the oxygen given out by trees. That is essential for sustaining animal life on the planet and the health of the atmosphere. There is concern that logging activities, particularly in the great Amazon and African forests will lead to deforestation but this is really a problem only if logging is carried out indiscriminately.

Although logging in natural forests is widely condemned, fewer people are aware of the damage done by artificial forestation. In African countries natural grasslands have been covered by huge man-made forests of pine and eucalypt trees. They are alien to the African biome and grow like weeds in mono-culture systems destroying natural fauna and flora beneath them. A walk through a pine plantation will be silent as death with nothing beneath the trees but a carpet of acidic pine needles.

The manufacture of paper and cardboard from wood pulp is a relatively new industry having begun as late as the 1860s. Previously paper was made on a smaller scale from other materials. In the 1950s it became possible to plant huge areas of grassland to pine and gum trees. The trees grow rapidly in the foreign climate and are ready to be harvested in ten to fifteen years as straight poles of about fifteen centimetres.

When they are fifteen to twenty centimetres in diameter young trees are cut, stripped and cut into poles to be transported by road or rail to pulping factories. They may be exported in chip form or be processed further into various types of paper for local use.

Of all the many forest products wood pulp is perhaps the most important product from artificial forests. In addition to the strong demand from paper manufacturers there is potential for use as a bio-fuel. This would be regarded as a sustainable resource which is environmentally more acceptable and less damaging than fossil fuels. Long straight eucalypt poles have many uses as tall electricity poles and in the building and transportation industries as planks for pallets.

Forest products are used in many aspects of modern life. Almost every activity requires one product at least, from tissue paper to house building. However the possibility remains that the most important forest product is still oxygen produced from living trees.

Consumers depend on a huge range of forest products for many uses. Pulp and paper products are currently produced from managed tree crops in many locations.

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