December 11, 2023 – Forestry and survival have been linked together since the beginning of time. Wood for spears, bows, shields and barriers against enemies, were common even in ancient of times. Wood for rifles, cannons, heat for cooking and hundreds of other uses helped make it possible for us to defeat England and become the start of a great nation. Wood for ships was paramount to early naval support. Such support has continued through to the present day, although wood forms have considerably changed. In WWI, enough wood from U.S. forests to build one million six-room homes (8 billion board feet) was used for war purposes. In WWII forests supported the war effort by providing enough wood to build 6.5 million homes (about 65 billion board feet). It’s not an exaggeration to say forests have been indispensable to national defense.
As our nation expanded westward, wood provided wheels, wagons, barrels, forts, as well as homes, and yes, paper for news. Even those sod prairie homes you’ve heard about nearly always had wood supporting their roofs. Leaky and muddy in a rainstorm perhaps, but they provided a home, at least for a few years at a time. Wood treatment was unknown, but species, such as Osage Orange (Horse Apple, Bois d’arc, hedge) and Cedar were found to provide long lasting fence posts.
Today, we still buy regular lumber, but wood is often used with glues and composite materials to provide new and much improved products, such as flooring, insulation, countertops, desks, shelves, and so on. And yes, it’s still being used for pulp to provide newsprint for this paper. Wood; it’s like the postman. It’s so visible, it’s invisible, but without it, life as we know it would change drastically for the worse. Forests today keep 57.8 billion tons of carbon out the atmosphere.
