Screaming at the person that suggested we just reinvent illegal logging. NO. That already exists and it is BAD. Because we NEED THE AMAZON
I can explain, I know fuckall about woodworking, but I do know fucklots about trees.
The furniture of our memory comes from a period of massive-scale deforestation that completely annihilated old growth in HUGE (I mean huge) swaths of the planet, including the ENTIRE eastern half of the USA. The deforestation was also ridiculously wasteful, with the trees being used not primarily for excellent long-lasting hardwood furniture but often being used for bullshit like fueling iron foundries.
Sustainable, minimally harmful logging can be done, but it is difficult to do at scale, because building big ass roads through a forest and driving heavy machinery through the forest damages way, way, way more of that ecosystem than just the trees being removed. It destroys and kills many plants and the micro-habitats they worked hard to create, disrupts the root systems, causes soil erosion which pours choking mud into the crystal clear forest streams, and kills wildlife in great numbers. If you want to minimize the harm, you really have to do it old-school—OLD old-school—using mules or heavy draft horses for hauling.
It has taken a truly Herculean effort by conservation organizations to stop the remainder of old growth forests from being Completely Destroyed, thereby preventing humankind from Dying Badly.
An old growth forest is often defined as one that has never been logged. Since the lifespans of trees are much longer than human lifespans, and it takes many cycles of tree lifespans for a forest to develop the characteristics of "old growth" (characteristics we barely understand, since these forests are rare), old growth is probably not renewable on a time scale any human who will know our names will ever witness.
Old-growth forests that have never been logged contain wood with highly desirable characteristics that cannot be replicated under any other conditions. I have been to an old-growth forest. There is no way to even talk about it. The trees are pretty large in diameter, yes, but they are also TALL, so tall that you can't even see the leaves clearly enough to guess at what kind of tree it is.
This does not come from age alone, it comes from generations and generations of trees growing underneath a mature tree canopy, causing them to grow tall and straight to reach the light, requiring successive generations to grow even taller and straighter, and so on. Trees have to be grown under a forest canopy, or else in highly crowded situations of unnaturally high competition, to grow straight. Trees in areas with lots of open spaces interrupting the tree canopy spread out and branch a lot more, greatly reducing the amount of usable "log," and they also are highly exposed to wind and storm damage, meaning they are bent, twisted and scarred.
Old oaks in temperate savanna environment pull off this aesthetic majestically, but those trees are not very useful for woodworking in forms that use long straight planks: they warp and bend and buckle under stress in wonky, unpredictable ways.
The tall trees of old-growth forests, however, often have no low branches which means their wood is extraordinarily unblemished. Before the devastation, Liriodendron tulipifera could have 100 feet of trunk with no branching marks. Almost all of those trees are gone.
We barely even have photos of what the old-growth from my area of the country was like. There was a White Oak cut down in the Appalachian Mountains that was thirteen feet thick. Red oak and tulip poplar got to six feet, sycamore over ten feet. That is thickness—not circumference, DIAMETER. (I can't think of this too much or I will cry.)
More relevant to OP, i'm pretty sure in Australia, they had the largest trees On Earth!
When old-growth forests were still common to plunder for resources, that old-growth wood was used for some things that would be much more difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish today. For example, those huge old wooden ships from the 1800's? You need old growth trees for the masts. It is for this reason that the slave trade deforested Europe. The slave ships had to be made from BIG trees.
High quality hardwood furniture of the olden days is rare because the resource used to make it is only marginally renewable. Nowadays, trees are farmed for wood, like the eucalypts mentioned, and that looks like this:
and if you think this looks like the screams of the damned, that is because it is. It's a monoculture, nothing much can live here, there's no understory or variety of species. They are planted very densely to make them grow straight, but the planks will be very small and flimsy compared to the prodigious beams you see framing old houses.
Good wood takes TIME to grow. If you wanted to farm trees to make masts for an old-timey ship (for instance) your first paycheck would go to your kid if not your grandkid, cause it's going to take like 80-100 years minimum.
Because of this, woodwork-able wood, especially hardwood, is expensive— and yet, nowhere near as expensive as it SHOULD be, probably. Illegal logging is still rampant, and the legal stuff is still threatening very fragile ecosystems. Companies have to be forced to take any steps towards sustainability.
So there you have it. We exploited the hell out of a resource that was non-renewable on human timescales, and now you can't hardly buy decent furniture anywhere.
germansingergirl
titsay
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romaincrisis
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