Hi Peter and All,
Ants are very successful and will be around long after the
'superior' animals such as Humans have made earth hostile to
Humans and much more via climate change. I do not recall details
but ant strategy is build around 'hive wisdom' ?
If an ant sees something which needs to be done it proceeds
to do it without delay. One could do worse than adopt ant
mentality; act according to individual judgment.
Manipulating the natural world resembles steering a container ship with one horsehair. But there is, given the safety of numbers, always a chance that one seed of many will become a tree.
Over time I took several Plant Ecology courses and came away with the notion that animals had no effect on plant cover; but they do. One year I planted about 100 Oak seedlings and gradually all were bitten off. In 1980 when I bought the North Alton woodlot an Oak about belt high caught my eye. 42 years later it is still belt high after being girdled by mice and gnawed off by rabbits numerous times in spite of 1/2" hardware cloth mouse guards.
But the old saying "Little drops of water, little grains of sand make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land" also says that one should think and act like an ant.
The great menace facing forest cover is climate change;
especially prolonged rainless periods during the growing season
and high winds.
Another menace are those who use forest products every day by using paper in various forms, live in wooden houses and have wooden furniture but denounce logging. e.g. the new math-- "What do you think of a man who will murder 1000 trees a day just to feed his wife and family ?"
A recent wind (2013 ?) uprooted or broke off nearly all of my
large live Spruce so I considered salvage; horse logging to brow
along my woods roads and conversion to lumber by portable mill so
I contacted a nearby mill owner. He had over 500 large Spruce down
and intended to let them rot in the woods because, as he
explained, regulations forbid the sale of other than certified
wood and certification is expensive. Unless you can use the lumber
there is no point in having it sawed out. So I gave them to a
friend to salvage for firewood.
This is extremely two faced because Fir lumber is now classed with Spruce. In former times when one could sell Spruce lumber without certification, even the lowest crook would not have had fir sawed to lumber because it is brittle and weak. Consequently potential lumber rots in the woods and more demand is diverted to Crown Land.
Dave, Kentville