The fragrance that wafts from eons of accumulated mulch in the forest’s core hearkens to fertility’s very origins. In the Białowieża, the profusion of life owes much to all that is dead. Almost a quarter of the organic mass aboveground is in assorted stages of decay— more than 50 cubic yards of decomposing trunks and fallen branches on every acre, nourishing thousands of species of mushrooms, lichens , bark beetles, grubs, and microbes that are missing from the orderly, managed woodlands that pass as forests elsewhere. Together those species stock a sylvan larder that provides for weasels, pine martens, raccoons, badgers, otters, fox, lynx, wolves, roe deer, elk, and eagles. More kinds of life are found here than anywhere else on the continent— yet there are no surrounding mountains or sheltering valleys to form unique niches for endemic species. The Białowieża Puszcza is simply a relic of what once stretched east to Siberia and west to Ireland.
The existence in Europe of such a legacy of unbroken biological antiquity owes, unsurprisingly, to high privilege . During the 14th century, a Lithuanian duke named Władysław Jagiełło , having successfully allied his grand duchy with the Kingdom of Poland, declared the forest a royal hunting preserve. For centuries, it stayed that way. When the Polish-Lithuanian union was finally subsumed by Russia, the Białowieża became the private domain of the tsars. Although occupying Germans took lumber and slaughtered game during World War I, a pristine core was left intact, which in 1921 became a Polish national park . The timber pillaging resumed briefly under the Soviets, but when the Nazis invaded, a nature fanatic named Hermann Goring decreed the entire preserve off-limits, except by his pleasure.
Following World War II, a reportedly drunken Josef Stalin agreed one evening in Warsaw to let Poland retain two-fifths of the forest. Little else changed under communist rule, except for construction of some elite hunting dachas—in one of which, Viskuli, an agreement was signed in 1991 dissolving the Soviet Union into free states. Yet, as it turns out, this ancient sanctuary is more threatened under Polish democracy and Belarusian independence than it was during seven centuries of monarchs and dictators. Forestry ministries in both countries tout increased management to preserve the Puszcza’s health. Management, however, often turns out to be a euphemism for culling— and selling—mature hardwoods that otherwise would one day return a windfall of nutrients to the forest.
littlegreenpills posted:do you HAVE to put politics into everything god
Abetted by its Chinese and Soviet communist mentors, North Korea invaded the South in 1950. Eventually, United Nations forces pushed them back. A 1953 truce ended what had become a stalemate along the original dividing line, the 38th parallel. A strip two kilometers on either side of it became the no-man’s-land known as the Demilitarized Zone.
Much of the DMZ runs through mountains. Where it follows the courses of rivers and streams , the actual demarcation line is in bottomland where, for 5,000 years before the hostilities began, people grew rice. Their abandoned paddies are now sown thickly with land mines. Since the armistice in 1953, other than brief military patrols or desperate, fleeing North Koreans, humans have barely set foot here.
I spent a summer once touring Poland by bicycle. It is a lovely country, one where small Catholic children, cute as buttons, almost entirely dressed in silk, turn up around every corner. I read from a travel brochure that in Poland the percentage of people who perished in the Second World War is larger than in any other country - about six million, if my memory doesn't fail me. From another part of the brochure I calculated that since the end of the war, population growth has compensated for the loss threefold in forty years? On my next trip after that, I went through the most bombed-out city in the world, Dresden. It was terrifying in its ugliness and filth, overstuffed to the point of suffocation - a smoke-filled, polluting nest where the first spontaneous impression was that another vaccination from the sky wouldn't do any harm. Who misses all those who died in the Second World War? Who misses the twenty million executed by Stalin? Who misses Hitler's six million Jews? Israel creaks with overcrowdedness; in Asia minor, overpopulation creates struggles for mere square meters of dirt. The cities throughout the world were rebuilt and filled to the brim with people long ago, their churches and monuments restored so that acid rain would have something to eat through. Who misses the unused procreation potential of those killed in the Second World War? Is the world lacking another hundred million people at the moment? Is there a shortage of books, songs, movies, porcelain dogs, vases? Are one billion embodiments of motherly love and one billion sweet silver-haired grandmothers not enough?
guidoanselmi posted:chernobyl created a great nature sanctuary. thx gorby
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18721292
http://wildfiretoday.com/2014/03/16/chernobyls-trees-are-not-decaying-normally-increasing-the-risk-of-a-nuclear-wildfire/
swampman posted:guidoanselmi posted:chernobyl created a great nature sanctuary. thx gorby
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18721292http://wildfiretoday.com/2014/03/16/chernobyls-trees-are-not-decaying-normally-increasing-the-risk-of-a-nuclear-wildfire/
A few sorties dumping agent orange should do the trick.