Popular Woodworking 2009-04 № 175, страница 6

- Out on a Limb •

BY CHRISTOPHER SCHWARZ, EDITOR

XT 7 POPULAR 1 •

WooDworking

Learn How. Discover Why. Build Better.

Are We Friend or Foe To the Trees?

S

<_yometimes when I'm on a walk with my children, they'll look up into the leafy branches and ask: "What kindoftreeisthat?" To which I'll reply: "Beats me. Let's cut it down and find out."

After a tree has been felled 1 can show you the difference between red oak and white, beechand birch, soft maple and hard. But when the tree is thriving and shrouded in green, I struggle to tell the difference between a willow and a walnut.

Like me, most woodworkers have an odd relationship with the society of trees. On the one hand, we are their ultimate destroyer. We prize the carcasses of the oldest trees with the straightest and widest trunks that are unmolested by disease, insects or barbed wire.

We pay exorbitant sums for the finest boards. In fact, 1 have seen how old-growth Appalachian forests are robbed by poachers with helicopters and chainsaws. This fact gives me pause every lime my hands pass over a 16"-wide board at the lumberyard.

Yet, it is the things we build that forge a deep human affection for wood. Less than 200 years ago, nearly every object was built from wood -every house, every dining table and every piece of treenware on the table.

And for me it was the amazing wooden objects built by human hands that first sparked my fascination with trees and my desire to learn how they function and grow. The grain, color and warmth of the wood caused me to study up on cambium, extra-tivesandtracheids.

So 1 was speechless at first when my youngest child insisted that I should be worried about "saving the trees."

At first I tried to explain to her that if we didn't build things out of wood, we would have to use other raw materials that aren't as renewable, such as metal, glass or petroleum-based plastics. She eyed me suspiciously because we recycle metal, glassand plastic in our house.

And then it came to me. When it comes to trees, woodworkers should be the creator, the preserver and the destroyer. As a destroyer, we slay the trees and cut their trunks into furniture-sized chunks. As preservers, the things we build with wood can last far beyond the lifetime of the maker or the tree. And these objects can inspire in others the love for the material and the living tree.

Finally, if we are good woodworkers, we are also the creators. We should plant trees to replace the ones we harvest.

And that was my most sincere desire last spring. On the day that I finished building a wall cabinet for my youngest, we planted two dogwoods in our back yard. The smile on my face lasted all day - until the lawn service showed up that afternoon and turned the two saplings to mulch.

Like I said, it's an odd relationship we have with the trees. Perhaps some day I'll get it right. PW

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12 ■ Popular Woodworking April 2009

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