We must save the French forest: To the citizens trees!

Baudouin Vercken is the co-founder of the EcoTree company, specializing in the ecological and economic development of forests and biodiversity.

The French forest is doing badly because its economy is doing badly.

If its area has doubled since the nineteenth century and that it represents more than a quarter of the country's surface with a level of afforestation that exceeds that of the Middle Ages, the situation is not satisfactory, far from it.

For more than thirty years, close to 300 reports on the forest and wood have followed one another, some commissioned by the highest authorities of the State, the subject is both strategic and regal.

In 2014, still Minister of the Economy, the current President of the Republic made these remarks: “

Today the timber industry is one of the greatest economic aberrations that we know, with a country which exports its timber and which imports overwhelmingly finished wood-based products

”.

Of course, not everything goes for export, but more could be done to make better use of this resource on French territory.

To read also:

"Reforestation, biodiversity: How the ecological transition supposes to redevelop the territory"

The same causes producing the same effects, the diagnoses are repeated, whether by the large state bodies or the most informed experts: the French forest is underexploited and its composition does not meet supply and demand. ;

forestry investment is largely insufficient;

the industrial tool, sometimes obsolete, does not put enough value on French timber;

the trade deficit remains very high;

the forest-wood industry is struggling to offer concrete solutions.

The French timber industry is experiencing a deficit even though the forest area in France is the third largest among the countries of the European Union.

The most optimistic will dare to think that the evil is less, when it comes only to problems directly or indirectly linked to the economy.

After all, there is something magical about the living being outside the pecuniary.

Only here it is, it is not.

If the forest gives up its economic function, 450,000 non-relocatable jobs will disappear.

Moreover, it is all the men and women who participate in the maintenance and sublimation of forests who will no longer do their work and will let forests wither away.

Because it must be said and repeated, the forest needs the man who accompanies his work but does not replace it.

Like the stork needs man to establish his nest on the roof of a house.

As humans join the service of medicine, thereby renouncing the radical naturalness that would define them at the outset.

Today, the French timber industry is experiencing a deficit even though the forest area in France is the third largest of the European Union countries and the demand for timber continues to increase.

To read also:

"It is time to build an ecology of France from below"

Within the next ten years, France will have to have renewed 500,000 hectares of forest, which corresponds to only 3% of the current total area, to make up for the already accumulated delay.

But that's not all, the forest is mostly private (only 25% of the forest is public), often caught up in complex joint inheritance;

and a very large number of forest owners admit that they do not have the financial means necessary to maintain and renew the forest.

What can the state do in this case?

Let's be honest, not much.

So why should a common heritage, essential to everyone's life, remain the concern of a few?

Don't we all have an interest in our forests being beautiful and fulfilling their ecological role?

Why don't we all do it?

The interest of the French social body in favor of replanting and forest management can only stimulate an essential sector for employment and essential for living beings.

Inviting all of our fellow citizens to invest with commitment and responsibility in the French forest heritage now seems to be a necessity.

Because we need to improve forest management, from planting to processing, for an increase in wood mobilization and an ecological valuation of our massifs.

The interest of the French social body in favor of replanting and especially forest management can only stimulate an essential sector for employment, but also and above all essential for living beings.

It will put an end to the ecological aberration of wood processing abroad because professionals will invest to produce furniture and buildings in French wood.

Wood, a vector of innovation and technicality, has become the material of the future par excellence, whether in construction (where it asserts itself against all-concrete which has long dominated), in green chemistry or even in the development of high technologies.

Let's bet on him!

We cannot continue to ignore the situation and we would benefit from the forest-wood sector becoming part of a dialectic with all the French people who love their forests madly, with new entrepreneurs who innovate to protect and renew these settings. of biodiversity, with companies wishing to give meaning to their investments.

All this is part of an innovative public utility logic where everyone can support the forest, its plantations, its maintenance, and thus promote a heritage asset as well as its economic, social and environmental benefits.