Coppicing & pollarding trees could provide us with energy, materials and food — but also with a lot of glow-worms (or fireflies), a research paper argues:

The glow-worm Lampyris noctiluca (Linnaeus, 1767) (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) is thought to be declining in the UK. Average glowing counts at 19 sites in Essex, south-east England, changed from ca. 20 glow-worms per km of transect in 2001 to ca. 5 glow-worms per km in 2018.

There is a clear signal of climate warming and drying effects on glow-worm numbers, but a substantially greater proportion of variation in glowing female counts is explained by local-scale site factors, such as unmanaged scrub encroachment. Brash and wood chippings provide habitat for glow-worm larvae while bare ground is important for glowing females.

Management that increased site populations included scrub clearance on a seawall flood defense embankment and coppicing in an ancient woodland. Sustained favorable management of sites by coppicing and scrub cutting may buffer populations against declines caused by climate drying and warming and benefit other insects such as butterflies.

In the UK, the widespread cessation of traditional coppicing in ancient woodlands in the 20th century has had a detrimental impact on the insect fauna associated with open woods:

Glow-worms were said to have disappeared from many Essex woods in the late 19th century, and have become very rare in Epping Forest, possibly due to the cessation of traditional pollarding (cutting of trees at approximately 5 m off the ground to prevent deer browsing re-growth) in the 20th century. Anecdotal evidence from Shut Heath Wood suggests that coppicing of willow has been beneficial for glow-worms over many years.

In the summer after winter coppicing had taken place there was often a number of glow worms in the coppiced area. Once the coppice had grown, even after 1 year’s re-growth, glow worms declined in the coppiced area. This indicates that glowworms may have a continuous cycle of building up abundance in newly coppiced (cut) areas, before declining or moving to an adjacent cut area (also known as a coupe).

Railways

Railway lines, used or disused, also offer a particularly good habitat for glow-worms, perhaps because the track bed (ballast) has a plentiful supply of the calcium which snails need to build their shells:

Most of Britain’s railway network was built at a time (1800s) when glow-worms were much more widespread, therefore providing an excellent system of ‘corridors’ along which isolated habitats could be colonized. Railway lines, both disused and active, provide ideal glow-worm habitats, with egg laying occurring in exposed, well-drained areas on top of embankments, while larvae may need the moisture gradients present on the steep slopes to forage.

Read the whole story: Gardiner, Tim. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out! Reversing the Glow-Worm’s Decline.” (2021).

Image: Fireflies in the woods near Nuremberg, Germany, exposure time 30 seconds. By Quit007 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

“We need two billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO₂ produced through fossil fuels. The total investment to clean the air from the CO₂ pollution is therefore five trillion USD. This investment is smaller than the costs of saving the bank system since 2008. Both USA and Europe spent over six trillion USD to save their banks.”

Read more: The Treesolution, Pieter Hoff.

Image: A forest in Montenegro. Credit: Snežana Trifunović.

“An ingenious British designer has come up with the ultimate environmentally-friendly way to create stunning household furniture – by letting Mother Nature do all the hard work. Gavin Munro grows young trees into specially-designed plastic moulds, pruning and guiding the branches into shape before grafting them together to form ultra-tough joints. Using this method he’s already created several prototype pieces and has a field in Derbyshire where he’s currently tending a crop of 400 tables, chairs and lampshades which he hopes to harvest next year.”

“You start by training and pruning young tree branches as they grow over specially made formers. At certain points we then graft them together so that the object grows in to one solid piece – I’m interested in the way this is like a kind of organic 3D printing that uses air, soil and sunshine as its source material. After it’s grown into the shape we want, we continue to care and nurture the tree as it thickens and matures before harvesting it in the Winter and then letting it season and dry.”

“Each of the pieces have grown from one tree, planted specifically for that reason, its limbs guided in an exact shape and later grafted together to produce the unique pieces of furniture, which he hopes are the pioneers of a new method of sustainable, efficient and ecologically aware production.”

See & Read more:

• How to grow your own furniture: eco-friendly designer uses special moulds to guide branches into ready-made chairs, tables and lampshades.

• The innovators: growing solid wooden furniture without the joins.

• Pictures: Munro’s website Full Grown.

Via Unconsumption.

The time spent working at a forward-bent angle of more than 20 degrees was reduced by nearly half. Hand gripping effort was reduced by more than half. Lifting strain was reduced by 40%.

Workers reported less work-related pain when using the handles, and those who had the most severe symptoms at the start reported the most improvement.

Taken from “Simple Solutions: ergonomics for farm workers“, The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 2001.

“The Dugout Canoe Project (.pdf) began as an experiment to use traditional Native American technologies. Archaeologists are reliant on just a few ethnohistoric sources that mention how Native Americans made dugout canoes using stone tools and fire. Numerous contemporary examples of dugouts exist, particularly Plimouth Plantation’s Wampanoag Indian Program, made by burning and scraping out logs. However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has attempted to fell a tree using only stone tools and fire. We wanted to see if we could cut down a live tree using these technologies, something that may not have been done in this area for several hundred years.”

“Dugout canoes are probably the first type of boat ever made. People from all over the world made dugouts. They were widely used in North America before the arrival of Europeans. Dugout canoes were made by Native Americans across North and South America for transportation and to hunt fish with a spear, bow and arrows, or with hooks made from antler or bones. In Eastern North America, dugout canoes were typically made from a single log of chestnut or pine. Carefully controlled fires were used to hollow out these logs. The fires were extinguished at intervals to scrape out the burned wood with wood, shell or stone tools, giving the canoes a flat bottom with straight sides.”

Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum. More posts on primitive technology.

“Flagged trees only reflect the prevailing wind direction of the strongest winds, which may occur during only part of the year. Seasonal variations in the wind have a pronounced effect on the type of wind deformation and these effects are characterized in this handbook. Techniques for estimating the mean annual wind speed have been developed using indices of wind effects on trees. These indices have been calibrated on two widely distributed species of conifers. The main conclusions are that trees provide a simple, inexpensive and quick method for identifying promising locations where more detailed measurements can verify the wind potential.”

Trees as an indicator of wind power potential (.pdf), John E. Wade & E. Wendell Hewson, 1979.
Vegetation as an indicator of high wind velocity (.pdf), DOE report, John E. Wade & R.W. Baker, 1977

More low-tech wind power.

He could have saved himself some work if he had seen the illustration on the right, which I copied from a 1901 Dutch newspaper. The accompanying text says:

“Windmills are ugly contraptions and many attempts have been made to make them look better. This illustration shows how nature and mechanics can coexist.”

“It is a windmill constructed in combination with two trees. The trees only serve as a support for the upper part and for the ladder to reach the top. The mill was built in Illinois (US) and worked so well that several have been constructed.”

I could not find any more information about it.

“Presenting the antithesis to the high-tech, high-cost and genetically-modified industrial vision sometimes pushed on Africa, Science Daily reports on the potential of evergreen agriculture and the use of fertilizer trees to increase food production, in a low-cost and environmentally more sustainable way”, writes Matthew McDermott at Treehugger.

“Using groundwater to grow crops and trees doesn’t make sense to Pieter Hoff, a Dutch inventor. Not only are traditional irrigation techniques inefficient because most of the water is lost to evaporation, Mr. Hoff says, but water can be easily captured from the atmosphere to grow just about anything.

To prove his point, Mr. Hoff retired from the lily and tulip export business in 2003, established his company, AquaPro, and devoted himself to the development of the Groasis Waterboxx (manuals), which he says will grow food crops and trees even in the driest places on earth.” Read more.