Recently, many readers have been asking: why specifically cedar? Why do we transport a large number of cedar cones to areas of ecological degradation in the Russian Taiga, to places of forest fires and large-scale logging?
The question became particularly acute after reports from Siberia and the Far East that 'harvesters' had taken all the cedar cones from the taiga 'to the last one.' They literally cleaned the forest of a crucial, KEY element, on which the lives of entire species of birds and animals directly depend. Local biogeocoenoses depend on them!
People have even begun bringing in migrants by buses, who quickly clear the Russian Taiga of cedar gold. All of this is then shipped by train to China, which supplies about 90% of the global cedar nut market. In other words, people are robbing their own Russian Taiga, leaving animals and birds to starve, all for the 'economic rise of China.'
And now we start buying cedar cones instead of the Chinese, to bring them back to the Russian Taiga to save its inhabitants. Why is this work important? Why are we doing this?
THE POINT IS THAT CEDARS FORM AND SUPPORT THE ECOSYSTEMS OF THE RUSSIAN TAIGA
If you look at your apartment SYSTEMATICALLY, you can see 'key processes or technologies' without which the apartment wouldn't be an apartment.
How so?
Yes, it's simpler than you think!
Look: the key technologies/processes can be called all the engineering structures/communications of your home. They are 'key' because they involve your home in the processes of matter and energy exchange, making it 'alive,' making it some likeness of a 'living system'!
- heating and heat retention;
- cold water supply;
- hot water supply or heating cold water;
- sewage and waste removal;
- power supply and lighting.
Have you ever seen an 'abandoned building,' an abandoned house skeleton with long-broken windows?
This is what an apartment turns into if 'key elements of the system' are lost!
It's just the skeleton of a house, where you can guess the shape of the house, but all the useful functions of the residence are lost!
And a similar process happens with biological systems!
As officials tell us how wonderful everything is, the living biocoenoses of the Russian Taiga are turning into 'abandoned buildings,' into ruins, whose systemic functions are lost!
The most striking example.
The Siberian cedar.
Not just a key species, but a system-forming species in the biocoenoses of the boreal northern taiga, where it grows, of course. In colder regions, such functions may be performed by spruce, fir, or larch.
I have written about this: there is a wonderful poetic image when people say 'the mother of all trees' about such trees. This image reflects the essence perfectly! The whole secret is in the nuts. In providing BASIC nutrition to other system participants. In storing energy needed for survival throughout a long winter.
It's like a battery – just imagine your smartphone or laptop WITHOUT a battery. In the presence of an electrical network, you can even sit near an outlet and use the device.
This energy storage for the whole winter is provided by nut-bearing trees.
The main function, but not the only one. There is also the connection with the mycelium and the formation of the forest's mycorrhizal network. And the provision of a local microclimate in the forest. And the provision of a regional climatic regime by the forest as a whole.
There’s a lot more!
The system-forming factor is precisely the accumulation (storage and preservation) of energy for the winter.
No nut reserve – birds, mice, and squirrels died of hunger.
Then predators, foxes, and wolves died out.
And in spring, animals that were hibernating joined the kingdom of decaying corpses.
And some local biocoenosis turns into an uninhabited 'abandoned building' with broken windows: trees are still there, but you no longer hear the voices of birds!
I recently looked at photos of a small abandoned town. There are many such in our country. Both in the Russian North and in Siberia.
From afar, the photos show just a town. A group of panels’ silhouettes of five- and nine-story buildings. The fact that it is not a town but ruins that were a town recently isn’t visible.
And then, on a series of closer and closer photos, the true essence of the object becomes more and more noticeable.
Ruins...
Just the skeleton of a once-living town...
And I remembered that town itself. I walked its streets and the streets of another dozen similar towns and settlements deep in the Russian Taiga. There are really many of such objects!
You know, when you walk along such overgrown streets and window frames of house skeletons look at you, an increasing sense of anxiety arises. Wrongness. There are no voices... There are no car sounds...
Some rusty door swinging in the wind starts to literally turn your soul inside out with melancholy...
I'm talking about this because similar feelings of wrongness arise in some forest areas as well. No birds... No sounds of life...
The same thing – SYSTEMIC LOSS OF FUNCTIONS BY THE SYSTEM.
Unfortunately, very few people see these processes of loss of functionality, loss of viability!
Official statistics and control lie in their essence. Formal numerical indicators of accounting simply reflect nothing at all!
...forest area of 100 hectares...
...forest planting density of 50 trees per hectare...
...total number of trees...
...total wood volume on the root...
You got it, right?!
Similarly, you can provide statistics for a dead town that is no longer marked on the map and was closed as an administrative object thirty years ago!
...twenty streets...
...three hundred houses...
...three schools, seven kindergartens...
...club, station, and administration building...
Just don’t mention that people no longer live there, and these are RUINS of buildings and structures!
So, in our country (and apparently all over the world!), the situation is such that official state accounting does not reflect the systemic function of forests at all!
In essence, 'grandma's corpse' is OFFICIALLY equated to 'grandma'! But that’s not how it is!
This is SYSTEMATIC LIE!
Ruins of an uninhabited town – that’s NOT a town!
Grandma’s corpse – that’s NOT grandma!
And the remnants of biocoenoses, whose systemic functions are lost, are NOT living biocoenoses!
Once again, I bring up a question, for which there are simply no terms within the state's bureaucratic language!
Officials simply can’t sincerely understand what it's about because they don't even know such words!
And now we are taking a step towards making the mechanical picture of the world more realistic.
For several years, the Russian Taiga project has been implementing a program to help birds in winter.
In recent years, we see massive participation of our comrades, massive participation of people in different regions.
And that pleases. It means our project really works!
It means summarizing experience, creating methodological recommendations, and living by our example can lead to changes!
And now we are facing a real catastrophe: the Russian Taiga has been CLEARED of cedar cones, just taken and bluntly all taken to zero. This is already leading to the SYSTEMATIC LOSS OF FUNCTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN TAIGA. Wild nature will inevitably turn into ruins, and its inhabitants will die off one by one.
What should we, the defenders of the Russian Taiga, do? What can we do in this situation?
In fact, we have only two options!
FIRST.
All cedar cones are sold to China and the Chinese continue to make millions of dollars selling cedar gold worldwide. I remind you that export volumes to China have already increased multiple times this year! China supplies 90% of the world's cedar nuts.
Meanwhile, as the Chinese get richer and 'our people' clear the Russian Taiga of cedar cones, wild animals and birds will die in agony from hunger and cold. And no one will come to their aid! Along with them, the millennia-old biogeocoenoses will rapidly degrade and collapse, and our taiga will turn into the ruins of once-living ecosystems.
And we will just sit and watch the Russian Taiga die.
SECOND.
We will buy cedar cones instead of the Chinese in the maximum volume and transport them to areas of large-scale logging and catastrophic forest fires. We will place them in areas where our help is very much needed.
During the winter, we will save hundreds of thousands of animals and birds! And the cones that animals don't eat will grow into mighty cedars, strengthening ecosystems and providing food for animals in the future.
At the same time, we will push for legislative measures within the government aimed at controlling cedar cone harvesting in the Russian Taiga and a complete ban on cutting cedars.
This is solving local and global problems. And this is what we can get up and do to save our forest brothers!
I just want to draw your attention to one interesting fact once again:
WE, HUMANS, ARE A KEY ELEMENT OF ECOSYSTEMS!
NOT JUST THE CEDAR, BUT US OURSELVES!
WE SHOULD NOT EXCLUDE OURSELVES FROM ECOSYSTEMS – THIS IS A MISTAKE!
WE ARE SUCH AN ELEMENT OF THE RUSSIAN TAIGA!
AND OUR ACTIONS CAN CHANGE A LOT!
© PAVEL PASHKOV
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