Germany to raze a 1,000-year-old forest in the name of 'going green'
Germany, as we well know with its Russian gas capers, is a highly industrialized society in need of a lot of energy.
Fine and dandy. But how they get it presents increasingly bad options.
They got rid of their nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown after a big earthquake in Japan, (despite Germany not being in a quake zone), driving themselves to dependency on foreign suppliers. That's presented problems for them what with Russia filling that role, so their other recourse has been the one Joe Biden is touting for America: Green energy -- like wind and solar power.
It's costly, requiring state subsidization, given that Germany is not a big sunshine zone nor particularly windy:
But it's costlier than just the wasted cash. They also are now looking at the loss of their 1,000-year-old Reinhardswald old-growth forest -- known as the Grimm's Fairy Tale forest.
German authorities, completely ignoring German sentiment about forests, which is quite mystical, have decided to mow down the big one to get some wind power put in, in the name of 'going green.' Like the Central Valley of California, which has been turned brown and starved of water in the name of 'going green,' Germany is trashing its most beautiful forest in the name of 'going green.' Funny how that works.
Reinhardswald is known as the Grimm's Fairy Tale forest. In a weird conundrum (the Germans probably have a word for this) the greenie industrial complex has morphed into Rumplestiltskin, spinning wind into gold for the state of Hesse's bureaucrats but demanding Germany's first child as payment.
Don't get us wrong: We are all for progress. But to call this 'progress' is pretty disgusting. How is it 'progress' to trash Germany's 1,000 year-old irreplaceable forest? Germany has a big population, a lot of ugly postwar urban landscapes and yucky modern art. It has a few nice traditional places, too, but the big one for Germans is their beautiful ancient forests, the ones that eminent Germans like Goethe and Kant and Durer and Schubert likely walked through, marveled at, and drew inspiration from. Google 'Reinhardswald' at Google Images and see what this place looks like. There are also some likely practical reasons to keep the forest in reserve. In France, when roof of the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned in 2019, what was lost were old-growth beams that could not be replaced easily at all because the old-growth forests were gone. Germany would not have such a problem if it needed to harvest a couple of trees to save, say. the Cologne cathedral if it were, heaven forbid, to endure such a catastrophe. There are always unexpected reasons to want to conserve some unique and irreplaceable natural habitats.
P. Gosselin of WattsUpWithThat has been watching this travesty for awhile and has some excellent coverage:
About a year ago we reported on disturbing plans by the government of the German state of Hesse to clear 20 million square meters of 1000-year old “fairy tale” forest in one of Germany’s most idyllic, fairy tale-like forests: the Reinhardswald located in the hilly region west of the city of Göttingen.
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