This piece is an extract from this week's Forestry Features newsletter, which is emailed out at 4PM every Wednesday with a round-up of the week's top stories.
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THAT sound you can probably hear are the clicks of this newsletter being closed down when its subscribers realise politics is once again the topic.
We get it. There's been an awful lot of that in your Wednesday FJ helping lately. Even we needed a quick gee-up to start typing this one. Without making any promises, we'll try and focus on something a bit more fun next week. Maybe we'll just share pictures of some nice forwarders doing their thing or the world's finest trees, and give us all a welcome break ...
Until then, we'll take a quick hop and a skip across the Atlantic to our brothers in Canada where one forestry-related story caught the eye. It concerned the country's Federal Budget for 2023 in which Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged $368.4 million (approx. £219m) over three years towards forestry. This, the minister said, would support Indigenous leadership in the industry, forestry research and development, low-carbon building construction, and bring more sustainably-sourced Canadian forest products to the world.
"Today, the Finance Minister sent a clear message to Canadian forestry workers – that they are among the best in the world at what they do and are essential players in the lower carbon economy of tomorrow," said Forest Products Association of Canada president and CEO, Derek Nighbor. It feels like a long time since any of forestry's representative bodies said the same here.
It wouldn't be fair or accurate to say the UK's governments (both at Westminster level and otherwise) haven't put money into forestry, nor can the apparent enthusiasm of Trudy Harrison, England's forestry minister, be called into question. But the lack of any new funding in the Chancellor's Spring Budget still stings.
At a time when so much recent good work appears to be at a crucial juncture, where success could so easily turn to failure, forestry has to get the proper support.
The land where pine and maples grow has showed how it can be done. It's up to us to follow.
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