[0:26]searching into wood. Um and uh I've been working with wood as a material, looking at its properties for about 25 years, 30 years now.
[0:36]Uh particularly interested in looking at wood uh in terms of its use in sustainable construction.
[0:44]Okay, that was good. Yeah, I'm Callum Hill. I've been quite heavily involved with uh working on the distance learning materials for Aalto University.
[0:54]And um I you probably saw a few of my videos on YouTube. So uh I used to be a professor of wood science, but I'm now working as a independent consultant.
[1:04]We uh we're here today to answer some questions that you've sent in about the course, so I'll let you start.
[1:10]Okay. Okay. And I understand you're a, you're a chemist by background. Chemistry, yeah, but I've got a feeling there might be a question about this a bit later on, so I don't want to give too much away.
[1:20]I'm sure there will be, okay. At least I can't remember what I used to do.
[1:25]Okay, so maybe maybe we could kick off with just the first question about uh, what's your favorite thing about forests?
[1:30]About forests. I just love being in them. I love the uh, the feeling, the smell, the sounds, particularly in the morning. It's just a wonderful environment to be in. I mean you can't beat it. I love them.
[1:46]How about yourself? Like likewise, I I think I I think also the fact that you can be there and you can do some foraging. I mean the forests here in Finland are rather different from the ones in in the UK, uh from my recollection.
[1:58]Uh and uh of course it's very nice to be able to spend time there picking mushrooms and berries and stuff like that, as well as getting the nice kind of environment uh and and just being part of nature. The silence is also great as well, I find. It's very nice. Yeah.
[2:12]You get paid for that? You get paid for that? I wish.
[2:16]I wish. Sometimes. I sometimes. Okay, let me ask you another question. Um, so what's the difference between cultivating wheat and trees? interesting question.
[2:28]Yes. I mean, wheat's uh, a crop, an annual crop. Um, so you can have uh, a yield of wheat every year from the fields and if you do it rightly, you can consider that to be a sustainable yield, but um, with trees, you have a much longer-term perspective.
[2:49]So I mean, you can treat trees in a forest as a crop, um, but if you want to have sustainable forestry, I think you you have to look at this, you can't just think, well, I'm just going to get one harvest. I'm going to get multiple harvests.
[3:00]So the difference is more the time scale really, I guess if you're talking about commercial forestry. Um, but you still need to think about sustainability with both these things. And the thing about wheat is, of course, it has a high energy input, doesn't it? For Yeah.
[3:11]Yeah. For the uh, agricultural inputs, the pesticides, and forest you don't necessarily need to do it that way. Yeah. And of course, the kind of the time scale of the thinking and the planning are very different as well. That that I mean if you're planning a forest and what's going to happen to the trees that come out of that, it's it's a much longer-term. I guess also you've got to think about uh, you know in terms of sustainable forestry thinking about the the biodiversity and the ecosystem, what do you want to do with that?
[3:40]Do you want to do clear cutting or do you want to continuous cover forestry? How do you want to manage the forest? These are all kind of questions that I guess come up in forestry versus kind of growing wheat. I mean, I guess the there's much shorter-term process. So the the time perspective is is very different. I mean forestry is uh, you have to think a very long way into the future. And sometimes like be not necessarily planting but a crop might be established that your generation won't be harvested.
[4:12]So if you're planning forests for the future, you have to think about, well, not necessarily what your needs are now, but what your needs would be a hundred years hence.
[4:19]Yeah, yeah, which is something that humanity is not too good at thinking about that, unfortunately. Unfortunately, that not thinking ahead.
[4:26]Okay. Uh, so why do some people Why do I need my glasses, I know. It's a shame.
[4:31]Can you hear me? Okay, I'm not quite sure yeah, okay, why is it, why do some people think it's okay to grow and cut wheat but not trees? Oh, I see. So it's same sort of question.
[4:50]I get I get where this one's coming from now. Yeah, because uh, I've yeah, I've given lectures to audiences where I've been talking about sustainable forestry and I've been talking about the use of timber in construction and the benefits of carbon storage, which you'll probably hear a lot about today.
[5:04]Um, but uh then the audience who I think are going to be on my side, they'll look at me with daggers because they they're huge hemp fans and think you can make everything out of hemp.
[5:14]And you can make some things out of hemp and hemp is a very interesting material. We've worked on it.
[5:19]The composites field and I've worked in it with insulation, you probably have as well. Yeah. Fantastic material for some applications, but it doesn't come at zero cost. There's still an environmental impact associated with hemp production.
[5:30]Um, not least of which is that quite often the land you use for growing hemp is agricultural land, which you might want to grow wheat or foods.
[5:39]Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be a protein shortage in the future. Yeah. Whereas forests can grow in much more marginal land, uplands and sort of not so well-drained lands and things like that.
[5:50]So you can get a uh, a crop, if you like, from a forest and not just timber, it can be non-wood forest products. Um, for land that's marginal. So does that answer the question? Do you think? Yeah, I I think I I think that does.
[6:05]I mean, I I I don't know why people think it's okay to I think we think of trees in maybe a slightly different way that they're kind of part of an environment, whereas agricultural land is so um, well, it's it's so humanized. You know.
[6:17]so used to seeing it like that. And and maybe there's a more of an association of of forest being a natural environment, which actually is incorrect to something because most most forests is actually planted.
[6:30]Uh we have very little uh natural uh old growth forest left these days. So it's kind of but maybe it's that more that kind of assumption that's okay, if you're if you're uh using a wood product, then you're destroying a tree, which is a bad thing because you're kind of invading the environment. And I think that's a kind of a it's a kind of a mindset thing.
[6:50]There's actually raised I think to my mind, a very important point uh about uh the perspective that people come from, and maybe this is a speaks to the the the need that we need to engage with lots of different uh stakeholders when we talk about how do we use not just forest, but land in general, but certainly certainly forest.
[7:05]I mean, we have the forest companies, but what about the the uh the those of the ecological side, looking at biodiversity, advocating for biodiversity, uh and then of course the kind of the the the general public, I mean, it's important that everybody, I mean, we we go there, we were talking earlier about this kind of need to go to the forest to kind of get some restorative effect. Absolutely. And yet balance all these different uh kind of perspectives of the forest. It's really complicated.
[7:37]called like forest bathing or something. There's some Japanese word like forest bathing or something like that, just absorbing the atmosphere of the forest.
[7:45]But I can understand why people the thing is that like forestry has a bad reputation because of commercial forestry, which can be quite disruptive to put it mildly.
[7:56]Um, and also because of deforestation in areas like the tropics and Asia and places like that.
[8:02]But the thing is if it's done properly, which I think in most of Europe it is done properly, um, you can have sustainable yields, you can have multi-purpose, you you can have ecosystem services, you can have recreation, you can have wildlife benefits.
[8:20]And you can still have a a yield of timber from that forest if it's done properly, and it can be done properly. I'm just thinking of an example where I'm from in North Wales, where somebody planted a forest over 70 years ago.
[8:34]They planted it and then it became a nature reserve and they're not allowed to harvest it.
[8:39]Okay. Well, there you go.
[8:42]Yeah. Luckily, it's very windy in North Wales so you they all fell down, so they they he uses the wind blow. He can make a living from that.
[8:52]Yeah, yeah. It's a bit ironic though. You you plant the forest, then you're told, well, sorry. Yeah.
[8:58]It's now a nature reserve. Which is died. That's that's actually that's actually a really interesting question about kind of who owns land. I mean, or I mean, I mean, I think this this whole concept of ownership of of land is very skewed because it it puts all the power into one individual.
[9:14]Right. Or company. And I and and I'm not sure I personally agree with that. I think I mean, we should have common rights. preaching revolution.
[9:23]Quite. But I think I think there should be more of it. I mean, there there isn't, I mean because it it because of common ownership. Yeah, common ownership and common rights to that land not having a kind of a so I think there is Uh, yeah, I mean there's there's kind of a nice example you just given.
[9:37]Isn't that more of a thing in Finland though? You have much more common ownership. every not so much is a lot of private ownership. Yeah. Um, but but there's a lot of rights of uh, I'm forgetting rights of uh access, you can you can uh rights of roam. Which uh you don't have in the UK.
[9:55]People do that. I guess they appreciate it more, don't they? Because they do have access. If it's seen as something off limits or as a boundary, they don't feel the they don't care so much about it's how it's looked after maybe. I don't know.
[10:10]I'm not a psychologist. No. Stick to the wood questions. We we're drifting off topic here. That's okay.
