3 ms·

> We save even more on heating. For heating we use wood that we get from the surrounding forests more or less for free (just insert physical labor). Someone su

by jwr 4y ago

> We save even more on heating. For heating we use wood that we get from the surrounding forests more or less for free (just insert physical labor). Someone subsidizes your living, then, by giving you the wood. I mean I hope they are giving you the wood, because otherwise that would be theft. Where I live, most forest is national, and you can't even gather fallen branches. You can buy the wood or a permit to gather a certain amount of fallen wood.

lpghatguy 4y ago
There are lots of places, including many national forests, where you can cut your own firewood for free. If you live near the Flathead National Forest in Montana in the US, for example, you can cut firewood for a campsite without a permit. You can also get a free permit that allows you to cut 4 to 12 cords of wood per adult per year. I don't know anything about firewood laws in Sweden or the rest of Europe. From first glance they look quite a bit more restrictive.
rippercushions 4y ago
Swedish allemänsratten give people quite extensive rights to exploit forests, even on private property. You are correct that cutting trees and collecting firewood are explicitly excluded from this in theory, but in practice, since the OP lives in a very rural, forested area and is presumably collecting wood from fallen trees instead of actively cutting them down, nobody will give a shit. Even if they did, it would be some kind of environmental violation, not "theft".
paganel 4y ago
> and you can't even gather fallen branches. And that's stupid as stupid can be, and it's not theft. Around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe) that used to be customary practice for hundreds of years, maybe even more, meaning people taking the falling branches for heating purposes over the winter. Of course, as modernisation set on around these parts of the continent (thanks, Brussels) then all that became highly illegal, so that highly-equipped policemen were set up to patrol the foresty areas and confiscate the equipment used for said "theft" from what are mostly very poor people, which in many cases involved them confiscating a very weak horse and a barely functioning wooden cart. But hey, modernisation! This whole subject makes me very angry because it is so reactionary, as you've got poor people supporting the brunt of the law while the wood multinationals (or whatever their PR name is) are profiting from it because they can afford to cut exponentially more wood in a "legal" manner. And yes, we do own a small piece of forest in my family (my brother does, in fact), so I should be all-in for the camp of "damn poors are stealing our branches from the forrest we own!". I am not. One of the very few positive aspects of all this is that these type of police-imposed reactionary actions coming from the very top have created a new sense of community in my brother's village. Nowadays almost the whole village is again on the lookout for patrolling police vans, as the villagers communicate with the people who are in the forest to take wood as to the policemen's whereabouts and instruct them when it's safe to pass. And then city-based laptop class people complain how come the "populists" are winning more and more votes.
- jwr 4y ago
  I think the issue is more nuanced than that. If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees. Also, this is not the only thing that governments lay claim on. You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations, even if it's your land. It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property. Not to say I'm against someone picking up a few branches, just pointing out that this isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.
  - paganel 4y ago
    > If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees That's not how it happened in the past (with exceptions, of course). Because of the sense of community you couldn't have cut all the forrest all for yourself and call it a day, you wouldn't have been allowed to do that, damn the State, your neighbours and the other community members would have gotten to you first. That's why and how that used to be the custom for centuries before. > You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations Industralized societies can do that, but at the (old) community level usually you could not. > It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property. I agree, in a way, it's the famous Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, my comment was trying to explain what happens to the people who get lost along the way during that transition (which is still ongoing in some communities in my country, even though by this point the transition is close to complete). For example if you used to get through the winter by collecting fallen wood from the nearby forest (because the Gemeinschaft was allowing it) you cannot do that anymore (because the Gesellschaft is now forbidding it), you'll most probably have to rely on direct financial help from a State authority (in most of the cases local), move out or die out freezing. And about shared property, we didn't always need a government to impose that, and I'm not saying that from a libertarian/anarchist point of view or anything like that. Past communities and customary rules were pretty good at imposing some sense of collective ownership (I wouldn't call it "property"). Of course, that is almost gone for good, too.
moffkalast 4y ago
Imagine being so hopelessly capitalistic that you label going out into nature to gather some wood as theft. Sweden is like 70% forest.
- camtarn 4y ago
  It's more of a tragedy of the commons. The article's comment about wood really took me aback, because I'm part of a community that is currently having said tragedy. We live in the UK, where forests are a lot rarer. We like camping in a forest by the sea, but it's become such a popular camping spot that people have completely stripped it of all fallen wood. This forest grows on particularly nutrient-poor land, so the forest rangers are begging people to leave the wood alone, as the rotting wood both feeds the soil and preserves local insect and plant ecosystems. Of course, this is what happens when you have a lovely small forest near a big city. The author lives out in the back of beyond where there presumably just aren't enough people that such a situation could happen. I think it's a good illustration that our natural attitudes towards public land might vary a lot depending on the population density and circumstances we live in.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Ironically the fate of UK's many forests lies in the fires of industry prior to the invention of coal. There was no tragedy of the commons there, they were bought and sold for profit which is not unlike what OP suggests would be the "correct" way to do things. The fact is that if you're not exploiting something on a mass industrial level there's hardly a way you'd destroy anything. And that's not being done by regular people trying to make a small living.
tsukikage 4y ago
Some version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure happened in a bunch of places, and to a lesser extent or not at all in others. The set of things one can do in woodland vary massively around the world.

by jwr 4y ago

lpghatguy 4y ago

There are lots of places, including many national forests, where you can cut your own firewood for free. If you live near the Flathead National Forest in Montana in the US, for example, you can cut firewood for a campsite without a permit. You can also get a free permit that allows you to cut 4 to 12 cords of wood per adult per year. I don't know anything about firewood laws in Sweden or the rest of Europe. From first glance they look quite a bit more restrictive.

rippercushions 4y ago

Swedish allemänsratten give people quite extensive rights to exploit forests, even on private property. You are correct that cutting trees and collecting firewood are explicitly excluded from this in theory, but in practice, since the OP lives in a very rural, forested area and is presumably collecting wood from fallen trees instead of actively cutting them down, nobody will give a shit. Even if they did, it would be some kind of environmental violation, not "theft".

paganel 4y ago

> and you can't even gather fallen branches. And that's stupid as stupid can be, and it's not theft. Around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe) that used to be customary practice for hundreds of years, maybe even more, meaning people taking the falling branches for heating purposes over the winter. Of course, as modernisation set on around these parts of the continent (thanks, Brussels) then all that became highly illegal, so that highly-equipped policemen were set up to patrol the foresty areas and confiscate the equipment used for said "theft" from what are mostly very poor people, which in many cases involved them confiscating a very weak horse and a barely functioning wooden cart. But hey, modernisation! This whole subject makes me very angry because it is so reactionary, as you've got poor people supporting the brunt of the law while the wood multinationals (or whatever their PR name is) are profiting from it because they can afford to cut exponentially more wood in a "legal" manner. And yes, we do own a small piece of forest in my family (my brother does, in fact), so I should be all-in for the camp of "damn poors are stealing our branches from the forrest we own!". I am not. One of the very few positive aspects of all this is that these type of police-imposed reactionary actions coming from the very top have created a new sense of community in my brother's village. Nowadays almost the whole village is again on the lookout for patrolling police vans, as the villagers communicate with the people who are in the forest to take wood as to the policemen's whereabouts and instruct them when it's safe to pass. And then city-based laptop class people complain how come the "populists" are winning more and more votes.

jwr 4y ago
I think the issue is more nuanced than that. If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees. Also, this is not the only thing that governments lay claim on. You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations, even if it's your land. It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property. Not to say I'm against someone picking up a few branches, just pointing out that this isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.
- paganel 4y ago
  > If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees That's not how it happened in the past (with exceptions, of course). Because of the sense of community you couldn't have cut all the forrest all for yourself and call it a day, you wouldn't have been allowed to do that, damn the State, your neighbours and the other community members would have gotten to you first. That's why and how that used to be the custom for centuries before. > You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations Industralized societies can do that, but at the (old) community level usually you could not. > It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property. I agree, in a way, it's the famous Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, my comment was trying to explain what happens to the people who get lost along the way during that transition (which is still ongoing in some communities in my country, even though by this point the transition is close to complete). For example if you used to get through the winter by collecting fallen wood from the nearby forest (because the Gemeinschaft was allowing it) you cannot do that anymore (because the Gesellschaft is now forbidding it), you'll most probably have to rely on direct financial help from a State authority (in most of the cases local), move out or die out freezing. And about shared property, we didn't always need a government to impose that, and I'm not saying that from a libertarian/anarchist point of view or anything like that. Past communities and customary rules were pretty good at imposing some sense of collective ownership (I wouldn't call it "property"). Of course, that is almost gone for good, too.

moffkalast 4y ago

Imagine being so hopelessly capitalistic that you label going out into nature to gather some wood as theft. Sweden is like 70% forest.

camtarn 4y ago
It's more of a tragedy of the commons. The article's comment about wood really took me aback, because I'm part of a community that is currently having said tragedy. We live in the UK, where forests are a lot rarer. We like camping in a forest by the sea, but it's become such a popular camping spot that people have completely stripped it of all fallen wood. This forest grows on particularly nutrient-poor land, so the forest rangers are begging people to leave the wood alone, as the rotting wood both feeds the soil and preserves local insect and plant ecosystems. Of course, this is what happens when you have a lovely small forest near a big city. The author lives out in the back of beyond where there presumably just aren't enough people that such a situation could happen. I think it's a good illustration that our natural attitudes towards public land might vary a lot depending on the population density and circumstances we live in.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Ironically the fate of UK's many forests lies in the fires of industry prior to the invention of coal. There was no tragedy of the commons there, they were bought and sold for profit which is not unlike what OP suggests would be the "correct" way to do things. The fact is that if you're not exploiting something on a mass industrial level there's hardly a way you'd destroy anything. And that's not being done by regular people trying to make a small living.

tsukikage 4y ago

Some version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure happened in a bunch of places, and to a lesser extent or not at all in others. The set of things one can do in woodland vary massively around the world.