From Bern to Moscow, the climate and biodiversity challenge

The world once marvelled at how the Swiss built the “Slide of Alpnach” to harvest pines from Mount Pilatus for European markets. Two centuries later, it’s the hard lessons the Swiss learned from using too much wood that draw global notice. Engineers in 1812 finished turning 25,000 pine trees into a wooden trough that formed a conveyor belt from the summit of Pilatus down to Alpnach. Pine trunks up to 30 metres long slid down it to the village on the Lake Lucerne shore, from where the logs were floated down rivers and on to the sea. In Alpnach, Mayor Heinz Krummenacher says town elders still insist that “Rotterdam was built on their timber”. Inside the town’s Roman Catholic parish church, hundreds of musty pine beams and plank wooden steps weave upwardly to a 91-metre-high bell tower. The tower looks out at Switzerland’s largest moor landscape, sprawling across 130 square kilometres, an area slightly bigger than Lake Lucerne. The Glaubenberg moorland between …
Source: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/europe-s-forests_from-bern-to-moscow–the-climate-and-biodiversity-challenge/41842720?ns_mchannel=rss