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THREADBARE STÈRES CLINK

5. October 2015 2015

Ahem

We are in full fall. The legendary colours of autumn in Alsace have reappeared in the woods, lanes and country paths of the South Sundgau, signalling the advent of morning frosts, long afternoon shadows, days of mid-forest stillness, and the promise of even colder weather, lumpy clouds like French hotel pillows and the crackle of logs. Talking of which, the village Mairie told me that my pre-ordered two stères of wood were piled neatly in an ultra-secret location in the Hagenthal woods; all I had to do to get the wood from the woods was to match the number on my delivery slip to a small plastic tab attached to one of the logs in the pile.

I dreaded the prospect. Like many others, I attach myself only very uneasily to the hardy characteristics of logging, sawing, humping and stacking metre lengths of wood. But I sighed in a long suffering way, assumed my tough man image, and donned a long-stored hard-wearing pair of jeans and a lumberjack shirt which I had bought from Aldi largely as a film noir gesture of irony. Two hours later it was done. M. Wolff, the engaging Leymen woodsman, was even on hand to “stère” me to the right place (I couldn’t find the pile at first). After first checking that there was no one hiding in the pile, I loaded the logs into the back of Galahad and, sweating profusely despite the practically Antarctic late afternoon weather, tootled off back home, feeling like Sean Bean.

I took a couple of days to drive down to our house in La Hune, and most of the countryside between the Alsace and the Tarn et Garonne, including the Auvergne, the Franche-Comte, the Dordogne and the Gers, wore its best country clothes of yellows, reds, browns and greens. I used a car-sharing (“covoiturage”) French web site – blablacar.com. For a small contribution to petrol costs, people can get a lift coinciding with the route taken by drivers willing to take company on long trips – within 24 hours of placing the notice I found I was taking three people (two students and an actor) and returning with two (a soldier and a health assistant), none of them older than 21, and all speaking only French. But it was entertaining, even amusing at times: talk (blabla) is encouraged but not compulsory. On the first night of the journey I stopped too late to have dinner after dropping off the third covoiturier in Tulle and decided to stay in Brive in the Hotel de Montaubon, an old-fashioned place in the middle of the town where I had stayed on a similar trip earlier this year. The bathroom was a squeeze, the coverlets faded, the carpet threadbare, and the lighting dull. Nevertheless this was a proper old-fashioned hotel with a balcony onto the main square; it was old but clean and it suited my needs perfectly, for I was tired and did not need more. Who needs luxury when you can rest content? I wish more of these hotels remained in France (they are disappearing fast) rather than all the colour-coded “budget” hotels littering the routes into towns: mute, impersonal and expensive, telling nothing about the place where they are or the people who live there.

In Mansonville I introduced myself to Jarno, Milla and their family, who had already taken up residence in La Hune and started to make it look better after just a couple of weeks. Jarno and I went to Agen to get some heat pumps and paint, and I invited him and his family to a fish dinner at the St Saturnin. In turn I was invited to lunch a couple of times, and had several conversations about how the house can be further improved. I came back to Basel with the conviction that La Hune was in safe and capable hands until at least next summer.

I was hardly 24 hours in Leymen before I was back travelling again, this time to Trieste pictured above), Ljubljana and Pula, in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia respectively. I was there with others to identify new opportunities in communications advice and to see a friend who moved to Croatia last year, and has just started a travel agency in Pula offering chartered sailing holidays in the Adriatic. I had never been to the region of Istria before and it was a revelation, with clear roads, friendly people, impressive classical remains, great weather and lots of opportunities opening up for tourism and leisure activities, and especially for good sailing. And although I have no significant sailing experience, it was impossible not to feel excited by the view of new sailing boats under a clear blue sky in the spotless Marina Veruda just by Pula and to hear the call of the sea punctuated by the flapping of sails and the repetitive clink of rigging on the masts.
Another quick turn around in Leymen before Alli and I were off for a mini-holiday to Lisboa, staying in Carcavelos with our friend Julia, whom I had known since my administrative traineeship (stage) in Brussels in 1982. Julia picked us up from the airport and we sat over drinks in the bar of the Albatroz Hotel overlooking the bay in Cascais before having a great dinner of salted cod, octopus and cuttlefish in Carcavelos. Alli and I spent the next couple of days wandering around Lisboa. We visited St George’s Castle, built in the 11th century and the first Royal Palace of Portugal, with exceptional views across Lisbon and its harbour. We saw the Torre de Belem and the Monument to the Discoverers, and took a ride around the more modern part in the east of the city, much of which was built for the Expo 98. In the evening, another ex-stagiaire graduate of the European Commission from 33 years ago, Fernando, joined us with his partner for dinner in central Lisboa. The next day Alli and I went to Sintra by car and walked around the town, having lunch and also taking a coach trip to the castle on top of the mountain and the Parque de Pena, the gardens of the Royal Summer Palace from centuries past. Sintra seemed like paradise, a last breath of summer before the inevitable cold catches us all at the beginning of the year’s dark half.

Yours in transit,

Lionel


Julia, Lionel and Fernando, Lisboa, October 2015

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All forested areas around the world from woods to jungles are critical in global climate action. As deep resources of carbon recycling, they help to mitigate the negative effects of CO2 emissions caused by humans. These emissions are causing warmer temperatures across the world, increases in extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, severe storms etc, which result in damage to local ecosystems, upon which many poorer people depend for their livelihoods. The continent of Africa is the only major region of the world not to have experienced substantial and widespread economic development. As such it is a significant region for the future of sustainable global forestry. African forests have the potential to supply timber and other forest-based products to meet growing demand within domestic markets and abroad, and while some of these resources are being depleted unsustainably, there is still time to convert the potential of the forests into long term and sustainable economic benefits. There is a strong commercial future in Africa available for sustainable commercial forestry, which has the unique ability to catalyse economic, social, and climate-smart transformation. But despite the immense potential of Africa’s huge resource-rich forests, commercial investments in forestry have slowed to almost zero across the continent in the past 20 years as population has shifted to urban areas. The growth in new plantations during this time has been minimal, and there has been a reduction in government-owned forested land. Real and perceived financial barriers such as low returns on investments and high perceived risks have dissuaded investors from fully investigating the potential to develop Africa’s forests to their maximum sustainable capacity and for the equal benefit of rural communities. There are technical and regulatory barriers, mostly different in each African country: high establishment costs; insufficient operational scale; lack of management expertise and industrial processing facilities, among many other challenges. In addition, Africa’s forests are becoming vulnerable to climate change and global warming impacts. But these challenges produce unique opportunities at a unique time if the appropriate policies and institutional frameworks are put in place to recognise the role of the private sector, the limitations of the public sector, and public-private partnership engagements, as well as the incorporation of multilateral environment agreements into national plans and programmes. Trees, forests, people and environment are intricately related through food chains, life support systems, maintenance of the hydrological cycle and provision of other environmental services. Forests are far more significant in how they can work in a sustainable process than in what they are or represent. For example, they protect and maintain sources of genetic materials for plant breeding programmes to improve food crops and produce herbal remedies and generic drugs. Forest biomes support flora and fauna that serve agronomic purposes, such as pollination. Africa needs to invest much more in itself if it wants more foreign investment. International partnerships and understandings have to be the best way forward. But, initially, Africa may lack information more than it lacks money. It urgently needs more information on climate change impacts on African forests and the complex relationships relating to climate change that face African communities across the continent. The challenges of getting the policies and incentives right go beyond getting information on the impacts of climatic factors on forests. They extend also to acquiring knowledge and information on the interaction between the different climate change factors. In most of Africa, there is no reliable or updated information on forest and tree resources because of the lack of permanent sampling plots for monitoring long term changes. This has resulted in Africa suffering gaping holes in the data needed for informed decision making. The African forest sector is the most lucrative investment in the longer term. For now it needs effective monitoring, protection capabilities, and detection activities to face the increasing short term challenges caused by human and climate change impacts. But the forestry sector in many African countries could be growing the beanstalk to economic transformation.

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Lionel Stanbrook is an editor, diarist, journalist, writer, re-writer, word designer, and content creator. This site contains the best of Lionel’s articles, prose, poetry, blogs, musings and perspectives, as well as a writer’s folio, a recent CV (perhaps the most creative part of all his work), and the monthly diary Ahem, written about his personal life, work, travel, emotions and experiences since 2004.

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