What I Learned in the Forests of France: About Humans and Nature

France Part 5.

Our entire July 14 hike (see previous essay) was inside of a national park, the Parc naturel régional des Vosges du Nord (Northern Vosges Regional Natural Park). With a name like that, you would expect such a park, if it were in America, to consist only of natural areas and trails, with limited development, by contractors, to accommodate visitors. In America, a National Park (Department of the Interior) excludes human economic activity as much as possible. National Forests (Department of Agriculture) allow logging and recreation (such as ORVs) other than hiking. In America, you find nature and only nature (for the most part) inside of National Parks.

Meanwhile, outside the National Parks in America, the private land is often being destroyed in an unsustainable fashion. Not only that, but if you trespass on private land, you risk getting shot. This is as true of wolves as of humans. The federal government has re-introduced wolves into federal land, but the moment a wolf strays onto private land it can be, and probably will be, shot dead.

In America, there are usually absolute and hostile lines between the human world and the natural world.

But in France, the Regional Parks (at least this one) embrace humans as a part of nature. First of all, why not? Humans have been farming and ranching and living in villages in France for thousands of years. There is virtually no place left of “unspoiled nature” in France. When you look at the fir forests ear the tops of the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, the trees appear to be lined up: they are not forests, but plantations. The Regional Park area has not only been transformed by human cultivation and habitation, but ravaged by war, as shown by the World War I cemetery in this photo.

Therefore when the French government established this park, they did not drive out the humans. The old farms and pastures for dairy cattle are still there, and they are productive. And I don’t mean just a nominal amount of economic activity. This park is actually the highlands of the Muenster Valley, the place of origin of the famous French cheese, about which I will write more in a later blog essay. And it was beautiful. The small towns, such as Pairis (not Paris!) and Orbey, were as picturesque as any “undisturbed” forest.

This has happened for two reasons. First, it reflects a faith in forest succession. No matter what happens, the forests will grow back. Most of the forests of Europe and North America were destroyed just a few thousand years ago by glaciers. They have all grown back. When Longfellow wrote (in his poem Evangeline) about “the forest primeval,” he was actually referring to a forest that was only about ten thousand years old. If you stop abusing the forest, and instead use it in a sustainable fashion, the forest will grow back into a beautiful, functional entity, even if not entirely natural. As a result, the forests of the Vosges Mountains supports, and has supported for centuries, pastures and villages. Everywhere we went, we found great stacks of firewood that had been harvested from the forests with no apparent damage to it. Timber harvest, but no clear-cutting!

Look, folks, it can be done. Don’t let anyone tell you that the timber companies have to clear-cut. In France, there are plenty of firewood and paper products without clear-cutting. A quick online check will show you that the paper products industry in France is very much alive and profitable. Nor do ranches have to have soil erosion! Look at these pictures—do you see any? But these farms are profitable!

Second, private landowners are required to simply accept the fact that hikers will be walking right past their houses and cutting across their lands. In America, signs may warn that “we shoot first and ask questions later” but in France, private land owners must accept the proximity of hikers on their land. Private driveways are marked as “privée,” and hikers stay away from these places. But if hikers were to trespass (which I never saw them do), there is no danger of them being shot. What I did, by walking right through fields and past houses, crossing private land, is virtually unthinkable in America.

The integration of humans and nature in the regional parks not only works but is a major source of enjoyment and income. There were at least a dozen people in our group, and we encountered lots of other hikers. None of us said, “This place would be beautiful if it weren’t for those ugly pastures.” And one of the major aspects of the local economy is for the farms (les fermes auberges) to host the visitors for sumptuous meals (and/or spartan accommodations). In order to gain the right to call themselves fermes auberges, the farms must raise all of their own milk, meat, and vegetables. (They can import things such as coffee and chocolate that cannot grow in France.) Many people drive to the inns, but we hiked for hours to get to one of these inns, where we spent as much time eating as we had hiking. And then we hiked back down.

Patrick Gennetay led and treated us to a wonderful feast at Le Musmiss, a ferme auberge in Orbey.

Hikers are not supposed to walk into people’s orchards or yards to eat domesticated fruit. But all along the path there were wild (or planted?) fruits for hikers to stop and eat along the trail. Hiking makes those fruits taste so good! We ate lots of wild cherries and raspberries. And right near the top, in the subalpine meadows, the trail was lined with wild blueberries (Vaccinium myrtillus, les myrtelles), which are smaller and tastier than the domesticated blueberries (les bleuets). We were a little bit early in the season for the wild hazelnuts, but if they had been ripe we could have munched on them almost the entire time.

Vaccinium myrtillus, a subalpine blueberry in the Vosges Mountains

Humans and nature can live together not only peacefully but enjoyably. I thought about this the entire time I was hiking, and it gave an extra dimension to my joy. It occasionally happens in America, too. Birdwatchers who visit the Arcata (California) bird sanctuary often do not realize that this wetland is the municipal sewage treatment facility for the city of Arcata. But it requires a shift in attitude among private land owners. The land owners have to realize that they are stewards of the beautiful Earth, which they share with nature and with other people. In order to establish such a park in America, private land owners would have to unlearn the little song that Garrison Keillor set to the tune of This Land is Your Land:

This land is my land

It is not your land

I’ve got a shotgun

And you ain’t got one…

What I Learned in the Forests of France: About Biogeography

France, part 4.

On July 14, I went hiking in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France with the Gennetay family of Strasbourg. This was easily one of the greatest days of my life. It is always fun to take a hike with such a happy family (the family of my son-in-law). And it is always exhilarating for a gentleman of a certain age, myself, to be able to hike for seven hours and survive. But in the next two essays I will describe some of the scientific and environmental things I learned on this hike.

First, about biogeography.

The forests of France are just similar enough to those of eastern North America to feel comfortable, but just different enough to feel exotic.

Some of the weedy species were the same, such as yarrow (Achillea millaefolium), mullein (Verbascum thapsus), foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), and cow parsnip (Heracleum sphondylium). The bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) and the fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) live all over the Northern Hemisphere. And one of the tree species, widespread at forest edges, is actually a native of North America, and was introduced to Europe in 1601: the black locust Robinia pseudoacacia.

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum, foreground)

Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)

Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium)

But in most cases the forests consisted of the same general types (genera) of trees, but different species. Examples of European trees similar to but not the same species as those in America include the following. I provide scientific names for the European species, and French names.

Pines: Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) (le pin)

Firs: Picea abies (le sapin)

Maples: Acer campestre and A. platanoides (les erables)

Birches: Betula pendula (les bouleaux)

Oaks: principally Quercus petraea (les chênes)

European maples (probably Acer platanoides)

European birches (Betula pendula)

The same was true of the shrubs:

Dogwood (Cornus mas) (le cornouiller mâle)

Hazelnuts (Corylus avellana) (le noisetier)

Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) (les sureaux)

Mountain ash or rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) (le sorbier)

The principal reason that European forests resemble North American forests but not Southern Hemisphere forests is that the Atlantic Ocean began to separate Europe and North America only about 70 million years ago, just long enough for new species but not for new genera to evolve. In contrast, Northern and Southern Hemisphere forests have been separate for about 120 million years; not only do Southern Hemisphere forests have different species, but different genera, of trees and shrubs. Evolution is the reason that the forests of France felt both comfortably familiar and enchantingly different from those I know in North America. I was standing right in the middle of a lesson in biogeography, a field of study largely invented by Darwin’s fellow-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Here are some other interesting biogeographical differences:

But you generally won’t see maples, birches, dogwoods, hazelnuts, or elderberries in Southern Hemisphere forests. You may see trees similar to them, but not the same genera. You will find a few oaks and elderberries in South America and Southeast Asia, and only one maple species out of 128 lives in the Southern Hemisphere.

The forests of France contain no poison ivy or poison oak (genus Toxicodendron). Both Europe and North America have nettles (les orties) but they appear to be more abundant in Europe. European nettle species (Urtica dioica and U. urens) are different from those in North America.

We also saw chestnuts, Castanea sativa. “Sativa” means cultivated. Although these trees grow in the wild, they are the source of edible chestnuts. The sprays of male flowers produce very little nectar but, according to a beekeeper in the family, bees can make it into a particularly pungent kind of honey. This rarely happens, however, since it takes hundreds of flowering trees for the bees to produce just a little bit of honey. In America, most of the native chestnuts (Castanea dentata) have died; a few of them re-sprout before they are old enough to reproduce. This is because of a fungus introduced in the early twentieth century from planted European chestnut trees. Although you can see occasional American chestnut resprouts in the northeastern United States, you will never again see chestnut forests.

Chestnuts (Castanea sativa)

Everybody loved this wonderful hike through the forest; but as a botanist, I experienced a whole extra dimension of enjoyment by seeing the cousins of my plant friends from America.