Rebuilding Notre Dame will be difficult: the forests that provided the wood are all but gone

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The flames erupted in the attic of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral on Monday, one of Europe’s great historical and architectural symbols. They toppled the 13th Century center spire in the process.The cathedral’s roof and the frame that supports it are gone. That will pose a particular challenge to efforts to rebuild the 856-year-old church. As the oak frame met its end, so too did remnants of Europe’s dwindling ancient forests.


The wood for the soaring cathedral was first felled around 1160 to 1170, with some of it coming from trees thought to be 300 to 400 years old at the time they were chopped. That puts the oldest timber in the cathedral at nearly 1,300 years old.

Replacing those beams with comparable oak is simply not an option, said Bertrand de Feydeau, vice president of the preservation group Fondation du Patrimoine. Trees that supplied the roof’s frame came from primary forests—forests that are largely untouched by human activity, he said, according to the AP. He surmised that the huge trees associated with primary forests are gone too.

Only 4% of Europe’s remaining woodland is primary forest, according to a study published last May, with none larger than 500 square kilometers outside of Russia or Northern Europe.
While forest covers nearly a third of mainland France, just 0.01% of it is untouched, containing trees around 200 to 400 years old, said Dr. Francesco Maria Sabatini, a lead author on the study and a researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. “Primary forests are small, fragile and precious for biodiversity,” he said. “They represent ‘pearls’ or ‘islands’ that survived intensive logging thanks to their remoteness or historical accidents.”

Nonetheless, logging of Europe’s ancient forests has not only continued but increased in some areas. Large forests of that kind only exist in remote regions in northern and Eastern Europe, where rising demand for timber has pushed up prices and encouraged logging in more distant areas, with some of it being done illegally.

Ultimately, there is simply no way to replace wood that predates the founding of even medieval France—from ancient forests or otherwise. "Extracting timber from the last primary remnants means losing also these, and this loss won’t cover up the tragedy of losing Notre Dame," said Sabatini. "It will simply add up."
 
 
 
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