Temple of Apollo, Delphi, Greece
 
Trees are one resource that are easy enough to renew. If you cut one down you can plant another and 10 or 15 years in the future you will have a new fully grown tree. Trees are a renewable resource that can be managed and this has been known and practiced for thousands of years.
 
Forestry management has been around for thousands of years Japanese Shoguns did it, Joaquin Balaguer did it but my favorites were the Greeks and Romans. They ensured a continuous supply of timber by making them sacred and systematically maintaining and harvesting these groves over centuries. See Ancient Forestry practices at the bottom.
 
Rag Trees, Ireland
 
We live in a time where little is sacred, except perhaps the right to do business. Good business is good for everyone it is presumed. This is perhaps the application of the Too Strong Anthropocentric Principle. Salve lucrum, lucrum bonum is one of the principles of a free market economy vested self interest though is not enough to bring about rapid change we need good intentions along with good regulations and good incentives to change resource wasting habits quickly.
 
In practice the Coase Theorem, allows a means to evaluate the validity of an enterprise by adding a few more factors onto the balance sheet. It also factors in the the costs inflicted on others. Not a bad thing, even if you do not subscribe to Nobel Prize winning economic theories it posits someone still has to pay for costs moved off your balance sheet.
 
Most would agree that business is necessary component of our society but not the only one. As one African conservationist put it in a hotly contested statement Sometimes you have to kill a few lions to save lions. Maybe we have to sacrifice some things to preserve other things we treasure. Young trees on a Costa Rican teak farm.
 
Back to trees though, most of use wood products every day of our lives. We sit on them, we wipe our noses with them, BBQ with them. We encounter wood derived products many times a day every day. But how often do you or I go out and plant a tree? Not very often. You could give money to an outfit like Tree Canada and bask in the satisfaction that a responsible NGO is at least planting trees thanks to your donation.
 
But what about buying into a tree plantation in Costa Rica as perhaps both an investment for your future AND as part of a renewable resource? With humans self-interest is a powerful motivator and a few hectares of harvestable teak or other tropical hardwoods are likely to be worth a lot more a few years down the road. After many more standing tropical forests have been turned into chopsticks and tchotchkas. So call it an investment, a retirement fund or whatever when you look at buying a tree for its future worth you begin to look at the tree differently, perhaps with a more proprietary interest.
 
Tropical American Tree Farms and Finca Leola seem to provide a service in the right place. If you need that teak beam for boat or furniture you can go and cut the tree down yourself and then plant another to grow into its place. A few hectares with your name on it, sounds like a worthwhile investment.
 
Plus while your trees are growing up you can fly down and visit them. Maybe you will become so attached you will never want to cut them down. So much better than a paper certificate that says I gave at the office. Its an offshore tree investment fund and it is about as close to sacred as we are likely to get.
 
Holy Bower in India
 
Ancient Forestry Practices

 

'Because sacred groves were generally well-managed and treated respectfully due to their sanctity, their continued existence assured by the firm religious obligation to replace felled trees with new ones., many persisted for hundreds of years after the landscape around them had become barren. Pausanias describes visiting temple precincts in the 2nd century A.D. , where the buildings were in disrepair or completely abandoned, yet their groves of cypress and pine were still intact and flourishing. These stands of sacred trees, however , were not immune to the rise of Christianity in the 4th. century A.D. Pagan worshippers caught honoring their gods in sacred groves were fined and the groves, along with their accompanying shrines and temples, were razed. Woodcutters appear to have taken advantage of this situation, selling the old stands of pagan trees as ship timber. This fact is illustrated by the presence or lack thereof, of cypress wood in shipwrecks excavated in the Mediterranean.'
  
Mature Teak TreesExcerpt Courtesy of Kristin Romey, Archaeology Magazine