These nanny state issues are ridiculous. Do people really need to be told not to burn down the forest. Will the crazies so inclined be prevented by the helpful government advise. I don’t know, when my daughter was young I was contantly telling her not to do this or that. I had the theory that if she did it anyway it wasn’t because I didn’t tell her otherwise. Should a government think of it’s citizens as unruly children? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Here is a stamp where the cancelization helps the visuals a great deal. Nicely centered concentric circle to focus you on the subject, like a gunsight. You can see the issue facing the stamp designer. Showing actual flames would be too exciting and may draw in the pyromaniac. So instead we have bare tree trunks with an orange color to hint at fire rather than say winter. I wonder if the message in the center was added later to better drive home the point.
Todays stamp is issue A199, a 20 Pfennig stamp issued by West Germany on March 5th, 1958. It was a single stamp issue encouraging the prevention of forest fires. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 55 cents used.
Germany in it’s natural state contained large forests of beech trees. Human activity had reduced the forests to about 20 percent of the country. At about this time mining was becoming more important and was a great driver for increased demand for wood. This was to build shafts and the heat energy needed for smelting. The problem of how to manage this was met by the worlds first school of forestry at Ilsenburg in the Harz mountains in 1763. They hit upon quickly that wood cutting rates cannot exceed the natural rates of growth. However the new experts could not stop there. Instead efforts at reforestation would now involve planting pine and spruce that grew faster and were cheaper to plant.
On one hand the forestry work means that there are now more forest coverage in Germany than 200 years ago. One the other hand nature has changed and few would argue the aesthetics of the pine tree are better than the Beech trees given by God/nature. From an industry point of view the quick growing pines are well utilized in a sustainable fashion. Even wooded enclaves in urban areas. There is a large amount of politics infused with this stuff. This stamp for example fails to point out that naturally occurring forest fires from lightning are a natural part of forest renewal. Or the fact that pollution is mitigated by the presence of forests rather than just pollution being a destroyer of the forest.
Well my drink is empty. Between todays stamp and the one the other day about forestry in Gabon, I have learned a lot about forestry. When I picked out the two stamps to write about, I had no idea what I would learn. Stamp collecting is great. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.