The Navy Manages A Huge Forest To Supply One Ship With Wood
Wood is a renewable resource. That’s a little surprising if you mentally divide everything into either “renewable” or “stuff we burn,” but yeah: If we can replenish a resource within a couple decades, it counts as renewable. So today, the timber industry doesn’t just consist of Paul Bunyan types, tearing their way through the forest and leaving just desolation in their wake. It also consists of managed timberlands, with newly planted trees replacing the old ones.
That’s standard now. The weird part is when one of these forests is used for a single purpose, instead of being managed by a lumber company for general lumber stuff.
The US Navy maintains a 50,000-acre forest and uses it for ship-building. That’s surprising because, well, the Navy doesn’t have all that many giant wooden ships. Aside from the occasional minesweeper (it’s good to have few boats immune to magnetism), it has just one: the USS Constitution, which happens to be the world’s oldest ship still afloat. And the Navy manages the forest just to replace the planks of the Constitution over time.
Starting around 60 years ago, the Navy cut down 130-year-old trees to refurbish the ship, and they said they’d leave the 70-year-old trees alone till they reached that age themselves. Now, those trees have grown up and are ready to embrace their destiny, and the Navy plans to keep the process going for another 60 years and beyond.
This does raise an interesting question, though. If the Navy replaces every single piece of the Constitution with wood from their Indiana facility, wood from trees that didn’t even exist when the ship first sailed, is it really the same ship as the one that launched in 1797? This is a question that we ourselves came up with, just now, so if you mention it to anyone, be sure to credit us properly.
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Top image: pxhere