The International Traditional Knowledge Institute Austria is starting one of the biggest environmental projects in Gmünd, lower Austria. The project is based on the reforesting of the forest, planted one century ago. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the human need to rediscover the nature and interact with it increased. Activities in open air are crucial for our physical and mental health.

 

In former times we lived thanks to the ambundancy of Nature, now it is time that we help Nature to do so. In Central Europe earnings in rural areas were obtained by cutting trees in the forest.  Income of nobility and clergyman originate from the woodlands. In urban areas warmth, game, mushrooms and berries originated in the forest. It is now high time that we do something for the trees in the forest. 
 

Some 250 years ago laws were written for the sustainability of large properties of forest. For farmers their forest was the saving account and every time some of the families members died or married some trees were cut and trunks were sold to pay the resulting cost. Universities published books about insects, bleth and plagues. Foresters studied those books and tried to apply it in the forest. Since 2016, the Bark Beetle (lat. Curculionidae family) wiped out, in some parts of Europe, the Spruce monoculture. In Gmünd, lower Austria, the one hundred years old Spruce (lat. Pinaceae family) that was planted in straight rows is now being wiped out by the pest.
 

But as votes became governments and Unions fixed salaries the responsibility was reduced to taxpayers. Nature suffered from this monetization and the living forest converted in to production areas. In this catalogued and massacred forest, roads moved in and heavy machinery plowed the ground of the forest disrupting the runoffs. As insects found the weekend pine trees they multiplied and destroyed the entire Central Europe from Germany through Czeck Republic to Austria. 

 

The Scientists believe that a new technology is needed. A biological solution such as the “bio-sequestration”, the need of gen manipulated root material to replant the former woodland. Planting more forests is one of the way to pull carbon dioxide from the air and boost the earth’s natural carbon sinks. We ask you to help us to replant trees with improved stomata or suberin so that the trees can fix more carbon dioxide in their rootsystem and these soils can fulfill again its duty.