The Spruce Forest and The Bark Beetles

Once upon a time, in a middle European country, there was a healthy spruce forest. It was teeming with life and the humans that lived nearby cared for it. The forest’s flora and fauna were in a perfect balance, with deers and bears protecting the habitat.

But as the civilization progressed, they changed their habits. Due to the strain they put on the ecosystem, the weather conditions changed throughout the years, the air warmed up and the rain stopped falling. The trees got weaker because of the stress they experienced. They were not used to this climate.

One year, when the weather was especially dry and the sun was as hot as ever, the equilibrium came to its bitter end. A swarm of bark beetles appeared. Each of them was small, no bigger than a seed. They usually live in the forest amongst other insects, but they appeared in unprecedented mass. They found comfort in the dried bark of fragile trees and started carving tunnels and caves that would provide them shelter.

But this kept the trees from receiving the nutrients and water it needed the most at this time. Soon the people noticed the state the trees were in, as they were slowly dying, losing leaves and even whole branches.

In a state of fear to lose their valuable material source they decided to cover the few healthy, resilient individuals that were left with tall structures to prevent more bugs from entering the bark. The community came together to celebrate the casting of a layer of isolation made from concrete between the soil and above ground and wrapping the healthy trees in a ritual. The children, as the youngest and healthiest of the community, would carve inscriptions about the tree onto the artificial base. The most experienced foragers would calculate the day the tree will be logged in the future, which would be etched into the stone.

The animals that lived in the forest mourned the dead trees and wondered about the unknown giants they encountered. They did not understand the water system that the base of the structure formed nor the reasons why they could not reach the trees.

As the years passed and the tips of the trees’s branches gently caressed the roof, the logging ceremony was celebrated on the day when the seasons changed. The precious wood was harvested to use in the human’s constructions. The delicate metal structure that once protected the old tree would be taken to a newly planted individual, to protect it with the spirit of the old tree, which the people believed to still be alive within the material.