By Stéphanie Thiebault, Director of Research at the CNRS, Unité Trajectoires-CNRS-Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
In Europe, forests are the product of several millennia of forest management, customs, codes, laws, craftsmanship and the extraction of multiple resources, and above all of a collective imagination, forged by countless tales and legends. Indispensable to the survival of mankind, the price of forests is no longer the price of their trees that are felled and sold to make cardboard, paper and furniture.
Forests have an intrinsic value that must be considered as such and respected. Although France’s forests have never been as well-developed as they are today, they are under increasing threat, in increasingly poor health and still too poorly exploited to be profitable.
