| We were inspired by a famous story told by Gregory Bateson about New College in Oxford, England. It went something like this. They had a main hall built in the early 1600s with beams forty feet long and two feet thick. A commitee was formed to try to find replacement trees because the beams were suffering from dry rot. If you keep in mind that a veneer from an English oak can be worth seven dollars a square foot, the total replacement cost for the oaks was prohibitively expensive. And they didn’t have straight forty foot English oaks from mature forests with which to replace the beams.
A young faculty member joined the committee and said, “Why don’t we ask the College Forester if some of the lands that have been given to Oxford might have enough trees to call upon?” And when they brought in the forester he said, “We’ve been wondering when you would ask this question. When the present building was constructed 350 years ago, the architects specified that a grove of trees be planted and maintained to replace the beams in the ceiling when they would suffer from dry rot.” Bateson’s remark was, “That’s the way to run a culture.” Our question and hope is, “Did they replant them?” |
