Almost forty years ago I read about the then richest man in the world named
Daniel Keith Ludwig getting conttrol of a huge tract of land near the Amazon, having
a papermill built in Japan on a huge barge and transported across the Pacific Ocean
and up the Amazon river. He had a forestry expert who had selected a couple of rapid
growing trees that by coppice management could yield a sustained yield of
wood for paper making;. The coppice management meant that the tree could be cut
close to the ground, but would not be killed, and in a short time would bebig enough to be
harvested again. Other experts predicted that such "monoculture" would invite disease to
wipe out the whole project as gad previously happened to large plantings of rubber trees.
Apparently the project failed, and the land reverted to the Brazilian government. But I
never found any magazine stories about it.
Elsewhere in ancient times coppice referred to maintaining a sustained yield of
firewood by cutting branches off trees rather than cutting the trunk. The word also refers
to a place where the trees are not tall.
One sad thing about the Internet is that sites get removed, so that it is now impossible
to find anything about Daniel Keith Ludwig on the Internet.
