The crime isn't cutting trees — it's not replanting them

I was born in the forest. In a small town in the interior of Santa Catarina, where the smell of timber was part of the air. My father worked at a sawmill and drove a forestry truck; my mother was a seamstress. The forest wasn’t scenery or a metaphor — it was what paid the bills at home.

And yet the schoolbooks told me that cutting trees is a crime.

The math that doesn’t add up

It took me years to grasp how wrong that sentence was. Today I look around and see trees everywhere — and I see that the crime isn’t cutting them. The crime is not replanting them.

A planted tree is a renewable resource: you cut it, you plant again, the cycle restarts. Demonizing the cut and forgetting the replant inverts the logic. The problem was never the chainsaw; it was the stump left without a future.

Without cutting, catastrophe

There’s an uncomfortable truth the easy narrative prefers to avoid: wood is in everything. In paper, in construction, in packaging, in energy. If we suddenly couldn’t cut trees, the result wouldn’t be a greener planet — it would be a global financial catastrophe, and a rush toward worse substitutes. We need harvested forest as much as we need standing forest. The mature question isn’t “to cut or not to cut”; it’s “how to cut and make sure it comes back.”

On single-species forests

I’m honest about what this means. Do I like single-species forests? Philosophically, no. A monoculture doesn’t have the richness of a native forest, and it would be dishonest to pretend it does.

But it’s necessary. Today it’s the cheapest, most efficient way to produce fiber, solid wood, charcoal and renewable energy — and we need all of it. Romanticizing the matter doesn’t plant a single extra tree or lift one person out of poverty. The planted forest is a conscious economic choice, not a sin to be hidden.

Romance gets in the way; honesty solves it

This is where nature, economy and social development meet — and where education, too often, falls short. That sentence in the schoolbook isn’t a detail; it’s the symptom of an education that prefers the slogan to understanding. We’re taught to condemn, not to manage. And whoever grows up condemning the cut never learns the one thing that actually matters: to replant, to manage, and to make the forest generate income and come back.

A well-managed renewable resource is development. It’s the job at the sawmill, the truck on the road, the income that supports a family in the countryside — mine included. Treating that as a crime is to deny development to those who need it most, in the name of an imagined nature that doesn’t exist in the real world.

What I stand for

I don’t defend cutting without criteria. I defend the opposite of what the book taught me: cut responsibly and, above all, always replant. A forest is one of the few assets you can harvest and return to the land at the same time. The crime was never the cut. The crime is leaving the ground without the next tree.

That’s the lens through which I look at every forest asset — no romance and no demonization, with responsibility and with the math adding up.

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