The Wasted Forest
By dtailed
4 Mar 2007
In early January 2007, coming out of my apartment, I saw a Christmas tree thrown away next to the dumpster. I took my camera out, took a photo of it and moved on. Then I saw another one and another one and my one photo turned into a 3 day walk all around Drumul Taberei, the Bucharest neighborhood where I live.
It's been two months since Christmas and the memories of those good times are fading away. I got and I gifts, I ate, I drank, but what's left? I'll tell you what: the trees. The 11 photos shown here are only a very small part of the entire story: over 150 photos, 200-300 trees (and that's just in my neighborhood). If all of Bucharest is considered you'd probably end up with quite a large forest. At a national or global scale things only worsen exponentially.
Some people have tried to convince me that most of these trees are grown in special farms and that they're not actually cut down from a real forest. Well, if you put hundreds of thousands of trees together then you get a forest, don't you? I find it hard to understand how people can still perpetuate this tradition when billions of trees are cut worldwide every year. Do you really need a Christmas tree to enjoy the holidays? Well not really, but that's what they teach you because otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell you all the other stuff either, would they?
