Burning Wood
Created | Updated Aug 19, 2018
Burning Wood
I cannot believe the amount of people trying to start camp fires over the summer, using wood chopped down from live trees. Not only that but dragging branches up to ten feet long and putting them on a fire only a couple of feet across. It is like putting a kettle of water on a stove and expecting it to burn, not boil. Green plants are full of water. They do not burn. Sure they drag plastic waste bins onto fires because they know that they burn but dry, dead wood? When we lived in Glasgow, I saw local kids trying to burn live bushes.
In Ayrshire at a local loch, I have seen the same thing of branches being chopped down and thrown on a fire. People have been coming here for years, yet it never seems to occur to any of them that this means firewood has been picked clean ages ago, along the shoreline. Do they go back and search for wood elsewhere along the road they came in? No, even though it is laying around in abundance. They prefer to try to defy reality and burn green wood. Even covered in petrol it isn't going to burn. Common sense? More like common dense.
Perhaps it is time to bring in compulsory scout camps for boys1 or get the SAS to teach survival courses, to those who obviously know nothing much about nature and the real world.
