Investor David Frank has postponed his goal of early retirement in order to buy forest areas for 60,000 euros.
He did this after seeing how the German forests are doing during a family vacation.
Frank now wants to buy more and more forest areas to protect them from harmful interventions. His project is called “Wild Forests”.
I have a big goal: financial freedom. I report on this every month at Business Insider as part of my Spar-Updates. In the following article, I will tell you why I have now decided to pause my path to early retirement and instead invest more than 60,000 euros in setting up a charitable project.
“Dad, where is the forest?”
In the summer of 2022, my family and I spent most of our holidays in the Eifel. The forests around our holiday village became something like our second home. From morning to night we were on a discovery tour.
Large spruce plantations criss-crossed by hills, caves and countless small streams offered us the perfect backdrop for this. But on one of our many campaigns through the green thicket something completely unexpected happened. Instead of being surrounded by metre-high spruce trees as before, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a huge treeless area.
My children could hardly believe their eyes. And I was pretty stunned too. What had happened here, where days before magnificent coniferous trees were climbing up? The answer to our bewilderment was provided by the knee-deep tracks in the battered soil. Because these led us directly to a so-called harvester. These machines support the forestry industry in “harvesting” huge areas of forest quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. Often only bare areas of enormous dimensions remain.
Reforestation fails
Unfortunately, clear-cut forest areas, such as in the Eifel, are now the order of the day in many places. Whether Harz, Hunsrück or Bavarian Forest – the picture is like one egg to the other. But what actually happens after forestry has “cleared” the forest, as the politicians say?