You had wanted to be a forester for a long time. On childhood walks in the forest with your parents, the stacked piles of cut logs fascinated you: clearly the result of human skill, but somehow also still a part of the forest. Each log different. Each pile unique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As an adult you found work and, each morning, you headed out into the wide, enveloping forest with your axe. Years passed, and you cultivated your skills as a forester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then they came to you and told you that the world had changed, and that you had to use a chainsaw. They said that chainsaws were the future. So you learned to wield one: the difference between cutting and chopping; how to hold your body; necessary maintenance; the angle and stroke of the file to sharpen the chain. Years passed. The labour, like the forest, seemed endless, and you continued to develop your skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then they came to you again and told you that the world had changed, and that you had to sit in a room in a building in an office park in the city and supervise a fleet of robotic tree-harvesting agents. The machines never stopped, they said, and were better at chopping-down trees than people were, and more productive. They said that this was the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you learned how to use the remote controls, the telepresence headset, and the communication systems. Each day you devised a harvesting plan for your team, even though the machines were almost completely autonomous. And the air in that room was grey and stale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that was when you realised that, for you, it was never about chopping down trees, or the height of the log-pile. It was always simply about being in the forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Manchester, February 2026.
Copyright \u00a9 Andrew Johnson 2026, all rights reserved<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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You had wanted to be a forester for a long time. On childhood walks in the forest with your parents, the stacked piles of cut logs fascinated you: clearly the result of human skill, but somehow also still a part of the forest. Each log different. Each pile unique. As an adult you found work … Continue reading “A Forester’s Tale”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2436,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3329","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3331,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3329\/revisions\/3331"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}