FOR FOREST

FOR FOREST

the uninterrupted

appeal of Nature!

There was a Soccer Stadium!

Built in Klagenfurt, Austria, at the urging of a megalomaniac Premier of the Province of Carinthia. This facility was built for 32,000 fans, at a cost of 66.5 Million Euros. (at today's rate of exchange, that would be about 100 million Can. Dollars.)

Up to the point of the opening of the new Stadium, Soccer games attracted somewhere around 5,000 to 10,000 fans.

This should give you an idea of the lunacy of this Premier.

Eventually the seating capacity was reduced to 12,000. Even at this reduced number, the Stadium never sold out, except for some rare international competition.

Now, do you think this is a bit short of rational thinking?

It gets better:

An “artist” had a brilliant idea: Let's plant a bunch of trees where normally the Klagenfurt Soccer Club plays its games. No, not little saplings!

Great big mature trees.

They brought 300 trees, some of them weighing as much as 6 tons and reaching heights of 10 to 14 meters and planted them on the playing field.

They planted a mixture of deciduous and coniferous trees “to show the beauty of a mixed forest.”

As their advertising brochure states: “Visitors may view this 'installation' free of charge and in astonishment.”

There is really nothing “astonishing” about a forest.

You may bathe in its beauty, you may listen to the wind as it gently moves the branches, you may love and admire nature at its finest. But you would likely not be “astonished.”

The advertising speaks of the changing of the impression created by this “forest” during daylight, dusk and dark hours, the changing colors of the leaves as fall approaches, during all of which the visitor may revel in astonishment.

They talk as if this did not happen in nature.

Go up to the top of one of the many surrounding hills and look over the countryside and what do you see? Trees, Trees and Trees interspersed by farmers' fields and meadows.

There is so much life and so much beauty in this country, that the last thing I need are a bunch of trees, trucked in from afar, and planted in the middle of a soccer stadium, nor do I need the gobbledygook written and talked about by the so-called “art experts” and the people who “admire the Emperor's new clothes.”

Bertstravels

prefers to hike in real forests

This is what 'Carinthia' looks like.

and better!

Do we really need a soccer stadium full of transplanted trees?

Let trees grow in the country side!

Let's play Soccer in a Soccer Stadium.