The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948 – nearly six decades ago. The central assurance: 'All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms.'

Perfectly said. And there is room for some happiness that the Declaration has prospered. It would exaggerate to claim it leads the militia defending and promoting human rights. But for those willing to look it stands shoulder-to-shoulder, more or less, with the greater declarations of the past. A little over-complicated, perhaps, but then so would you be if you wrapped 1,700 words around several dozen clauses. It is at least shorter than Britain’s Magna Carta of the 13th century (4,700 words) or the 17th century Bill of Rights (2,800 words) which restrained British monarchs and created Common Law. French galvanisation of Republicanism via the Rights of Man during the 18th century was far shorter (900 words). So was America’s Bill of Rights from the same period (800 words).  

Whatever the rather lengthy form of The Declaration, December 10 should be one of our calendar’s great treasures. In all the mess of war and poverty, this day represents our one global belief that all peoples and all cultures share common values; we all have ambitions not to repeat the past and to improve our future. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan captured this quite well: 'These rights include rights to health, to education, to food, to housing, to marry and found a family, to participate in public life, to be free from torture, arbitrary arrest and detention – in short, the rights needed to be free from want and fear.'

As with much from Mr Annan diplomacy dominates. Instead of '...to participate in public life...' he should have said '...to vote leaders into office, and out...'. That directness would have been preferable. But otherwise I could not fault his view of what the Declaration should mean to us all.

What happens on December 10? Nothing much seems to be the answer. Compared to AIDS Day the rich world seem blasé and disinterested. The BBC hardly covers Human Rights Day; the UN seems to lose it in a mass of events and other celebrations; few world leaders discuss. Google, the internet search engine, which usually marks important days by varying it's logo, makes no alteration to its home page. On International AIDS Day it features the red ribbon. It is not just Google, either. Search the internet for "human rights day" in quotations (ie, for pages with these precise words) and the result is a miniscule 500. "World AIDS day", by contrast, appears in close to 7,000 pages. Similar imbalances result when you search for "human rights" (17 million results) versus "AIDS" (50 million results).

Something is plain wrong here. True, AIDS affects forty million people and annually four million die. That's certainly severe. But it is a few percent of the worlds population. Meanwhile, 100 percent of the world’s population have human rights to aspire to and face massive challenges in meeting those aspirations. 

What has all this to do with forestry? Actually quite a bit if we can accept and see the realities faced by humans and trees are similar.Individual trees within forests remind us perfectly of an ultimate connection between trees, no matter how great the distances between them. In a large forest, those links can extend for kilometres. Forest 'neighbours' which seem distant and unseen are in fact warnings of the future as well as sources of good fortune.

Wind can greatly damage trees within commercial forestry. Perhaps there is some justice in that because commercial forestry is not especially attractive. Lines and lines of Sitka Spruce in Europe are one example, up and down hills and fields like soldiers on parade. Or oil palms in south-east Asia. They all look like artificial creations. But, liked or loathed, these plantations are similar to much of our modern world: systematic, automated, overly concerned with quantity and predictability when variety and difference could be just as important. And when a strong wind blows in these settings, momentum builds. Trees are forced to sway in unison. Like tightly-packed football supporters they are unable to move in individual ways. Gradually other trees sway even if they are in the middle of the forest, far from direct exposure to the wind. And that united movement becomes, in the end, vital. Huge numbers of trees can be felled in a single climax; overturning and stem breakage is massive.

History tells us that human rights suffer in much the same way. In our interconnected world, once one entity has lost their footing in human rights, it is not long before it will inevitably affect others. What happened in 20th century Yugoslavia soon affected seemingly safe countries elsewhere in first the Balkans and then Europe- and not once but twice: refugees, rogue governments; world war. It is an even sharper connection in the 21st century. Hiccups in North Korea now have the potential, through  inter-continental missiles, to affect Seattle and the west coast of America - not just a continent away but an ocean too. 

This tells us that even if we consider ourselves deep inside a stand of trees, believing our own human rights are safe and inviolate, that can soon mean nothing if the rights of others are not protected. 

There is another point which trees teach us about human rights. Generally, native woodland does not suffer as much wind damage like commercial forestry. Why? Mostly because trees in these woodlands are planted in a more varied way, or nature has produced the varied composition. Either way, native woodlands usually exhibit a mosaic of tree-life, a mix of facing and joining of trees that never settles in a uniform line. It does not look, in forestry terms, mono-cultural (made of a single species). Wind can cause less harm. Native woodlands, in short, show us that human rights can still benefit from some differences and variety.