WOODEN BUILDINGS

Where I come from, there are still an impressive number of 19th century wooden buildings that never burned down. (A huge stone church burned to ashes, leaving just the stone wall shell, but somehow old abandoned wooden houses still stood,)

What has been destroying wooden houses is not nearly fire so much as it is a) Foreign Chinese investment to build bigger structures made from energy-expensive concrete; b) a prevailing cultural idea that wooden building cause fire (even in the face of the many that don't); c) the religion of modernism that says buildings must be hard concrete; d) absolutely zero application of commonsense measures like sprinklers (including any effort whatsoever to prioritize their funding,)  These are only some of the reasons for the destruction of wooden buildings other than that "they catch fire."

The destruction of historic wooden buildings is a detriment to historical tourism (not to mention more esoteric cultural, spiritual and aesthetic values).

Simply insisting that wooden buildings catch fire may be leaving out important other considerations.

------------------

Wooden buildings are the heart, soul, spirit, flesh of Jamaican culture. They embody the spiritual messages left by those who built them. To destroy them brings the entire society down. Stone and brick are cold substitutes. As to concrete, which wastes energy for its manufacture and tears up mountains and their web of life, the harm it does is incalculable.

Wood is part of wattle and daub, and soft materials like clay or mud for the daub are very spiritual as well. The softer the material, the more representative it is. I believe cob or (k)nog are very commendable building materials too.

But the way life passes through the veins of the wood makes it very like the human body. The tree stands upright like the human, has a crown, has appendages that extend outwards. Don't think that African builders didn't know all that.