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    Re: The myths of forestry as a counter to global warming. Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on July 8, 2019, 9:22 pm, in reply to "The myths of forestry as a counter to global warming. "

    Thanks for such reasoned comments Derek and Rhisiart. I wrote in sheer frustration at how our commercial interests are still outweighing our moral ones. Almost all the thinking about re-forestation is still predicated on the need to do this at the lowest possible cost and to make a profit and to fit in with the distortions of the ETS. The fact that the profit is in saving the local ecology and the planet isn't apparently, on its own, sufficient, or that forests are just part of a total re-think of our agricultural practices. . Because of this we are making continued stupid long term decisions, which are not going to benefit us, but only those whose land is being used or the investors in the forests. The figure that wholly commercial forest provides just one fortieth of the CO2 sequestration of a planted or regenerating native forest is sobering, but that's still so much of the thinking. And even where governments know this, and wish to do better, as here in NZ, we are still doing to the opposite. The dramatic pictures I posted show our "clean green" country in its ecologically destructive reality.

    I now live in a more rural area of New Zealand - the south Wairarapa. I live in a small town mostly devoted to grapes and wine, but when I take a cycle ride around the countryside, the most obvious sensation above all is the constant sweet and sour and sickening smell of cow shit. This is intensive dairy country, with highly artificially fertilised pasture, cow-pugged paddocks, stagnant and weed infested drains and green slimy pools of water. I don't know how farmers stand the smell, but I suppose ultimately it's the smell of money. This landscape would have been, 150 years ago, virgin forest, of kahikatea mainly but many other species of huge trees that make up the NZ bush. Huge burn offs and felling destroyed all this - if we reforested all this land, we'd merely be undoing the damage we'd caused then, but as a profit/loss account of CO2, we'd just be back to square one, and no overall benefit to to the planetary balance.

    I occasionally drive to Wellington about 80 kms away, and my journey takes me over a mountain range, the Remutakas, the road goes up to 550 metres - all this deeply dissected mountain range was felled and burnt at one time, mostly several times. The pictures show the road from the summit looking to the west towards Wellington. Some of this was for farming which came to nothing on account of the steepness of the land or the poverty of the soil or the severity of the climate, some was accidental. But we now have a very slowly regenerating forest, with a low canopy of shrub like plants like manuka. The capacity of this forest to regenerate itself speedily is gone. You can burn a forest once, and if left alone, its regeneration can be rapid, but multiple burnings literally sterilise the land. There are no seeds of the apex species to recolonise this forest. It could take several hundred years to get it back to something like it was if we just leave it. This is immediately apparent from the photos, that's almost 150 years of "recovery" of the land, it's nowhere near regenerating, most of the land is still covered in scrub-like natives, with just the odd pockets of some taller native species, like rewarewa. But these are not the climax species of totara, rimu or southern beech, which will remain absent. I would like to see the government fund research into the aerial reseeding or replanting of this landscape (and there are vast areas of NZ similarly affected) to dramatically speed up this process.


    Remutakas (the spelling was recently changed from the Rimutakas) 1875 Wet collodion film.

    Remutakas from the summit, sometime in the last few years.

    The fact is there is only one solution to global warming, and that's to stop burning fossil fuels.

    Not all forestry is bad, of course - I should have made this more clear. I strongly support reforestation, it's a no-brainer. The most reliable and secure way of storing carbon is to plant species that are native to the area, as permanent, unmanaged not as a monoculture, but in sympathy with the surroundings. Such ideas as "rewilding" should be incorporated into the thinking behind this, we are seeing examples of rich benefactors starting this in Scotland, for instance. That's what was there originally, we should seek to mimic this as much as possible.

    But of course, we can use plantation forest much more wisely than we do now or we incorporate forestry as part of our agricultural land management. You both give examples of how this would work. For New Zealand for instance this would also provide considerable benefits for the local ecology, especially in flood and erosion control. This mightn't be as effective as planting or regenerating native forest to leave aside, but still much better than having billions of cattle or vast monocultures of soya beans. But when did you hear of any politician talking about permaculture as a possible solution?

    Our thinking (by that I mean humanity in general, not you in particular) is still predicated on the way we do things now, but if anything is blindingly obvious, we can't keep doing things the way we do now. You both explain very well some sane and rational alternatives, so thanks for that

    Cheers, John M

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