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    Re: Nice docu: Self-regenerating forest (with minimal human help) in Aotearoa - Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on September 6, 2019, 7:00 am, in reply to "Nice docu: Self-regenerating forest (with minimal human help) in Aotearoa -"

    Thanks for this posting Rhisiart, I didn't know anything about this. Some amazing individuals around the planet. It's not surprising that the local farmers were so antagonistic, they still are, for the most part. The conservatism of farmers, and of the corporate industry that supports them, is very politically powerful (The government is now trying to clean up our severely polluted rivers and lakes, the farming community have claimed the new legislations will be the death of pastoral farming in NZ - it's totally hysterical, but that's the attitude Farmers protest clean rivers

    . He certainly grows a splendid amount of gorse. But as he notes, it's a nursery for the natives. (Of course, gorse is otherwise known as an invasive introduced pestilential weed) However, much of the New Zealand landscape is so degraded, that natural regeneration won't occur without quite a bit of help. He was fortunate that his land still had stands of native forest from which the seeds can spread.

    In Scotland something similar is happening, sometimes a rich person's passion, sometimes the local community. Again, the land is so degraded that "self regeneration" won't occur, except on exceptionally long time scales, and we don't have that time.

    I posted a few weeks ago photographs of our local mountain scape where old cleared steep countryside cleared for farming has been abandoned, and where regeneration is taking place, but even after 100 years, it is still low growth scrub as the apex species that should be there are no near than many kilometres away and the bird life that spreads their seeds is gone I have written to ministers with the suggestion of aerial reseeding some of these areas, but no-one's interested, I'm just a crazy old man, perhaps?

    But at the same time, we can't avoid the fact that such individual action is on its own still rather rare, and government, local and national, and international, must spend more and do more.

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