by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Many people will immediately think, and that is what the promoters want everyone to think, of nice woodlands with great biodiversity but, alas, the story often is very much a different one.
More often than not those organization(s) behind this are promoting nothing uniform plantations of conifers, and other trees, in other words, monocultures, which generally lack biodiversity greatly, as opposed to mixed woodlands and forests, but is contiguous forest cover. Only that it has no benefits for wildlife and the Planet. This kind of forestry only benefits the corporations.
All plantations are of a uniform age, generally, and will felled almost at the same time, which is very different to, what I call, proper forestry and woodland management, and I will come to coppicing later, where the ages of the trees and their growth rates are different and thus also the time and age at which they are being felled.
What we really need are not monoculture forests of conifers or even broadleaf trees but a mixture of different kind of trees in our woods and forests and where appropriate they should be broadleaf rather than conifer. Not just do those kind of woods and forests provide greater biodiversity and are better for wildlife in general, they also are better in carbon sequestration.
Broadleaf trees can and will regrow when “pruned” on a regular interval, of between seven years to several decades, in a process called coppicing or pollarding, and ideally should be worked as coppice with standards allowing the finest specimens to grow into large trunks.
But present day commercial forestry, even in the country that is the birthplace of sustainable forestry, is only interested in fast growing trees that can be harvested within about a generation to make a quick buck. It is not, despite what they say, about the environment and all that, but all about a quick return on investment.
Under the term “contiguous forest cover” we are being sold a lie in the same way as we are being sold a lie with the Green Pledges and the Green Deal as to forestry. It is all about forestry monocultures, generally, and not about mixed woods and forests. Such monoculture forests do not benefit wildlife and biodiversity and do nothing with regards to “combating climate change”. In fact it is almost the opposite rather.
In a changing climate where there is the possibility of hotter temperatures, droughts and thus forest fires monocultures, especially of conifers, are also a disaster waiting to happen.
The British Forestry Commission, now, to an extent re-branded as Forestry England, Forestry Scotland and Forestry Wales, etc., and the Royal Forestry Society, are advocating bringing in foreign trees to Britain, for instance, including the likes of eucalyptus. This is bordering on insanity.
The only reason, though they are, unfortunately, not open with this, for eucalyptus is the fact that it is fast growing and, apparently, very suitable for the making of biomass pellets.
As a replacement for the ash, affected by Ash Dieback, they are proposing foreign maples and when challenged why not concentrate on the Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus), known as Mountain Maple (Bergahorn) in Germany, the reply was that Sycamore was not a native British tree. Apparently American maples are.
Most, if not all, of those foreign trees are unknown to the British wildlife, for instance, and eucalyptus, for instance, has no known benefit to wildlife and Britain is just a little short of wild Koalas. We also have zero idea as to how many of foreign pests, in whichever form, we might be importing with those trees. The driver definitely is not environmental concern but neoliberal capitalism at its worst.
We need to return to an understanding of the ways of the past in dealing with woods and forests and work with the trees once again for the mutual benefit of all concerned, trees, wildlife, environment and humans. But then there are not the huge profits to be made from it as with the current – and future – kinds of forests envisioned by the capitalists, especially not in the biomass market and that is why governments and agencies follow the lobbyist trails and the brown envelopes.
© 2020
