Woodland habitats could benefit from changes about to happen
IREMEMBER being told as a kid that before the age of coal, a squirrel could travel from the top of the Rhondda to Cardiff without touching the ground.
Such was the extent of south Wales’ native woodland.
Though the valleys would no doubt have also been dotted with farmland, the picture I imagined was so different from the coal tips, abandoned pitheads, barren hillsides and miles upon miles of terraced street that was the reality I saw.
Industrialisation and agriculture have left their scars on the landscape.
The consequences for the environment are only too obvious – ecosystems destroyed, animal and plant life obliterated, habitats extinct. Wales has a paucity of forest. The deciduous temperate rainforest which once covered much of Wales has long disappeared. The country is now one of the least wooded in Europe .
Only 14% of Wales’ land is covered by woodland. Half of that is the native, broadleaved stuff.
The Welsh Government is only too aware of the national deficit in woodland habitat. It wants to establish an extra 100,000 of woodland over 20 years. It could almost certainly be more ambitious. But it’s a target, at least.
Could Brexit be the unlikely source of a boost for Wales’ afforestation project?
The conservation charity, Coed Cadw Woodland Trust will next week outline the environmental benefits it sees presented by Britain leaving the EU.
Natalie Buttriss, the trust’s newly appointed director of Wales, says Brexit presents “a unique opportunity to develop a new sustainable land management policy that delivers a viable future for our landscapes and countryside and our aspirations for the well-being of future generations”.
The charity will hand a petition to the Assembly in Cardiff Bay next week, calling for the Welsh Government to establish a “sustainable land use policy that will encourage landowners to plant the right trees in the right place and seek to protect Wales’ existing trees and woods”.
Butriss adds: “They say that money doesn’t grow on trees; our message is that they offer huge and completely tangible benefits, from reducing flood risk, improving air quality, protecting soil, sheltering livestock and supporting wildlife. We simply can’t afford to miss out.” Why not be more ambitious? We could realise that a great shift is about to happen in human history. We’re entering an age of automation and artificial intelligence.
But we’re also entering an age of great global population growth and planet-wide environmental crises.
Here are problems and opportunities.
One of which is a change in how we view our landscape.
We might realise that supporting pastoral farming through subsidies neither makes economic nor environmental sense and that creating new forested areas could be a way of reinvigorating rural communities.
The rewilding of Wales need not be at the cost of prosperity. Questions of income and employment are likely to be redundant in decades to come.
We could come up with a plan, aping that of England, for a national forest of our own.
It could cover the south Wales valleys, and dot its way through Powys to the uplands of Gwynedd and Denbighshire.
There are robust ethical and economical reasons for changing the way we live.
The need to farm livestock for meat is almost certain to disappear with the ability to manufacture meat artificially and as plant-based diets become the norm.
This stuff might seem far fetched, but China recently signed a $300m deal to purchase meat grown in a laboratory in Israel.
That kind of money is not a gamble.
Our communities and environment have been through radical reform in centuries past.
Wales’ woodland habitats might well be among the biggest beneficiaries from even greater revolution in decades to come.