Listen to what the trees tell us
A year on from the Tolaga Bay disaster, historian Dame Anne Salmond, in Munich on a Humboldt Fellowship, reflects on the lessons that Germany’s silviculture practices have to offer.
In June 2018, many Kiwis looked aghast at images of a house marooned in a sea of logs in Tolaga Bay, with huge piles of logs choking the rivers, and on farmland and beaches. Gazing at this catastrophe, they asked themselves, ‘‘How on earth did this happen?’’
It’s a long story. For more than 80 million years, Aotearoa New Zealand was a land of forests, at the heart of the world’s largest ocean. As trees, rivers, plants and animals evolved together, unique life forms emerged. As the biologist Jared Diamond has said, this is the nearest we can find to ‘‘life on another planet’’.
It wasn’t until about 800 years ago that the first people came ashore. These first settlers were gardeners, fishers, hunters and gatherers, who cleared forests for gardens and settlements, usually close to the coast, on plains or along major rivers. They hunted birds and brought with them kuri (Polynesian dogs) and kiore (Polynesian rats) that ate eggs, chicks and reptiles – and the human transformation of our forests began.
In the chants taught in ancestral schools of learning, people, plants and animals were all kinfolk, sprung from the same ancestral parents, Ranginui (Sky Father) and Papatuanuku (Earth Mother). While people could harvest the offspring of their children, the ancestors of forests and birds, fish and reptiles, wild and cultivated foods, they had to carry out rituals to ensure their ongoing life and fertility.
When the first Europeans landed almost 250 years ago, they were amazed at the height and girth of the trees that grew across the country. The scientists on James Cook’s Endeavour marvelled at towering kahikatea forests along the Waihou River, while Marion du Fresne’s men were struck by the kauri forests in Northland.
In the Biblical story of creation, God told Adam and Eve to ‘‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’’. People were expected to rule over all other life forms, and command them for their own purposes.
Not surprisingly, then, once European settlement got under way in the early 19th century, forests were felled in vast quantities – for ship’s masts and spars, for buildings in the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, for firewood and other purposes. For a long time, the supply seemed inexhaustible.
As forests were cleared for settlements and farms, with great ‘‘burns’’ that sent up so much smoke that people at sea thought there were volcanic eruptions ashore, the woods began to dwindle, and the land began
to slip and slide. Warning signs were noted as early as the mid-19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that New Zealanders became sufficiently concerned about the loss of our forests to mobilise.
When the New Zealand Forest Service was set up in 1921, its vision was to sustainably harvest native forests and to plant exotic forests (mostly pinus radiata), which began to be felled during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. As the demand for inexpensive housing grew, the rate of felling native forests accelerated, and New Zealanders rallied to protect what remained in national parks.
The ‘‘forest wars’’ of the 1970s left bitter memories of a Forest Service dedicated to felling native forests, rather than managing them sustainably. As a result, conservationists largely dedicated themselves to protecting the remnants, while the Forest Service was left to concentrate on planting and harvesting exotic forests.
In many ways, this has been a disaster. A radical division between exotic commercial forests and indigenous conservation forests has meant that the possibility of truly sustainable, ‘‘close to nature’’ silviculture has been almost entirely ignored.
From the late 1980s, when privatisation took hold and many state forests were sold, even those exotic forests that had been planted to stabilise highly erodible landscapes were sold, and harvested. In regions like the East Coast, with some of the most fragile soils in the world, this led to devastating erosion, choking rivers and coastlines with sediment and slash, flooding and ruining farmland.
In 1988, after Cyclone Bola ravaged the region, more exotic forests were planted in an effort to stabilise the land, and these are now also being harvested, with predictably disastrous effects, as we saw in Tolaga Bay last year. That kind of planting is still going on.
In New Zealand, almost all silvicultural research, expertise and commercial forestry is devoted to exotic, short-rotation monocultures, despite the devastating environmental impacts seen in regions such as the East Coast, Coromandel, Northland and Marlborough.
Back in the 1950s, on the other hand, countries such as Germany
realised that ‘‘close to nature’’ silviculture, based on indigenous mixed forests, with no clear felling, little spraying and an emphasis on natural regeneration, was a smart alternative to exotic plantation forests. Today almost three-quarters of German forests are in mixed stands, with an emphasis on biodiversity and soil enrichment.
As we confront a climate crisis, we can’t keep on repeating the same old mistakes. At present, the Emissions Trading Scheme and government schemes heavily subsidise the planting of exotic species, even in regions where the planting and harvest of exotic forests has wreaked environmental havoc.
The Billion Trees programme and other initiatives give us a chance to take stock, and change course. On red and orange-zoned land (our most erodible landscapes), current types of forestry need to transform to more sustainable models.
If ‘‘close to nature’’ forestry can work in Germany, there is no reason why it cannot also work here, with our magnificent native timbers. Certainly, no more taxpayer funding should go into establishing shortrotation, clear-felled, exotic monoculture plantation forests on highly erodible lands. That would be crazy. It’s time to start planting the right trees in the right places, and not just talk about it.
The disaster at Tolaga Bay should never happen again. At present, though, the chances aren’t great. It’s time for forestry managers and conservationists to talk together, and for ministers and officials to listen to those whose lives and lands have been wrecked by a crude, extractive form of forestry on the East Coast and elsewhere.
With ‘‘close to nature’’ silviculture, we could be a land of forests again, where the rivers run clear and clean, and there are no more piles of logs on the beaches. If this can happen in northern Europe, at the heart of great industrial nations, it can happen in our ‘‘clean, green land’’ at the heart of the Pacific.
As we confront a climate crisis, we can’t keep on repeating the same old mistakes.