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Our Land is not an Industry

Chris Perley's Blog
Friday, July 08, 2016

"To heal is to make whole.  This applies as well to the 'industries' of landscapes: agriculture, forestry & mining.  Once they have been industrialised, those enterprises no longer recognise landscapes as wholes, let alone as homes for people and other creatures. They regard landscapes as sources of extractable products.  They have 'efficiently' shed any other concern or interest."
Wendell Berry.  Our Only World p6

This quote by Wendell Berry sums up why I do not like the name (and explicit framing) of our renamed public department 'Ministry of Primary Industries'.  It disturbs me when the technocrats, especially those who see the world through the myopic lens of dollars and markets alone, have the power to fundamentally shift from a metaphor of culture - agriculture, silviculture, apiculture, horticulture, viticulture, aquaculture - to a metaphor of 'industry'. 

I think we ought to 'see' landscapes in a broad sense, as places of potential for people and the planet, without the industrialised overriding assumption of 'trade-offs'.  We cannot see potential synergies (win-wins in policy speak) if we don't have a sense of the shifting patterns of a place; its mysteries and its beauties. 

And this is the point that the industrialists and narrow technocrats don't get.  They also lose in this new industrial framing.  They do not see that a woodland, a wetland, a tall pastoral ley, a soil that sings within a pastoral setting does many things that not only provide for people and the landscape wonders with which we share our home, but also are better at the hard business considerations of cost savings, input reductions, risk reduction, productivity (output per input) and profit.  They think that their 'efficiencies' and focus on mechanical homogeneity and scale makes our world better when it does the very opposite.

Their ideas of landscapes are analytical without a prior synthesising perspective. These ideas are not 'real', they are a social construction from within their moulded minds - their learned dys-integrated myopias made narrow by a particular education. Their technocratic perspective is blind to either potential or problem.

And so they fail to realise the opportunity, and continue adding more costs and struggles to the people within their land, ever sicker.

You cannot heal a place by industrialising.  But you can create Mordor, where inevitably the people ourselves are reduced to meaningless 'resource', 'waste' and 'tradeoff'.  That way leads to work camps and death.

The heart of any healing perspective is to see through the eyes of culture and the fullness of landscape, never industry.

Chris Perley

What's wrong with wilding trees?

Nick Ledgard's Blog
Thursday, July 07, 2016

Having been a high country forester all my working life and spent much of the later years dealing with wildings, I have long pondered on the pro's and con's of wilding trees.  In short I do not favour them, and certainly don't think the FFA should be seen to support them. 

Farm forestry is all about the wise (informed) use of the right species in the right site, whereas wildings are quite simply forestry by default..  Too often they are the wrong species, of poor form and varied age and stocking.  Even the C market does not make them as attractive as a planned forest.  We are currently harvesting wilding Corsican pine (average age around 30) by L. Coleridge, and the varied age and stocking means the forest contains less than half the volume of a similar aged stand of radiata pine.  And value-wise we are only getting a stumpage of $2/3k/ha. Why then are we harvesting them?  There are a few reasons, but the main one is that they are spreading onto neighbouring properties where they are not wanted.  This is also the reason why we are no longer replanting in D-fir.  Radiata instead. 

The spread risk (in susceptible country) is the main problem with species like contorta, Corsican, larch and D-fir.  It is all very well to say 'let them go', but what about the neighbour's opinion and where do you say stop?  Plus the cost  of 'stopping' can prove formidable.  At the moment, there is a vigorous debate about harvesting the 173ha Coronet forest (all D-fir) between Queenstown and Arrowtown.  It is aged between 20-30, and ideally harvesting should not start until 2030.  But it is sending seed onto hundreds of ha of susceptible land where wildings are not wanted, and the sums indicate that the cost of on-going control could be more than the trees are worth.  I will be surprised if the forest is not harvested early - and this will not be the last such discussion relative to D-fir stands in inland S. Island.

To me, the best landuse is all about deciding on objectives and then making informed decisions to meet that goal.  If it is decided that land is best in trees (for whatever reason) then lets plant or seed it in the species we want - letting it happen by default (= wilding spread) rarely gives the best outcome.

Attached is an article "What's wrong with wilding trees?" which I wrote in 2010.  Hence it is a little dated, but I would still go along with nearly all of what is written.

Wilding spread can look attractive.  But this site on Braemar station near Mt Cook is rapidly infilling, so it will not remain 'park-like' for long.

 

Disclaimer: Personal views expressed in this blog are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the NZ Farm Forestry Association.

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