During a recent visit to Eswatini, while temporarily lost and in the middle of a forest I thought I’d never get out of, I remembered Tato, one of my protagonists in Future Imperfect (soon to be published 😊), when he described commercial tree plantations as arboreal eugenics. Of course, I agree, but then again, wood is an important resource, useful for many things and renewable because you can plant new trees after the old ones have been cut down – a veritable virtual circle.
Future Imperfect – Meet Tato
‘Renewable’ is the word of the moment, like ‘clean’ nuclear power and ‘biodegradable’ bioplastics, but maybe we should pause and consider their true meaning and what renewable means for trees in a commercial plantation.
A tree life and death in 4 easy phases
Ground preparation – Clearing, usually through burning and herbicide spraying to remove unwanted survivors.
Question: Who and what is burned? Answer: Flora, fauna and the living chain between each of them. I can’t help thinking of the panicked pandemonium of rats, rabbits, foxes, birds and, and, and … as they flee the fire.
Planting – the saplings receive regular doses of fertilisers and pesticides until they (the trees) are well established.
Question: Who survives the herbicide treatment? Answer: UNWANTED PLANTS, if you believe the manufacturer’s blurb, or food for the feeders and nutrients for the trees – millions of years of adaptation and development.
Question: Why fertilisers when the soil should have enough nutrients?Answer: When trees are removed, the nutrients go with them.
Pole stage – when the inter-tree battle for space starts to slow growth, every 4th or 5th tree is removed. The ‘thinning’ will be repeated numerous times in a single tree’s lifetime – if it’s lucky enough to survive.
Question: Can you imagine how it must feel to wonder if you’re next?
Final harvest – all trees of a specified height are removed.
Question: What happens to the carbon the trees are storing? Answer: most of it will be released into the atmosphere again as carbon dioxide (CO2).
Question: What happens next? Answer: The same cycle is repeated with significantly less biodiversity to remove – a win-win for some.
I’m not targeting Eswatini. I’ve seen as much and much worse in South Africa and Europe, but perhaps I’m more aware of the subject after writing Future Imperfect, and maybe I had more time to observe because I was lost.
I’m not offering solutions, though recycling timber saves unnecessary logging, and limiting our paper usage does too. In the end, it’s all about consumption – how much and how we do it. If everyone made a small effort, we could force the change, so let’s raise Consumer Power’s ugly head and make it beautiful again.
N.B
Trees accumulate more than 40% of their lifetime’s worth of carbon in just the last quarter of their lives.
Younger trees are more sensitive to the changing conditions of rainfall and sunlight than older trees.
Meanwhile – a plantation in Eswatini
And finally
Large-scale industrial plantations have been associated with driving deforestation, causing massive land grabbing and emitting huge amounts of CO2. They have also been associated with poor management practices, such as reducing soil carbon stock, reducing micronutrients, increasing soil compaction, lowering water tables, releasing invasive species, plus using fertilizers and herbicides.
Large-scale plantations extending over entire landscapes provide fuel for fires. As temperatures rise due to climate change and fires are more likely to occur, these plantations represent a public threat on a large scale.
Extract from A burning issue
