Chris Packham on trees

18 Replies to “Chris Packham on trees”

1. yes indeed, natural regen much better where possible

   1. As Chris Packham has said there is a lot of space in the uplands for natural tree regeneration. When one looks at a tourist view of a Scottish or English upland landscape the typical tourist quote is “isn’t it beautiful” . It maybe, but actually one is looking at a catastrophic disaster as probably 5-600 years ago our uplands would have had much much more tree cover than the measly cover we have today. We have to stop abusing our uplands through burning them and over grazing them. Banning driven grouse shooting and the abusive management that goes with it and halting totally uneconomic subsides for upland grazing will be a great start to seeing a lot more trees appear quite naturally on our landscapes . If we did all this we wouldn’t really need the current “headless chicken” syndrome we have.
      PS If the National Trust had cooperated with the Cairngorms Connect project that would have helped a lot. Very remiss of them.not to do so.

2. There would be enormous scope for the natural return of trees (and nothing to stop a bit of enhancing of that process) to many parts of the Scottish highlands if instead of estates putting out supplementary feed to tide the bloated red deer population over the winter they carried out the full and humane cull of them they really need to. Not only would that mean life would be considerably easier for legitimate farming, forestry and conservation projects it would also mean a significant reduction in the number of usually serious and occasionally fatal road accidents involving red deer. If a conservation organisation wants to take back a few pine marten to woods where they used to live they have to embark upon a full public consultation exercise with all ‘stakeholders’. If an estate wants to have an unnaturally high deer population that screws up the land, wildlife, other busineses and actually kills people that seems to be perfectly OK. Yet of course it’s conservation organisations that don’t care about people and ride roughshod over local communities isn’t it?

3. It has been widely suggested (as a question from Evan Davies recognised) that the Labour target is unachievable. Chris’s response to that was good, but here’s another way of looking at it.
   The BBC’s fact-checker suggests that trees can be planted at 50 million to 30,000 hectares. If we then look at the current tree cover in the UK (about 13%, amongst the lowest in Europe), at what rate would the various election pledges increase that? Even assuming that the promises are for net growth (far from clear), the Conservative proposal is for 0.76% growth per year and the Labour pledge for 1.9% growth, with the other parties in-between. Those are very low rates (compare with expectations of GDP growth for example). Even the proposed Labour rate, and even if it was compounded, would take 36 years to double our tree cover and 60 years to reach the present EU average. Except that it never would, because EU forest cover is currently increasing at 2.8% per year.

   1. Alan – thank you for that.

4. I don’t like millions of trees – that belongs to the politicians – and we should be talking landscapes and outcomes. Yes, trees are great but we’ve been through what damage mindless tree planting can do before. Particularly worrying is the old chestnut of ‘planting up the rough corners’ which is, basically, the last fragments of slightly wilder land in the lowlands – and some are advocating that. When modern foresters plant they are trying to create far more than a plantation – let alone an ‘energy crop’ which is likely to be as bad as the worst intensive farmland: it is about creating multi-purpose land, hitting key outcomes – which can and should be combined for each place – including people, biodiversity timber, water and carbon. Physically, delivering the area/number of trees is no problem – but planning is a different matter and requires a huge amount of effort and thought, making the difference between landscape transformed for the better or complete disaster.

   1. The huge amount of effort and thought are what will make the rates of planting impossible to achieve. And then there’s the horses and the courses. Afaik, where upland peat is up for rehab by raising water tables by grip-blocking and the like, no-one wants the effort wasted so tree seedlings are ruthlessly extirpated. According to literature, heather should be also – in fact anything that conspires to lower the water table should suffer the same fate.

      Want bog – forget trees

      1. Both are needed, each in their own place.

5. I live in Wensleydale – the surrounding moors are barren and lifeless apart from grouse
   I read a book written mid 1700s regarding the toll road that ran through Wensleydale-it stopped at Hawes. North and West of Hawes the uplands were coverered with a vast forest. The house I was brought up in was mentioned as it was a public house then Source-Harrogate reference library

   1. Interesting. Perhaps there are some useful 18th C estate maps of the area that might shed more light on the degree and type of forest cover. Yorkshire Public Record Office might be able to help.

6. And natural regeneration requires nil human effort – it’s a perfect prehensile-belly-clutching-beer-can-type solution. But Homer Simpson would need his environmentalist daughter to explain why.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SLbEDMZMAk

7. We need to get on top of these tree diseases, stop buying muck from foreign nurseries, that goes for gardeners too.
   The Southern Peak District, is currently under threat of devastation caused by Ash die- back,
   thousands of trees are being removed, Larch are still under threat from various pathogens, and
   if Sudden Oak death takes hold, we can all go home.

   1. I see large swathes of Ash re-gen – legacy of Hurricane Fish according to Bloke Down the Pub – with all the signs of infection. But in my wooded garden there are mature Ash that so far appear uninfected. The genetics of Ash and Chalara will interact: an open-pollinated prolific seeder like Ash stands a chance of its population self-selecting for resistance.

8. I am afraid that the forestry industry is ahead of the game re the current mania with tree planting targets. They have jumped up and swiftly got the Scottish SNP Government to agree to new targets of 12,000 ha in 2020 to 18,000 in 2030 in Scotland. The organisation is CONFOR, a forestry industry body that specialise in huge sitka spruce plantations. They use carbon sequestration as a key selling point ‘Fast growing conifers soak up more CO2 than slower growing deciduous’. They also mention biodiversity gain, I suppose this will be through the smaller percentage of deciduous that will buffer the perimeter of the dense plantations.
   https://www.confor.org.uk/news/latest-news/snp-well-plant-36-million-trees-a-year-in-scotland-by-2030/
   I noted the influence of CONFOR when reading up on a ‘new forest for Northumberland’, imagine my shock on seeing that this is a CONFOR operation with sitka. They even had local school children planting sitka (and deciduous) along their ploughed rows.
   The average member of the public does not understand the difference between natural forests and conifers and the timber industry is using this to their advantage and getting positive publicity and public money. This also puts pressure on the land, areas that could be re-wilded or planted with native species in a sympathetic way may be lost under a dark sea of sitka. Also, will some areas of land be drained (with a loss of peat carbon as they prepare the land) to prepare for planting?
   I contacted the Scottish Green Party and relevant MP when I saw this coming some months ago, but had no replies. I will be looking into it further and hopefully getting some answers.

   1. Thanks for this, to me this is an inevitability when everything becomes reduced to carbon emissions. We’ve had rainforest cleared to grow biofuels, the Amazon reduced to something that we need to fight climate change (as opposed to an incredibly complex ecosystem being trashed for a quick buck) and in our own backyard now looks like more of the shitty plantation forestry we were supposed to be moving away from. It’s a shame that the waste issue was sidelined as with so much else when Climate Change became the brand leader rather than a by product of everything else. If we’d got reduce, reuse, recycle and use of recycled material to where they should be we’d have done so much more to protect existing wilderness and free land to be given back to natural processes. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do to stop forestry for yet more junk mail, virgin fibre bog roll and crappy wooden pallets. One of these ‘Forestry is wonderful’ companies created a FB page on which I left a critical, but fair point. The next time I tried to make another I found I had been blocked. Looks as if we’re about to be deluged with loads of propaganda there are clearly piles of dosh to be made.

      1. Well said Les

9. A really fundamental problem, well illustrated in the comments here, is all too often issues are seen as an either/or, good/bad – and frequently leavened with a layer of missing knowledge.

   Planting more Sitka Spruce does not mean there shouldn’t be big re-wilding areas – the FC established Wild Ennerdale very nearly 20 years ago, with in my case at least, the hope that others (especially the National Trust) might learn and follow. It didn’t work, and conservation is ill prepared for the changing scene, with too many advocates stuck in the 1990s. And there’s been a huge failure to recognise change – 30 years on from the Flow country agricultural intensification has wrought havoc in the uplands – Llanbrynmair inn the Berwyns, the contentious last major upland planting in Wales, far from a forestry intrusion into wild country, is now surrounded by nitrogen green improved grassland. The new forests are very different to the solid Sitka of those days, too – it isn’t just about conifers and broadleaves, but about the total landscape including open space, management of other values, especially water, and of very specific influences on biodiversity, both positive and negative. And far from timber going to waste, the efficiency of recycling in the UK has actually lost markets to virgin timber for products like paper !

   Bluntly, this is a challenge to the conservation lobby which really must up its game – 30 year old prejudices are simply not good enough in a changing world.

   1. I’m not sure it’s so much balance as compromise though. Whether it’s ‘sustainable’ harvesting of a hundred year old oak to make natty hardwood furniture or a plantation of foreign conifers for pulp and timber they are an intrusion into natural processes and will inevitably mean an impact on biodiversity. The hundred year old oak was a lot closer to becoming a future ancient tree than a whip I may have planted in the hope that it will be. It certainly will not get to a hundred and fifty years old the time when trees start being big enough to provide dens for pine martens, and it will never be a standing dead oak which is practically as valuable for wildlife as a living one. And of course we can tinker with plantations a bit – leave brash to provide deadwood habitat – but the more they are expected to produce for human consumption the closer they are to a factory and inevitably are worse and worse for wildlife.

      Given the FC’s history of being set up to ensure we could meet strategic, vital needs re timber products after their vulnerability was shown up by WWI, and latterly obligations towards conservation and recreation I see absolutely no conflict with it taking the lead in pushing for more reduce, reuse, recycle and use of recycled material in order for us to meet genuine needs without increasing, and hopefully reducing, consumption orientated forestry. It will also create more jobs in promoting reuse than it will in forestry which is becoming increasingly mechanized. Imagine the FC promoting reusable pallets made from recycled plastic (that could come from beach cleans or pulled from the sea) instead of rather crappy wooden ones that are often used just once then skipped? Or the FC telling the public if they bought more recycled toilet paper we could have less plantation forestry and more genuine rewilding? This would increase their capacity for conservation work and recreational opportunities for the public – but it will be the opposite case if we find plastic over packaging is just being replaced with paper over packaging. Energy companies in the USA found themselves promoting energy efficiency to their customers because it was actually a more sensible step than investing in new generating capacity – so maybe a Forestry Commission (which additionally isn’t a private company) that tried to make sure we needed as little of it as possible is not so far fetched. Better for wildlife, jobs and lovers of the countryside if it did.

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