Crowning glory? Coillte, the ecological emergency and regenerative forestry

Driving through North Cork from Ballyhooley to Glenville, you cannot help but note the huge swathes of monoculture conifer plantations, what I once heard described as ‘slave trees’. These non native species like Sitka spruce, are planted in mechanically spaced rows for ease of harvesting, with no regard to their health or the biodiversity within which they might have evolved, except as these relate to productivity and profitability. An industry whose base is the topography and climate within which profits can be reaped with a chainsaw.

You cannot blame those employed in this industry for feeling defensive when challenged as to its impact on water and soil quality, and on the capacity for resilience within Irish native ecosystems. The industry is well established as a sector that lauds its green, nationalist, sustainable credentials as carbon neutral, a domestic product, and an employer of almost 1000 people (for comparison, Amazon, the firm not the forest, employs around 5000). Yet there are serious questions around how responsibly this state-owned business actually manages the roughly seven percent of Irish land it owns.

Coillte trumpets its achievements in creating carbon neutral initiatives alongside entities like “Go Carbon Neutral” and Forestry Partners, which, together with not-for-profit arm of the Irish State forestry company Coillte, formed the Nature Trust, a new not-for-profit.

But biodiversity loss continues apace, and climate change cannot be challenged with a ‘business-as-usual’ attitude. Indeed, we need an entirely different approach to how economies are structured if we are to maintain ourselves within the limits of global temperature rise that will allow human flourishing to remain a prospect on this planet. This is obviously a huge ask, but economic concerns are nested within ecologically sustainable practices and so far, according to an Irish Times article from July, 2018, native trees cover just two percent of Ireland, and clearfelling, “a practice illegal in Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and parts of Germany for its devastating effects on plants, animals, soil and landscapes alike”, is still common practice by Coillte.

The truth is that climate change and biodiversity loss are entirely interrelated. Dealing with climate change by simply planting huge tracts of land with non-native species and then clear-felling the trees which are all, by definition, within the same year age-range, fails to address the question: how do we create more resilience in natural systems? Resilience, through allowing natural regeneration of species, or replanting native species judiciously to allow regeneration to take place, is the only way to allow ecosystems, and therefore human systems, to mitigate at least some of the ill effects of global temperature rise.

Can biodiverse systems generate wealth? If we use our imaginations, there is absolutely no reason why biodiverse woodlands cannot provide a living for well over 1000 people, though whether or not these people need be employees is a moot point. Native species include hazel, cherry and apple, to name a few, and some incomers, like walnut trees and sweet chestnut, have been growing in Ireland for at least 400 years, and provide rich pickings. Willows and blackthorn have long been used in traditional furniture and craft-making(not to mention the harvesting of sloes to flavour spirits). A conscious move towards seeing woodlands as both productive for human resource needs but also as places of beauty, for mental and physical health and well-being, is vital if we are to re-establish a relationship with the natural world which is rooted in our own survivability. Forest gardening can be highly productive and lucrative, including having small clearings for growing berries and vegetables, and for grazing animals. Mixed use approaches like this allow for a wide variety of activities to co-exist, with different areas being managed or allowed to regenerate naturally at different times.

Of course this would require rethinking furniture making and fuel production. At present, a key plank in Coillte’s business approach is Smartply MDF, to an alternative approach to producing ply from reclaimed materials would move the model towards a totally different set of functions, and, in fact, repulping, or repurposing existing products might well be a much more truly sustainable solution than the creation of new products which is still, unfortunately, the favoured current thinking.

Could we see Ireland once again clothed in a thick blanket of oak, pine and ash, elm and birch, holly and hazel? At least two of these species are in radical decline at present and threatened with near extinction by pests introduced by humans. Combining our capacity for technological knowledge with a systems-based approach (locating the genome for pest resistant individuals, and cloning and replanting these judiciously, in species rich environments that are then allowed to regenerate themselves without human interference, for instance) might just allow us to reclaim that arrogantly awarded epithet: homo sapiens. If we are prepared to learn from how other systems, including forests, manage shocks like disease and wildfire themselves — through diversification and adaptation of species — then we might have a chance at learning how we might best survive ourselves in this, the world we have now created for ourselves. We need the managers of our forests to be on board with this, however. Otherwise we can kiss the ash, the pearl mussel, and our own self-assessed intelligence, goodbye.