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A Forest Flows

Chris Perley's Blog
Friday, November 25, 2016

I am a forester; in the old sense of the word. I want to reclaim the name, to give it again the sense of guardianship of a people and a place which is spatial, structural, dynamic, and timeless; a guardianship which sees our short stay here as one step along a path, which sustains a place of function that gives of multiple values, and shifts in shape and form through four dimensions … and others of the mind. A forester used to be far more than an agronomist. They were verderers (responsible for the green), guardians of the forest common, and common law, and the rights and responsibilities of commoners, and with equal status to the Sheriff.

I want to reclaim that word ‘forest’, to take it back to the French forêt – even beyond. A forest was vert (green) and venison (meat), game, hunt, wolf, prey, browse, graze, forage, arable fields, villages, halls, fungi, recreation, procreation, herb, fruit, nut, of rights to mast and turbary and marl, of wild food, charcoal, fuel, wood, tool making, even refuge. A forester is, as Jack Westoby said, concerned not just with the forest, but with how the forest can serve people. Not just the mill.

Such a forest is not a ‘crop’. No forester merely ‘scientifically manages’ that crop. That we leave to the agronomic technocrats who must reduce meaning of complex natural and social beings in order to fit some delusion of concrete form that behaves within the model: the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.

"All things flow, nothing abides. You cannot step into the same river twice, for the waters are continually flowing on. Nothing is permanent except change." Heraclitus

Forests are as Alfred North Whitehead argued for all objects. No forest has a simple spatial or temporal location. They shift, they extend, they change, they are influenced from their position within a geography, a history, and through the changing lens of humanity and other beasts. They are complex, adaptive, alive, and beautiful. They are verbs, not nouns. They are defined by process, not structure. “All things flow” is what Whitehead said, as all things are integrated, and inseparable from the observer. What we see, we see through the filters in our minds given to us by our culture.

It is because forests are unbounded, complex, adaptive and dynamic that they don’t behalf as factories do; they are more organic than material. The ‘forest as factory’ idea is an abstract, an ideal; it is ‘anti-real’ in the sense that it is a representation of reality made useful because it provides a working model – an illusion – for those who think in a mechanical way, with all the emphasis on hierarchy and control, and all the delusions of how the scientific managers are those that ‘know’ a forest. To think of a forest as a ‘resource’ is to dissect it, divest it of essence. To think of a forest in this way imprisons an experience of all the senses into a prison cage.

You can sense a forest. Ball’s Clearing is a Podocarp-Hardwood remnant adjacent to a frost flat (the clearing) beneath the Kaweka Range, inland Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. As a child it was nothing short of a wonderland of sense and mind-changing experience. There is energy, life, breathing, pulsing, tenor, bass and baritone sounds of boughs and birds, multi-scented, multilayered, multi-coloured, moving, swaying, height, awe, grandeur, and welcoming grace. Because I was no artist – perhaps those best at knowing and representing this sense of place – I chose a future as a forester, for the sake of forest ecology. Ball’s Clearing is a forest as a system, subjective, moving, death and renewal. There is no factory here, unless it is one trapped inside someone’s mind.

That forest-as-factory ideal is a useful mirror to reflect back to the agronomists their prior belief. And this belief is hardly, if ever, questioned, because to do so would involve looking beyond the mirror, to try to catch a glimpse of the real world where scientific method cannot go. Beyond the mirror is the realm of philosophy, experience, intuition, sense – the real world, connected, dynamic, difficult to define in any static structural sense: “Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalisation around which we must weave our philosophical system,” wrote Whitehead.

Whitehead even had a phrase for ‘becoming’, for being influenced by a moment such as a boy’s visit to a rich forest ecosystem. An ‘actual occasion’ is this process of becoming. It is not a mere event. In complex systems theory today we might refer to it as the adapting of a complex, me.

There have been other ‘actual occasions’. You can be taught ecology, but there is a moment when you get it – lying on your back listening to bird calls after plotting up and down the change from gullies to sunny or shady aspects. The plot data shows one ‘truth’, a snapshot. The experience of variation and connection you feel in a small forest site and how it relates to the dynamic context around you gives another, and it is far deeper.

And if you like land, and have a sense for it, you can see the same integrated patterns and processes working through space and time outside the forest, across the wider landscape.

These challenges to the definition of forests go beyond what they are. It also extends to what they do, their purpose, and what relationships they have within their geographic space, within their on-going path of history, and to humanity. Are we one inclusive part of these natural systems, or excluded outsiders who draw upon ‘objective’ forests for sustenance or the occasional visit?

The modern view would have us the latter, excluded, and the forest as ‘resource’ – the either ‘preservationist’ or ‘resourcist’ dichotomy that provides no place for people. The developer and the preservationist fight each other for where the fence will go between their two sides of the same coin, and they both fight those that try to live, nurture, and harvest within a space.

The past and – in my view essentially – the future view would have us the former, integral, included.

We need to move away from our current modernist debasement of truth – the structuralism, the mechanical ontology, the simplification, the reduction and dissection, the denial of the richer parts of sense experience, the dis-integration of people from their space. These ideas are just that, ideas. They are not only false, they are inhumane, and underpin the debasement of our natural forest systems to accommodate a desire for more easy measurement, control, ‘utilisation’, modelling, and concepts of allocation and ‘ownership’. That debasement is not ‘truth’, it is ‘convenience’. It does not maintain value and adaptable philosophical enquiry, it degrades thought and assigns tasks.

And that modern debasement applies to all land, and the people it would call ‘resource’ as well.

Chris Perley
2nd March 2013

And I couldn’t resist quoting this …
“This is a trait I admire about foresters: they think big. Some of the greatest thinkers about the American landscape were foresters, including Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and Benton MacKaye. …… Maybe this bigger picture has to do with the roots of the word ‘forest’: the place outside the king’s garden, the place beyond.”
Robert Sullivan 2014 ‘Forest farewell: an ode to an iconic tree’ Orion Mar/April 2014 p61

Forest policy and politics

Hamish Levack's Blog
Thursday, November 10, 2016

Stuart Nash, Labour spokesperson on Forestry, met with the NZFFA executive on 8 November and shared his ideas about forest policy. See Forestry - Imagine by Stuart Nash, Labour spokesperson for forestry

My views on this policy follow:

A $1/m3 Government levy on export logs would certainly be much more palatable than $5/m3 (as Stuart suggested previously).

I mentioned that such a levy would probably be acceptable if it was introduced at the same time that Government began paying something, [perhaps an equivalent amount] in recognition for the ecosystem services that forest owners provide the community with.

My paper that was published in the November 2015 ‘Tree Grower’ refers to the  impressive strides Scion has made recently in the quantification of the ecosystem benefits of plantation forestry. The table below, which is extracted from the paper, is from a 2014 report on eco-system services in the Bay of Plenty’s Ohiwa Catchment. It demonstrates a large positive ecosystem service value from exotic forestry of $5,609 a hectare each year. 

 

Table 2: Indicative values in dollars per hectare each year of key ecosystem services in the Ohiwa catchment

  Dollars per hectare
Carbon sequestration/emission and greenhouse gas regulation using $4 per New Zealand Unit. [Note however that as at November 2016 an NZU is worth $18.50] $48
Avoided erosion and flood/disturbance regulation $121
Regulating nutrient supply by avoiding leaching $2800
Pollination $206
Water regulation $6
Waste treatment $244
Pest and disease regulation/biological control $11
Water supply $8
Recreation $900
Species conservation $257
Nutrient cycling $994
Soil formation $14
Net ecosystem services value in dollars per hectare each year $5609

 

Stuart's proposals that Government (a) Includes forestry cutting rights for stands of forest over 500 hectares in the Overseas ?Investment Act, and (b) Implements a $1/m3 export levy on all logs exported without value added, will not go down well with many of the estimated 100,000 people who have significant investments in private forests. The proposals would discourage investment in replanting and new planting  if potential forest investors feel that a precedent has been set whereby the Government ‘arbitrarily’ extracts money off them. There is already a strong resentment in the forestry sector about the Government’s uneven treatment of different land uses. Government, via the ETS,  has already devalued pre 1990 forest land but agonises about capping the value of pastoral land by the imposition of a stock exclusion rule for water quality.  Without pricing GHG emissions from Agriculture (principally dairy), the government is paving the way for a huge ongoing subsidy from the taxpayer and industry to NZ’s dairy farmers.   The pull-through effect of demand for land from the dairy sector has put sheep and beef farm land suitable for forestry ( having an average value of $5,700/ha according to one analyst) out of reach for afforestation, noting that land under a pre-1990 forest has  an average value of $2000/ha including the depreciated costs of improvements (roads, culverts, and landings).

It would also be counterproductive to make it difficult to attract foreign investment in forests. Among other things this would discourage forest aggregation and scale economies.  [Note for example, UFG which is a company that uses Chinese capital to aggregate cutting rights is more than happy for the New Zealand sellers to exchange their cutting rights for shares in UFG]. Note also that most of New Zealand forest assets are already foreign-owned because, in general, there was, and still is, insufficient capital in NZ to buy them. Some profit may go overseas eventually, but typically more than 90% of that foreign capital investment ends up in NZ pockets, via wages, land purchases, taxes etc. Liquidity is needed if we want more investment in forestry and afforestation, and obstructing overseas buyers does not help.

Now onto other matters.  You have omitted to include many excellent forest policies that the Labour Party laid out in its 2014 pre-election paper “Economic Upgrade for Forestry and Wood Products” It would be good if these ‘promises’ were carried forward as a pre- 2017 election manifesto.   ‘Carrots’ rather than ‘sticks’ would be much more attractive to forest growers.

In summary this pre-election paper said that if Labour formed a Government it wanted: 

  1. To encourage investment in wood processing to move the focus from logs to higher-value products by:
    a)     Implementing a ‘tax deferral’ for investment in plant and equipment in the forest and wood products industry, by means of an accelerated depreciation provision. 
    b)    Reintroducing an R&D tax credit to encourage stronger private investment in high-quality R&D.
    c)     Ensuring that public science works to further develop wood-plastic composites.
    d)    Working with the industry and BRANZ to develop building standards for wood construction to accommodate advanced wood construction technologies.
    e)     Developing a stronger domestic market for wood products
    f)     Adopting a Pro Wood government procurement strategy for government-funded project proposals for new buildings up to four stories high. 
  2. To increase net stocked forest area by:
    a)     Stabilizing the price of carbon in New Zealand 
    b)    Making suspensory loans available (repayable on harvest) to cover the costs for planting new forests, with the option of joint planting ventures with iwi.
    c)     Introducing a legacy forests status to protect and renew our indigenous forests 
  3. To establish Forestry Taskforces for the long-term unemployed by:
    a)     Supporting iwi forestry clusters to analyze options for their land.
    b)    Providing business stability for the forest and wood products industry
    c)     Completing the National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry.
    d)    Formalizing the government’s approach to the forestry sector in a ‘New Zealand Forestry Policy’ document.
  4. To ensure the sector is underpinned by suitable infrastructure and a skilled and safe workforce by
    a)     Supporting universities, polytechnics and wãnanga, and the forestry ITO to further contribute to the industries and communities they serve.
    b)    Introducing new regulations to protect forestry workers, support the Independent Forestry Safety Review, and introduce a corporate manslaughter law.
    c)     Finishing relevant roading development in forestry regions in order to make it easier to get wood from forest to plant.

 All good stuff.

Hamish Levack 9/11/16.

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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