Sir, – While the world is crying out for more trees to be planted to held decarbonise our planet, the Green Party in Government has overseen the collapse of the Irish forestry industry, with the least acres planted last year since 1946.
While farmers across Europe demonstrate and rail against ever increasing bureaucracy, it is that very red tape and shambolic Irish forestry policy and misguided interference that have diluted the commercial forestry model, and has turned landowners against planting trees.
Ireland was planting up to 20,000 acres of primarily commercial crops of sitka spruce trees in the 1990s, trees now being harvested to keep sawmills operating to satisfy industry demand for construction timber and giving the risk-taking landowners a return on their long-term investment.
Landowners today have rejected the non-financially viable, idealistic, policy-driven Green interference and talking-down approach to planting trees. Landowners who chose to sow a crop of wheat, for example, are not subjected to paying for a plethora of experts, advisers and planning authorities before they set their crops, so why forestry?
Despite the much-heralded government financial supports, landowners are simply refusing to tie up their land for a short-term financial carrot to plant long-term, non-commercial species of trees as an act of altruism. Add in the associated risks to be borne solely by the landowners, such as ash dieback, the bark beetle, fire and wind, and the non-financially supported legal obligation to replant the ground after harvesting, it is clear that forestry is now only an option for pension funds, hobby foresters or the independently wealthy. If society wishes to encourage landowners to plant trees for the common good, then it will have to commit to long-term support for the landowners with minimal interference. Currently the Government policy has “brought the horse to water but can’t make it drink”. It’s past time for a more realistic and collaborative approach to support this vital but high-risk, low-return enterprise before landowners return to growing much-needed trees for industry and climate mitigation. – Yours, etc,
TOMÁS FINN,
Ballinasloe,
Co Galway.
Sir, – Much of the discussion on forestry and biodiversity enhancement in the public domain in recent years tends to fall back on received ideas about appropriate species and habitats. These received ideas are informed more by the mid-20th-century ecological ideas that “native species” are always appropriate and the correct choice.
The definition of native species is itself problematic. Scholars in this area are increasingly questioning what native means and the value of native species in biodiversity restoration. “Native” and “alien” are not ecological absolutes, but relative, almost metaphorical terms drawn by analogy with human communities.
Although these concepts may make intuitive sense they offer insubstantial foundations for conservation management in practice, creating situations which effectively fossilise nature and which may actually be counterproductive.
There is wide agreement that this dualistic paradigm which, on principle, sanctifies all natives and damns all aliens is unsustainable and inadvisable.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) suggests that biodiversity is not essentially “native”.
Instead, we should be exploring the concepts of novel ecosystems and the use of analogous species which may be just as valuable and useful in our biodiversity nature restoration programmes as putative natives.
Using native species on many Irish afforestation sites may not be silviculturally practical, it will certainly not meet our attempts to capture carbon at the same rate as faster growing exotic species. Furthermore, exotic forest species are already here and, in some cases, almost naturalised and could, if viewed and dealt with through a more considered lens, provide useful analogous species in biodiversity enhancement programmes.
For example, lodgepole pine could, if accepted as a useful analogous species and if the correct management regime was applied, prove to be an excellent replacement for the Scots pine we know once grew on some of our poorer and but now wetter sites.
Ignoring novel ecosystems and non-native tree species or describing them with value-laden language will not help us meet our goals in either biodiversity or carbon capture. There is no either/or dichotomy.
Given the challenges we face, it is important to value all ecosystems in some way and to conserve and enhance nature in its many forms, including both native and non-native species in novel ecosystems.
The alien/native paradigm is under multidisciplinary attack, accused of being historically arbitrary, geographically ambiguous, ecologically unsound, culturally insensitive, socio-politically dubious and economically futile.
We need to move beyond received ideas and outdated (and sometimes contentious) classifications and see our island’s nature for what it is and can be, and not some harping back to a time now past. – Yours, etc,
WILLIAM M MURPHY, PhD
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.