John Ellegard: Time to see the trees for the wood, not just the problems

Forestry slash in a river seen during a flight over Gisborne after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Kiritapu Allan, File

OPINION

It seems to have become fashionable to slag off the forestry industry in New Zealand for all sorts of reasons. The terrible destruction from Cyclone Gabrielle is the latest case in point.

Some criticism is wholly justified. The management of slash on steep harvesting sites, in particular, has been well documented over past weeks.

The haste with which the government of the day pushed through mass planting of radiata pine tree forests across Tairāwhiti following Cyclone Bola in 1988, and then the sale of those assets to private buyers (local and overseas) for harvesting, has come back to bite in a big way.

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

Logging practices that work well in many other parts of the country don’t cut the mustard on fragile sites such as north of Gisborne.

I visited the East Coast in 2018 during my 12-year tenure as editor of a New Zealand forestry journal.

It was evident that the enormous amount of rain washes out slash from recently harvested forestry blocks, but also swept away whole trees (natives and pines) along with the land under them.

The forestry industry knows things must be done differently because these heavy rain events are becoming more frequent. Other land uses will need to change, too.

But some criticism and comments about forestry are misguided. Take, for instance, the comment that we need to plant more native trees and less plantation pine. We actually need more of both.

Plantation forestry is, and will become even more, important to our future wellbeing. Aside from homes, furniture and packaging, wood will also provide the raw material to replace the plastics and many chemicals we currently derive from oil.

A good source of that will come from the slash that is left to rot after logging, along with low quality logs that are not pulped to make cardboard and paper.

This will be good news for all those who criticise the export of whole logs to China, where they are mostly used as concrete forming for building high-rise apartments.

We all want to see added value here in NZ but it’s just going to take time.

What about native trees being better for long-term permanent forests to suck up carbon? Fair enough, native trees do sequester more carbon over their lifetime.

However, they are slow growing and it takes many years before they are sequestering enough to make a difference.

Radiata pine can be sequestering carbon by age five, two-to-three times quicker than most natives.

The answer, forestry researchers have determined, is to create permanent forests by planting pines alongside natives to offer shelter in harsh weather and be either cut down and used or left to fall as the natives grow up and over them.

John Ellegard: ''I’m with those who argue that radiata pines on their own should not be grown as permanent forests''. Photo / Supplied

I’m with those who argue that radiata pines on their own should not be grown as permanent forests.

They have much shorter life spans and do not sequester much carbon in old age.

To answer those who say we have too many pine plantations, from 2009 through to around 2016, huge swathes of forest were cut down to make way for dairy and other farms.

We lost almost 100,000 hectares of forest. Planting in recent years still hasn’t made up that loss.

The entire plantation estate amounts to less than 1.8 million hectares, against more than 3 million hectares of native forests across New Zealand.

Foresters have been trying to find alternatives – or more realistically, a companion – to radiata since the late 1800s.

One of the earliest ancestors of the tree we now call radiata, is a Monterey pine that still stands in the Peel Forest in Canterbury.

It was planted from seeds brought from Australia in 1859 as early farmers sought a fast-growing tree to create shelter belts. Over the years, NZ forest scientists have improved the strain and tailored it to suit conditions around NZ.

Now, the fastest-growing trees can be logged at age 25, rather than 32. Other alternatives may come along in time.

Scientists have also got an answer to one criticism of pine trees in NZ – the proliferation of wilding trees in our natural landscape.

Scientists at the Scion research centre in Rotorua have used genetic editing to turn off the ability of a pine tree to create seeds (cones). Unfortunately, our outdated rules preclude the use of any sort of genetic tools outside the laboratory in NZ.

That does need to change. Genetic editing is vastly different from genetic modification and can easily solve our wilding problem in the future. It’s been proven safe overseas.

I am a bit of an apologist for plantation forestry in NZ but I also acknowledge it can be done so much better. This country needs what forestry can supply.

I’ve met some brilliant people, from those breaking their backs in silviculture to plant seedlings in atrocious conditions; in the logging crews who are at work hours before most of us open our eyes in the morning; to dedicated researchers and also those trying hard to make their operations work better for all concerned.

We all need to learn when things go wrong, but we shouldn’t trash it all because of those mistakes.

There’s a phrase that forestry is adhering to these days: “Right tree in the right place”.

That’s a good mantra to live by.

- John Ellegard is a former editor of NZ Logger.