Martin Williams: Can mānuka heal the land?

Martin Williams says planting mānuka and re-establishing wetlands will go a long way towards helping to heal the land. Photo / NZME

Opinion

Our river and stream beds are covered in mud. Metres of mud lie on the seabed of Hawke Bay.

This is as catastrophic for aquatic and marine life as it has been for those in our rural communities whose lives and livelihoods have been buried by a land-based tsunami of silt and wood. In the midst of that, our transport infrastructure is in tatters.

Scores of bridges have been damaged, with some completely destroyed. The north and south rail lines to the port remain severed, and our rural road network is beyond the capacity of any council’s resources to repair.

As our minds and energy as regional leaders now turn from the grief and pain of response to the immense challenge of recovery, I come back to the point – we need to heal the land.

This will not be the last Cyclone Gabrielle. The simple fact is, whether it is droughts or floods, natural events are getting more extreme.

Land use decisions made over the past 180 years in Hawke’s Bay have left us in a position of immense vulnerability; our farms, forests, roads, rivers, rural communities and even cities remain at very substantial risk.

Risk which no stop bank or drainage scheme, no one dam or seawall, can protect us from. There is simply no point in recovery if we do not use this opportunity to heal the land.

Whatever billions we might spend on new roads, bridges and stopbanks - it may all, again, just be smashed to pieces.

The true crisis we must confront to that end is not just climate change, but the biodiversity collapse at global scale which we also now stand amid.

As Sir David Attenborough writes in his book A Life On Our Planet, carbon dioxide levels, which are the focus of so much attention, from Kyoto to carbon credits, are a smaller part of a broader and deeper immediate catastrophe; a species extinction event unparalleled since the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago.

In Aotearoa, native or indigenous forests and wetlands covered more than 80 per cent of our total land area before humans arrived. In the last 200 years, 97 per cent of wetland areas and 77 per cent of indigenous forests in Hawke’s Bay have been drained and cleared.

Indigenous forests not only soak up carbon dioxide, but they are better at holding the land in place and keeping it stable. Wetlands also soak up carbon dioxide and hold and filter water, slowing its flow downhill when the heavens open.

Restoring biodiversity is both the antidote to climate change and the protection we need from the damage it wreaks through more frequent and intense storms and cyclones.

What that means in Hawke’s Bay, in my view, is supporting all rural landowners, of both forests and farms, to retire their steepest and most erodible land into mānuka, and to re-establish wetland areas.

Mānuka has long been known by Māori to have healing properties. In my view, mānuka could heal the land as well. Not through a band-aid, but a whole new layer of skin on an otherwise open, grazed and weeping wound right across this region’s rural landscapes.

Mānuka has a deep-rooted and fast-growing habit. It is a ‘colonising’ species; literally reclaiming bare ground and acting as a nursery for a wide range of native plants and animals to establish and thrive. Unlike exotic species, it evolved here. In short, and because of all this, mānuka ‘sticks’.

Decisions made after Cyclone Bola to plant steep erodible land in pine have proven, with hindsight, to be a mistake. The recent Hawke’s Bay Regional Council study into the wood debris washed down our rivers during Cyclone Gabrielle reveals that it is not harvest slash but whole trees, mostly pine and other exotics, which lie strewn across our valleys, orchards, vineyards, rivers and beaches, amid the five million tonnes of sediment.

As I see it, this is not so much about forestry harvesting practices. It is about where to plant pine in the first place.

Before Cyclone Gabrielle, there was an estimated 250,000 hectares of steep erodible country in Hawke’s Bay. Transitioning this land into native forest through mānuka, and re-establishing natural wetland areas throughout the region, should be the paramount long-term recovery priority.

This transition would better hold both land and water in the landscape. It would lessen flooding severity and impact. The new and better farm tracks, roads, bridges, rail and other transport infrastructure we will now build through the recovery would have a more likely future. Our rural communities would too, but they need ours and the Government’s help. We must also ensure productive land remains just that, for both farming and, in the right place, production forestry.

This is what the regional council’s ‘Land for Life’ programme is all about. We are currently looking to scale it up from the 15 pilot farm properties proving the concept, to many hundreds in the years and decades ahead.

But rather than carbon farming, I say, how about a future of Government-backed biodiversity credits to support the programme, and so that when our orchards and farms get back on their feet, they stay that way?

To do this we need to heal the land; it could all start with mānuka.

Martin Williams is a Hawke’s Bay Regional Councillor for Ahuriri/Napier.