By SIMON COLLINS in MANCHESTER
New Zealand's practice of clearfelling pine forests has been attacked as unsustainable at Britain's annual science festival.
Dr Geoff Wilson, a German-born geographer who wrote a doctoral thesis at Otago University on New Zealanders' historical urge to clear the bush, told the British Association's Festival of Science in Manchester that pine forests were New Zealand's new frontier.
Laws passed in the past 15 years had largely halted the wholesale loss of native forests that began when Maori arrived in the country and accelerated after Europeans came, he said.
But New Zealanders had not made the mental shift that those in Europe had made from seeing land purely as a productive resource towards also valuing it for aesthetic and environmental reasons.
"In the minds of New Zealanders you can see this conceptual separation - wilderness areas sealed away, and the rest of the country can be used for productive purposes," he said.
"[Pine forests] are seen as fields of timber to be harvested."
Dr Wilson said German forests had been managed with selective logging techniques to produce a sustained yield since the mid-eighteenth century.
In contrast, New Zealand kept on clearfelling even its native forests until well into the 1990s.
"A new frontier is emerging regarding forestry practices in planted radiata forests," Dr Wilson said.
"Many New Zealanders do not accept that planted forests can be seen in the same way as indigenous forests.
"Annual clearfelling of 400 square kilometres of planted exotic forest, often on slopes of more than 30 degrees, indicates that New Zealand society continues to compartmentalise [protected and productive forests], with only little criticism of the highly unsustainable clearfelling practices in those pine plantations."
He said New Zealand had the highest erosion rate in the world because of its steep hills and loss of forests.
Yet New Zealanders still saw land where bush had been cleared as good and productive, while land that was still in bush was unproductive and bad.
Although New Zealand farmers were gradually changing their attitudes, the predominant attitude continued to remain largely productivist, he said.
He told the Herald that New Zealanders did not realise the erosion risks caused by the common logging practice of simply pulling a wire across a forest and ripping out everything in its way, including roots which normally held soil in place.
"If you rip out the forests on steep slopes you have huge erosion problems," he said.
In Europe, by contrast, recent changes to the common agricultural policy marked a shift towards paying farmers for conserving their land rather than for production.
Dr Wilson said the same shift might take place in New Zealand when the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions came into force and farmers could get valuable carbon credits for their remaining patches of bush.
He told a questioner that mature native forests did not absorb as much carbon dioxide from the air as a fast-growing pine forest, and that the carbon they absorbed was partly offset by the methane emitted by decaying older wood.
But even mature forests were still net absorbers of carbon from the atmosphere and would therefore have monetary value when the worldwide carbon emission market was established.
Herald Feature: Conservation and Environment
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