Moaning about monocultures

The National Arboretum of Canberra is a beautiful and unique place. Just one of the things that makes it unique is its design of planting small "forests" of a single species - there are about 100 of these 1 - 3 ha single species "forests" over the 250 ha arboretum. When people hear about this design though, many exclaim in apparent horror and ask why we countenanced the planting of monocultures! Monocultures are apparently the antithesis of biodiversity or of "naturalness" and should have been shunned.

But ...monocultures are not unnatural. In shade intolerant and pioneer species like many of the eucalypts, areas considerably in excess of 3 ha, or even 250 ha may contain only one tree species like Alpine Ash after a hot fire. It is extremely common for a single tree species to exclusively dominate just 1 ha in a native forests in Australia as well as in many other parts of the world.

Further, "biodiversity" has three scales - an ecosystem scale; a species scale and a gene scale. At the species scale, 100 tree species in 250 ha is actually pretty impressive, but it is at the gene scale that the. National Arboretum of Canberra really shines for biodiversity. Having 1 - 3 ha of the same species all planted together means there may be a hundred or more individual trees growing in a consistent, well maintained and observable location. This is extremely rare anywhere in the world and provides one of the few opportunities to quantify and appreciate genetic diversity. Given the high proportion of tree species classified as rare or threatened, this opportunity to study genetic biodiversity is of even greater significance.

So, caste off any lingering and ill formed angst over small areas of monoculture and celebrate the potential for the National Arboretum of Canberra to provide valuable information at multiple scales of biodiversity.

Spitting wood chips

Wood chips. There, I said it. Now let us wait for the Pavlovian Response to kick in and for your blood pressure rise with indignation that any one could grind up something they have been growing for decades to produce such small pieces of stuff. Funny though that such a response does not occur whenever wheat is ground into flour for sale. Well, flour can be made into some really useful things like bread or cakes or even croissants! While tasty, these products are nothing compared to wood chips.

Now obviously wood chips can be made into paper, but not toilet paper as so many politically active campaigns implicitly suggest. Chips from hardwood species make high quality paper for writing and drawing - you know, all that cultured stuff, while softwood species make paper with high tear strength. Imagine a sheet of metal the same size and weight as a piece of paper - you could more easily rip that metal than that paper!

But wood chips are the input to so much more. The chips can be reconstituted and moulded into sheets of fibre-board and all manner shapes and sizes - versatile and maintaining enviable strength properties. But further, nature has excelled itself with wood chemistry too. The amazing chips contain complex long molecules, rich on oxygen which form sugars and starches. These, in turn, can provide the world's most amazing glues, ethanols, alcohols, synthesis gas, and a host of drugs, polymers and dyes. Wood chips can be used to build you home, keep it warm and keep you healthy and attractive. They can also be used in the construction of your car and in keeping it running and fuelled.

Some uninformed commentators like to appear horrified that forest industries sell wood chips when they could sell solid wood products. It apparently does not occur to them that the seller would sell to the market that gives them the best price, which would have to be the market that can make the most out of the wood in whatever form produced. While wood chips are extremely versatile and able to be turned into valuable products even when generated by small and damaged trees, solid wood products are restricted to low value pallet timber and fencing when the trees are small.

Commentators and journalists who complain when wood chips are generated during forest operations are simply trying to attract readers without the effort of research and making a real story. They hope that the emotional baggage of the word is sufficient to draw readers in and adopt a certain attitude towards the forest owners or managers. Be aware of any news article or banner with wood chip mentioned as there is an excellent chance it is part of a campaign of manipulation.

A title to excite but not inform

What do you call someone who raises and grazes cattle for a few years and then sends them all to an abattoir for slaughter? A grazier. What do you call someone who plants, fertilises and farms a crop of wheat before sending in the slashers over all their land each year? A farmer. What do you call someone who plants, fertilises and protects 100 ha of forest then logs 1 ha? A logger. Why are those who work in forests labelled by the activity that only takes place on 1 to 2 percent of their land? Is it just lazy journalists and commentators who do not have anything to say but still want readers? If a journalist takes two 5 minute toilet breaks in a 7 hour work day then they spend at greater percentage of their time defecating than the total percentage of land logged in a commercial forest each year. So, for consistency, forest workers could be called loggers when graziers are called slaughterers, farmers called slashers, and journalists (or in fact all who work in offices and are entitled to toilet break) are called defecators!

Recently, the Prime Minister of Australia addressed a Forest Industries dinner. The room was full of people who ran nurseries, who planted trees, who built fine furniture, who made world quality paper, who sold machinery, who taught an incredibly complex discipline, who managed forest stewardship organisations, and maybe just two or three who used a chainsaw. However, the mere absence of any significant number of people who could actually log a tree did not stop the popular press from labelling the entire group as loggers with the implication that they engaged in deforestation. A simple tactic that allows these lazy writers to attract an audience by just using emotional buzz words. The Prime Minister himself did not use the word logger when describing the benefits of the industry, but that did not stop lazy commentators in the press from inventing quotes like "PM says loggers are the ultimate conservationists". Of course a made up quote like that, given the emotional baggage of the word "logger" will attract readers. Those poor, lazy commentators may not have received anywhere as much coverage if they had a headline that screamed foresters and those who rely upon and maintain the forest estate are conservationists.  Those poor writers may have been required to actually do some work to attract an audience. If they had done their work, they may have realised that deforestation in Australia has been caused by slaughterers, slashers and defecators but not by loggers. Hey, a headline like that might have attracted a big audience, but graziers, farmers and journalists would deserve a responsible and balanced argument, while loggers apparently do not.

Logging is a skilled and dangerous job, which does not deserve to be simply associated with dirty and uninformed labourers. Even so, logging occurs only on 1-2% of the public commercial forest each year and nothing warrants having the whole set of activities over the other 98-99% ignored by the use of this one inappropriate label. Deforestation is what happens when you take forestry and the forest industries out of landscape. Bad journalism is what happens you replace meaningful labels with emotion filled abstracts in the hope of attracting readers.

How much is enough?

Everyone knew that Prime Minister Abbot would create headlines when his speech to a major Forest Industries dinner included  a suggestion that we had "enough", or even too much, protected forest.  The suggestion of enough or too much begs the question "...for what?"

There are some famous thresholds in science where "enough is enough" is measured. LD50 - the level of drug dosage that results in the death of 50% of a target population is one such measure. Significance levels, eg p=0.05 which is where you accept there is a 0.05 or 1 in 20 chance that the important difference you think you can see is simply a bit of random luck. But even these thresholds are arbitrary and indefensible except through claims that "we have always used them". Significance levels in fact vary between disciplines as well as countries and levels of p might be as high as 0.3 in wildlife ecological studies or as small as 0.0001 in medicine where you really want to be quite sure your drugs have the effect you want. 

Similarly, thresholds of the fraction of land in reserves exist but are largely arbitrary. Early discussions about "CAR" reserves - Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative - in the late 20th century started with suggestions that adequate meant 5% of the area pre-European conversion for each major forest type. This percentage has progressively climbed to 10%, 12%, 15% and currently sits around 17%, with each increase due to temporal arguments to balance economic, political, social and ecological values. Simultaneously, the forests are being more finely classified and divided and restrictions placed on what can be done near the boundaries of the reserves. This fine sub-division and restricted activity means that reserves can impact a significantly larger area that just that within their boundaries. Imagine, for example, that you had to reserve 10% of your home, say to let your aged parents move in, and you could not walk within 1m of the reserve boundary. You might loose a bedroom or your study. But if to had to reserve 10% of each room and not come within 1 m of those boundaries you would loose access to the toilet and any room less than 2-3 m in length. In fact, your hallway would probably be cut and you would loose access to half your house. So, how much really is being reserved by a 10% reserve? 

But why a nominal 10% area even if it results in substantially more than a 10%  reservation? Why not 11%, and if 11% why not 12% and so on? Must you stop before 50% while you can say the reserves are a minority use. In contemporary news, the difference between 49% and 51% is massive for QANTAS - the right to call yourself the Australian carrier and the need to employ Australians and manage for Australian good apparently revolves around whether 49% or 51% can be in foreign ownership. The difference between 49 and 51 may have great importance in business and in democratic elections, but it has no real significance in ecology. 

If a scientist looks in sufficient detail, any hectare that could be added to a reserve will be uniquely different to all the others already in the reserve. Nature is full of diversity at a variety of scales and although two areas may look to be the same to a human with their poor senses, they in fact will be different. So if you want to reserve a bit of every different environment you have to reserve all the hectares. If the Department of Heritage wanted to reserve one of every unique house, you would have yours, wherever it is, reserved. 

So obviously we do not reserve everything - we need to keep somewhere for ourselves to live and to produce the things we need to live. In the past, the majority of forest was converted to agriculture and urban development. When people say that 85% of our forests have been lost, it is to agriculture and cities that they have been lost. And these land uses must actively continue to keep the forests at bay - if you abandoned Sydney or Melbourne or the Queensland cattle farms, the forests would return. Should we try? Let's take 10% of Sydney and remove the offices and houses to allow the forests to return - they will return, and those forests will be unique and therefore worthy of being reserved. That would return more than twice as much forest as the area being disputed in Tasmania now. Why stop at 10% ...or 15% ...or 50%? 

But of course we could not reserve and return 10% of Sydney to its pre-European forest nature. Where would the people live and work? There has to be a balance between people being able to live and work against reserving arbitrary percentages of land. 

An unnatural death

The death of any child is a catastrophe. But a death caused by a tree is somehow an unbelievable or even an unnatural seeming catastrophe. The parents and family of the young Sydney girl crushed by a tree branch last week must feel devastated by this unreal tragedy and my heart goes out to them.

Trees are associated with life; with the future; with security. When we plant a tree we are surely thinking about our children and their children who will be the ones to see it in its maturity and future majesty. There is even a theory that modern-day humans still associate trees, especially those with spreading crowns, with the safety and security they offered our remote ancestors in the African savannahs. Even people raised in cities in the absence of trees, associate images of trees with home, safety and beauty. So what happens when the nature of things goes astray and a tree kills a young girl who was simply sitting in its shade, enjoying her lunch with her teacher?

The first response is to cut the remains of that tree down (which has already been done) and then inspect the trees of city to remove all that might be unsafe. My neighbour, a retired School principal agreed that that's what they proposed in Canberra too. "Its not that uncommon for trees fall on school kids" he said, "remember, about 10 years ago, a little girl was swinging on a low branch in a school playground and it broke and crushed her?" Canberra has about 2 trees planted for every person here, so checking  all 600,000 trees would be a big task. They couldn't check them all  in Canberra then and they won't be able to do it in Sydney now. Besides, what would you check for? Aparently there was no external evidence that those tree branches were going to fail. And if you cut into a tree to check whether there is any internal evidence of a problem, you'll simply be introducing a place for the tree to fail. You cannot remove all the risk of a tree causing a problem, and we certainly live with riskier objects. For example, there are at least 5 times as many planted trees in Canberra as there are cars, but while a tree has killed one person in the last 10 years, cars kill at least a couple every year. So cars are at least 100 times riskier than trees, but we don't stop driving.

But I can understand parents who are scared of trees now and want to keep their kids away. In the same way, people who survive an earthquake might feel unsafe in any sort of building - especially if friends or family died. Can you compare a falling tree with an earthquake? I think you can as both feel unnatural, both cause some place that used to feel safe to now feel threatening, and you cannot ever totally remove the risk of it happening again. One day, the earthquake victim will have to enter the building, and one day children will be near trees.

So if Mencken is right and the first response is wrong, what do we do? Do we stop sitting in the shade of trees? No, because that is something that humans need to do for the good of their spirit. Do we stop kids climbing and playing around trees? No, because that is something humans need to do for the good of their health. Do we teach our children and our parents that trees too are complex living things that are born, and live, and offer wonderful gifts, but eventually die? No one can take away the hurt of a child killed by an unnatural seeming accident, just as no one can ensure it wont happen to another child again. But we all can appreciate the joy of children playing and growing in the shade of the many thousands of safe trees, while remaining vigilent.

A misquote

Ten years ago, I misheard a quote given by a colleague to his class on forest planning. I thought he was quoting the Mendel - the father of genetics - and was something along the lines of having simple answers that were wrong. I thought it was great advice, especially for students studying the art of planning for working in natural environments, where everything seems to be related to everything else. But I never got around to finding the real quote. Eventually, I made up the following:

To every human question there is a simple and obvious answer that is wrong.

Try as I might though I could not find anything like this remotely attributable to Mendel, so I claimed the words as my own. Years later, I ran into that colleague and told him the story. He calmly replied that it was probably a quote from H.L. Mencken, but that he liked my rendition better. So, to honour the work of that great American author who inspired "my" quotable quote, I named my blog after him and I give you the original quote:

To every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. (H.L. Mencken)

Given that whenever humans are involved the problems are complex, then it is obvious that we are on the same wavelength.

It is unfortunate that our clear, simple, obvious yet wrong answers or solutions are so often the first and only one we come up with.

A whale sails

The SkyWhale flies

The SkyWhale set sail this week. And just as in Moby Dick, there were those who were more than prepared to cast some harpoons. Of course there are other things the Government could have spent money on. At least this expensive option had the population looking up instead of focusing on the gutters.