What a difference they'll make to the landscape as well as the environment!
Willow trees planted at Harperrig Reservoir - many thanks to Victor Partridge, Natural Heritage Officer, Pentland Hills Regional Park, Forestry and Natural Heritage, The City of Edinburgh Council.
What a difference they'll make to the landscape as well as the environment!
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Last year, one group of researchers claimed that growing a new forest over a global landscape the size of the United States (a 25 per cent increase in Earth’s forest cover) was “the best solution” to battling climate change while others argued that cutting fossil fuel consumption was the true way forward.
Diana Beresford-Kroeger, the famed botanist and celebrated author of The Global Forest shakes her head about the level of the controversy, and then notes that both sides had a point. “We can’t plant trees everywhere higgledy-piggledy. That won’t work.” Yet that is what the world has generally done to date, and it is what many governments plan to do more of in the name of fighting climate change. “Asswise” efforts in Ireland, California, Japan, India and China — all involving non-native trees — have done more damage than good, and bear no resemblance to her own plan. Take China, for example, which destroyed many of its great native forests during the Cultural Revolution. The nation now boasts that it is the world’s largest tree planter. But it has largely constructed unfriendly monocultures of Japanese cedar, bamboo or eucalyptus that burn at a low flashpoint of 48 degrees Celsius. Yet science shows that indigenous wild forests do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to storing carbon. One recent British study found that natural or native forests covering 350 million hectares of land could sequester 42 billion tonnes of carbon, while commercial plantations could only store one billion tonnes. “There is a scandal here,” said Simon Lewis, a professor of Global Chance Science at the University College London and one of the study’s authors. “To most people, forest restoration means bringing back natural forests, but policy makers are calling vast monocultures ‘forest restoration.’ And worse, the advertised climate benefits are absent.” Why might it be right to shoot deer, but not human beings?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th February 2020 Though the protest was against me, I sympathised. When demonstrators outside the theatre where I was speaking last week asked the audience to call me out as a killer, I didn’t dispute their claim. I am a killer. While making our film for Channel 4, Apocalypse Cow, I shot a deer. If it helps (though it didn’t help the deer), I hated every minute of it, from picking up the rifle and learning to use it, to finding and stalking the innocent animal, then shooting it through the chest from 180 metres, watching it rear into the air, stumble, spasm and die. It was a gruesome, horrible experience. I was seeking to demonstrate the realities of ecological restoration. If, I reasoned, we believe something is right, we should be prepared to do it ourselves. But do we really have the right to take another life? The problem arises in this case because of humanity’s disastrous intervention in the ecology of the Scottish Highlands. By exterminating wolves and lynx, we released the deer from predation, and their numbers exploded. Because tree seedlings are highly nutritious, the deer selectively browse them out. A rich mosaic of habitats becomes a drab monotony of heather and rough grass. The deer I shot was one of thousands killed on the Glenfeshie estate in the Cairngorms. As a result of this cull, the trees are returning. The regenerating forests are full of birds and other mammals. Surely, as the protesters insisted, there is an alternative? Some of us have campaigned for years for the return of wolves and lynx, but it cannot happen without widespread public consent, and this takes time. In the meantime, what should be done? Their favoured alternatives are contraception or fencing. ............................................................................................................. Yes, I am a speciesist. Not because I believe human beings are innately superior to other animals, but because I believe we cannot live together (or even alone) without privileging our own existence. We don’t have to see ourselves as the divinely appointed stewards of creation to recognise that we bear responsibility for restoring the magnificent living systems we have harmed. And we don’t have to deny our bias towards ourselves to defend the lives of other beings. Despite growing awareness, our government still allows landowners to help flood the homes of people living downstream.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th February 2020 On Friday, campaigners in Calderdale, West Yorkshire issued an urgent warning. The peat bogs in the hills that drain into their valley were burning. The fires had been set by gamekeepers working for a grouse shooting estate. Burning peatlands, research suggests, is likely to exacerbate floods downstream. Towns in the Calder Valley, such as Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd have been flooded repeatedly, partly, local people argue, because the upper catchment is able to hold back little of the rain that falls on it. On Sunday, Storm Ciara landed in the UK. The River Calder rose higher than it had ever done before, and Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd duly flooded. The following day, the UK’s diaphanous environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, made a statement in the House of Commons expressing her “support and sympathy to all those whose homes or businesses have been flooded over the weekend.” She assured the house that “every effort is being made to keep people safe”. But she said nothing about the land management that might have caused the flood. Last year, a paper published in the Journal of Hydrology X reported experiments conducted in another part of the Pennines, the range in which Calderdale is located. It found that when peat bogs are restored, deep vegetation is allowed to recover and erosion gullies are blocked, water is held back for longer in the hills, and peak flows in the streams draining them are reduced. Broadly speaking, the rougher the surface, the less flooding downstream. Burning moorland for grouse shooting reduces roughness and increases erosion. In October the government announced that, as landowners had failed to stop burning their peatlands voluntarily, it would introduce legislation to ban the practice “in due course”. Since then, there has been not a squeak. As Villiers dispensed sympathy on Monday, she failed to mention it. Power relations in the British countryside are still almost feudal. Vast tracts of land are owned by small numbers of people, who are permitted to manage it with little regard for the lives and homes of the less elevated people downstream. The environment secretary, a scion of one of Britain’s grandest landed families, offers her thoughts and prayers. I’m sure they are appreciated. But we need action. |
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