Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
'It is possible to get over-enthusiastic about trees', Patrick White field warns at the be-
ginning of the woodland chapter in his authoritative book on permaculture in temperate
climes,
The Earth Care Manual
. 'They are not 'better' than other plants, nor are woody
ecosystems 'better' than those without trees or shrubs'.
It is not difficult to imagine who he is thinking about. There is a fringe of the green
movement which has managed to reduce the complexity of nature to the formula 'trees
good, no trees bad'. This outlook is buttressed by the symbolic role played by trees in
protests against road schemes and similar developments. If such people get a hold of an
area of grassland, often the first thing they want to do with it is plant trees all over it. The
fact that someone, a long time ago, went to a lot of trouble to get the trees out, and that
generations of people have spent energy making sure that trees stayed out, is lost on them.
Years ago, on television, I saw a wildlife documentary about insects in an African wild-
life park, most of it shot within 100 yards of a safari lodge. There was no point in hump-
ing the cameras any further into the bush. Every so often, in between shots of the mating
rituals of beetles or the internal politics of the ant world, the camera would pan over to an-
other load of tourists piling into their land rover for a trip to the lions and zebra. 'Do they
realize', the commentator asked, 'that African wildlife is happening under their feet and on
their doorstep?' It is like that with some of the tree-huggers: they don't seem to be aware
of what is happening beneath their feet. They do not have much conception of grass either
as a complex biological system, or as a crop, or as a way of life. For them it is just default
vegetation, a place to walk on, to put things on, and to plant trees on.
However, it is not just the eco-warriors. The iconic status accorded to trees is coming to
be accepted by a widening spectrum of the population. Planting trees is commonly viewed
as an instant solution to environmental problems ranging from over-intensive farming to
global warming, and we can expiate our carbon guilt by contributing to tree-planting pro-
grammes in distant lands. In the 1990s, John Major's Conservative Government announced
in its rural White Paper that it wished to double the amount of woodland in England. Blair's
Government stated, more cautiously, that it was 'determined' to oversee 'a significant in-
crease in woodland cover across England', with a doubling of the area in some regions.
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The latest advice in the Read Report is to increase woodland coverage by a million hec-
scale, especially when we bear in mind that the country is currently busy trying to eradicate
the coniferous legacy of the British Government's previous drive to double tree cover in
the 1960s. Imagine the outcry if the Prime Minister announced that he wished to double the
number of wheat fields, or horses, or houses or roads. Planting trees is more uncontentious
than motherhood and apple pie.
The public have pitched into the tree planting boom with enthusiasm. Buying a small
neglected woodland, or planting a new one, or establishing a community woodland are fast
