Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The third matter is the bias against timber plantations, and especially conifers. There is
an understandable reaction against the overplanting of Sitka Spruce in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the pendulum has now swung violently in the other direction. Not only is almost every-
body who plants trees in many parts of England planting native broadleaves, but often they
plant them too wide to produce straight timber - unsurprisingly since the same grant is
available whether or not they space them densely enough for timber production. In some
places there is a virtual pogrom against conifers. Dorset, until 2009, had a policy to ban-
ish conifers from its Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which occupies about half the
officer I interviewed, the number of conifer plantings in his region is 'very small' and he
confided that he found it 'depressing' that there was 'such a pronounced move away from
productive woodland'.
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In our Somerset village, until recently the only mature wood of any size being managed
was a stand of Douglas fir and larch, planted by a firm called Economic Forestry as a tax
scam in 1960, and bought by 'Happy Valley' community in 1994. Since then it has been
progressively thinned, two areas have been replanted and about a hectare of invasive cherry
laurel has been removed. The conifers have been looked after rather better than the five
acres of broadleaves in the same wood, because larch and Douglas are first class building
timbers; they provide the walls, floors and roofs of the community's buildings, the posts for
its fencing and surplus timber is planked up on a sawmill and sold locally. The broadleaf
trees, by contrast, aside from any ash which has escaped canker, are not so obviously useful
for anything beyond beanpoles and firewood.
All those people who are insouciantly planting native broadleaves perhaps need to think
a bit about who will look after their woodland in the decades to come. 'The wood that stays
is the wood that pays' is a foresters' motto, and it is a main conclusion to be drawn from the
historical information provided in Oliver Rackham's
The History of the Countryside
. 'The
wood that pays' doesn't necessarily mean a wood that makes a financial profit, but a wood
that meets the need of the rural economy. The landscape of Britain was crafted according
to people's needs - though not necessarily everybody's needs. When foresters planted all
those Sitka Spruce, it was to meet the needs of industry, but now they have reached their
maturity in a global economy where it is not clear that there is any need for them. Wood-
land today is often planted according to the whims of people whose material livelihoods
are more or less unrelated to the rural economy, so if these plantations meet the needs of
future generations, it will be more by luck than by design.
This undiscriminating approach towards trees and tree-planting is shared by people of
all sorts of persuasions. But it is prevalent amongst vegans and not uncommon amongst ad-
herents of permaculture, and we can locate some of its intellectual roots in both the perma-
