Issues and Options for Plantations

For many years, the conservation movement, quite rightly, fiercely opposed the alienation of large areas of native forest for the establishment of pine plantations. It perceived that there was a large environmental cost to pay for the alienation of such large tracts of country into a single species or tree farms monocultures. However, by the mid 1980s, the realisation came to many involved in forest conservation that the price that had been paid in terms of the loss of native forest ecosystems shouldn't be wasted.

Plantations Can Replace the Logging of Native Forest

In 1988, the Australian Conservation Foundation proposed a transition from native forest logging to a wood products industry largely based on extant pine, together with the development and articulation of a strategy for pulp production on short-rotation eucalypts.2 The largest obstacle to the realisation of this strategy has been the general dislike in the Australian community for Radiata pine, a dislike that in large measure has been engendered by very potent, powerful and emotive conservation campaigns, and the desire of industry to maximise its potential land base in native forest. At the moment, all of the evidence indicates that in terms of domestic self sufficiency, there is no longer any requirement to continue to alienate native forest for plantations or indeed, to continue to establish large monocultural tree farms.

Current Economic and Ecological Paradigms Driving Forestry

Tasmania, as most people know, is the woodchip capital of Australia. It does far better at exporting its low value-added forests than anybody else in the country. But the pursuit of sawn timber resources at ridiculously unsustainable levels, has forced the industry into using a kind of technology that gets into more and more unsustainable environments in order to continue to extract increasingly ridiculous volumes of timber. This has led to the practice of cable logging on steep country slopes. In 1990, there were no regulations whatsoever on steep country logging - no limit by slope on what could be removed in Tasmania. Environment groups pointed out that this was not ecologically sustainable. In one area in northern Tasmania what had appeared as a possible problem on a ridge had become a massive land slip eighteen months later, with a whole gully disappearing down the slope. All the stumps went with it. The landslip cut through the bedrock, which poured out of a small stream into the main river.

The problems are not just confined to steep country. There has also been increased logging on the more fragile soil types. In the north east of Tasmania logging is occurring in wet forest on very fragile granitic soils. Huge ruts are created by logs that aren't adequately suspended on the cables; others have been dragged through creeks. This destruction is one of the consequences of not using the monocultural plantations already established.

Another problem is the shift of pine plantations in some areas to eucalypt plantations. In southern Queensland for example, second rotation land is going back into eucalypts to produce pulp wood, instead of putting the site back into pines, which are producing sawn timber. This is an extremely worrying trend.

There is no excuse for the current unsustainable land management of the timber industry, or the concurrent unsustainable land management practices that are associated with almost all types of farming. However, it is not reasonable to compare native forest logging, which is a form of quarrying, with plantation forestry, which is a form of farming. It is only reasonable to equate and compare questions of sustainability on an equal basis between agriculture and plantation forestry. Plantation forestry is agriculture.

Issues Around the Sustainability of Plantation Forestry
Why Radiata Pine?

In 1992 The National Plantation Advisory Committee looked at the environmental costs and benefits of plantations. One area examined was why Radiata pine came to be planted in preference to Eucalypt. The reason was due to a decision made in the 1960's. The belief that the world was running out of softwoods led everyone to plant softwoods.

Ecological Benefits

Australia was relatively lucky that it was landed with Radiata pine, a species that came from a really small geographical distribution around Monterey, on the west coast of North America. Australia doesn't have any members of the pine family, so genetic cross-species fertilisation was not a problem. Although there's a potential for these trees to become environmental weeds their appearance makes them easier to distinguish than eucalypts. While they do not provide the best of habitats, they certainly offer more than a field of carrots. The very fact of how isolated they are from their native ecosystem has reduced insect predator problems, except for the Syrex wasp, which has largely been managed by good stand management and correct decisions about site selection. There's currently a global problem with an introduced mildew, but again, if stands are properly thinned and are managed using copper-based chemicals (of the type used on fruit trees) the problems can be remedied.

Myths Surrounding Pines

Pines Degrade the Soil
One of the classics claimed by the conservation movement and the farming community is that pines destroy the soil. Pines don't destroy the soil and they certainly have far less impact than other crops. This assertion evolved around some spectacular failures at the second rotation in some South Australian pine sites, where poor site selection on the first rotation and low-phosphate soils (not at all uncommon in Australian soils) had depleted the phosphate reserve within the first generation. The foresters had committed a double sin and burnt the site, losing the phosphate that was locked up in the slash. As a result, small additions of phosphates were made to those sites, forestry practices were changed and chopper rolling was introduced, locking nutrient cycling within the soil - all of which fundamentally changed the soil. The soil will now support the vegetation that was there before - as a well managed farm site. South Australian plantations are some of the best in Australia, where chemical inputs have fallen and productivity has increased, into the third rotation.

Pines Take All the Water
Any tree species planted in large amounts into a catchment that was previously cleared, will lead to a decrease in water yield. In India, the story would be "these awful Eucalypts, they're taking all the water". So it's not a problem that's confined to any species. It's a problem that occurs when cleared catchments are re-forested. There is a decline in water yield and there are going to be areas where that's a serious social problem. However, there are massive improvements in water quality over time, once the forest reaches maturity.

Problems Associated with Eucalypts

Eucalypts however have been around in Australia for 30 million years, taking off 5 million years ago when the continent really started to dry. Not surprisingly, they have a vast host of co-evolved insect predators. People moved plantation eucalypts all around Australia; Victorian species to Tasmania, Tasmanian species to Western Australia. Of course, species that were chewing up eucalypts in their native environment very quickly found that these fast-grown, tasty young morsels were worth infesting and so there were some spectacular insect predation problems. People working on WA's massive plantation scheme, Project Blue Gum, did not envisage any problems because they were a Tasmanian species. Within a few years they were being eaten by insects. Similarly in Tasmania Victorian Shining gum is being eaten by beetles The response has been a massive chemical use of nasty things like synthetic pyrethrins. So there's a major price associated with eucalypts and in terms of producing plantation sawn timber, radiata pine is far less trouble-ridden.

Some of the most scary genetic engineering that's being done in Australia at the moment is on Eucalypts: one example of which is the insertion of genes into eucalypts to make the leaves unpalatable; another is to insert genes into E. nitens to make it grow roots from cloned material - anyhow, anywhere! This is not necessarily an alternative that should be pursued.

Plantation Management: Problems and Alternatives

Like all agriculture, plantations suffer from a major set of problems associated with the long term maintenance of site productivity. In some instances in Tasmania at the second rotation, site managers are still bulldozing the bits left over from the plantation harvesting into heaps and burning them. According to the National Plantations Advisory Committee and all the relevant sources, there's a heap of evidence that maintains that "wind row" burning is a very bad idea. What's more, there are alternatives to that approach - one of which is called chopper rolling - where the logging slash is broken up on the soil, and the next rotation is planted through it. This maintains the organic components of the slash on site.

Site Location
Plantation managers will often say that their sites are too steep and that they must keep slash burning. What they're trying to say is that they've made a bad decision about where they've put the trees in the first place and they're not going to manage these sites sustainably. There are obviously areas within the plantation estate that are going to have to be managed differently. They're either going to have to be put in long rotations or will have to be taken out of production completely, and restored to whatever simple but functional level that can be achieved.

There is also a need to designate areas where wood production, or any kind of agricultural production, is appropriate but where ecosystems can be worked on to restore some level of environmental functionality. In the latter case, it is certainly unfair to integrate farming with forestry and then once the trees are fully grown, to insist the trees stay, since the landscape has been restored.

Chemical Use
In terms of sustainability, how are these monocultural plantations to be managed as better farms? Current chemical use in plantation forestry in Australia is not acceptable. Australia is still using triazines for example, the most notorious of which is Atrazine. Both are hazardous; they move through the environment very easily and they're also environmentally stable, so they last a long time - chemicals of the worst possible kind - that hang around and are highly soluble in water.

There are other chemical alternatives. The herbicide, glyphosate, for example, is a far better option: there are problems with it, but it's far safer than any of the triazines. There are even alternatives to some of the pesticides used in the eucalypt plantations, like the naturally occurring pyrethrum. Scientists have also developed a strain of bacillus which is active against the main leaf-eating beetles.

Much more encouraging is the growing development of completely alternative systems dispensing with chemical use all together. Wool mats, dry mulching, steam treatment of weeds and in agroforestry, grazing, are just some of the alternatives available. More work needs to be done in this area.

Streamside management
Plantation impacts can also be reduced by better management of riparian zones. In the United Kingdom, it's now standard practice to plant buffer strips with native species to act as native corridors. There's no reason not to do that in Australia. There needs to be an enforceable set of guidelines or codes of practice for the establishment and maintenance of plantations.

Creating A Positive Future

Where development should be heading is the integration of farming and forestry. Instead of having this ridiculous division between foresters and agronomists, what is needed are people who want to produce wood. There's a huge potential to grow a whole range of wood products - and get away from the landscape alienation that occurred in the 1960's and 1970's. The wood is there and it can be better managed, but if more wood is required, it should be going onto farms.

New Zealand
New Zealand is a role model in this area. One property, for example, that would not support one family in the 1960's because of soil erosion, is now supporting three. One family grows the wool, another grows the wood and the third harvests the wood from this property.

What about Australia?
One of the most interesting developments is the Blue Gum project in Western Australia. It's not without its problems, but because the wood is being grown in small parcels, the chances of major collapse associated with insect predation are lower than in the big (2,000-10,000 ha.) treefarms. By the end of the decade, the Blue gum resource will be equivalent to what is being woodchipped now. A 10 year-old farm-grown blue gum can be sawn on a laser guided bandsaw into 10 millimetre boards, and dried by a solar drying system, controlled by computers. Three 10 mm boards can be laminated and made into planks as large as required, or can be turned into stunning furniture.

Agroforestry

Use of windbreaks are good for farms because they increase productivity, well above the land area lost in putting them in. A three-tier wind break will grow a sawlog in the middle and pulpwood on the outside with maybe a short log in it.

The National Plantations Advisory Committee investigated the potential for the farming of small wood lots in north west Tasmania. It concluded that within ten to fifteen years it was possible to grow a world-scale pulp mill-size resource, by taking 10% of the land out of potato and onion production and putting it into trees. This would in fact increase the productivity of those crops by providing shelter and other benefits - and give the farmer an extra lucrative resource.

The Ecoforestry Debate

Some of the ideas and principles around which ecoforestry is based are very sound. However, the outcomes from eco-forestry appear in many cases to be confused. Wood fibre needs should not be confused with the need for ecological restoration, nor should the low-volume quarrying of native forest advocated by some be expected to supply a significant proportion wood and wood fibre needs. There are serious contradictions and problems likely to arise from this confusion.

The models for sustainable wood extraction at any level from native forest ecosystems are just that: models; and - because of the silivicultural timescale involved- unproven. It is quite valid to equate low extraction with decreased impacts. There may be some areas of degraded forest capable of being farmed for wood products and supporting sustainable production. However, this does not equate with ecological sustainability. The biggest problem associated with all ecoforestry models are the very low volumes of wood they can produce. If native forest was put into this form of production, it would ultimately produce the same outcome as any other silvicultural system: the conversion of an ecosystem that functions perfectly adequately without human interference into a farm. Quickly or slowly, all that results is a comparison of different farming systems.

Alternative Fibres

There must be a diversification of fibre sources, both for structural wood fibre products and for pulp, and far higher recycling and lower use rates. It is ludicrous that we continue to see opposition to the establishment of hemp for fibre, in countries where such crops would offer a good additional fibre option. Again, as a note of caution, hemp fibre in itself is not a replacement for wood fibres, but in any integrated management resource system it would be a valuable additional source. There are other crops of potential, for example Kenaf, or the use of agricultural waste - flax, sugarcane, straw and so on - in paper and panel production. The key is to maximise the options available.

Conclusion

Society has genuine needs, needs that are growing with the growing population. These needs include the need for wood products. There has to be the establishment of a secure resource base for the production of those wood products, otherwise precious and irreplaceable native forest ecosystems will always be under threat. This resource should be grown in ecologically sustainable plantations on already cleared agricultural land.

The debate about the wood products industry and the sourcing of those products is very healthy. However, it's vitally important not to lose sight of the main environmental agenda, which is the continued, rapid and unsustainable loss of largely or completely undisturbed ecosystems, because people are not prepared to deal pragmatically and incrementally with the complexities of sustainable agriculture.

Recommended Reading

Cameron, J., Penna, I., The Wood and the Trees, Australian Conservation Foundation, Melbourne, 1988

Clark, Judy, Australia's Plantations: Industry, Employment, Environment, Environment Victoria, July, 1995.

Greenpeace New Zealand, The Plantation Effect, 1994

Native Forest Network, Towards a National Forest Action Plan, Conference Proceedings, October 1994 (in print)

Bibliography

1. Reproduced from Native Forest Network, Towards a National Forest Action Plan, conference proceedings October 1994 (in print)
2. Cameron, J., Penna, I., The Wood and the Trees, Australian Conservation Foundation, Melbourne, 1988