Missing the Wood and the Trees: Welcome to our New Normal

Take a drive through today’s pastoral New Zealand landscapes. What is it that you see?

Now think, what do you not see?

Listen-in on the simmering debates regarding the dire state of New Zealand’s freshwater quality. What is it that is seldom mentioned?

Now…contemplate New Zealand’s approach for addressing climate change obligations.

What should be at the forefront of our response? A common missing thread. Something that has slipped away from our current frame of reference.

A Scarce Entity

What is missing?

Forests. Permanent forests to be precise—and lots of it.

An estimated 71% (14 million ha) of New Zealand’s natural forest cover has been cleared.

Welcome to our new normal. We operate on a rolling baseline, from which it is surely inevitable, over generations, to lose sight of what has been lost. Forests. Forests once dominated our land mass. Now we face a suite of environmental crises, largely without the benefit of permanent forests.

New Zealand’s lowland temperate rainforests are biologically distinct, and they have become both scarce and poorly protected. The scarcity of New Zealand’s lowland forests means that the entire suite of remaining forest ecosystems are not equal in their conservation value. Most of New Zealand’s remaining indigenous forest is confined to high-elevation mountainous areas, and those forests are both less-diverse and less-scarce compared to their lowland counterparts, and those high-elevation forests are well protected as part of the Government’s conservation estate.

The scarcity of lowland-forest ecosystems continues to have significant negative implications for the persistence of the flora and fauna, which are dependent on the unique lowland-forest ecosystems to survive and prosper.

A Bygone?

But it appears that many view forest dominance merely as a historical point of reference. An entity removed from, and irrelevant to, current environmental issues. Something that is gone. Something we will never get back? But is it sagacious for forest to be regarded as just something that dominated prior to humans’ use of the land? Can we accede to permanent forest now being relinquished to the past, and lost from the vision and debates had by today’s New Zealanders?

Permanent Forests—An Essential Tool in our Environmental Problem-Solving Tool Box

Is it wise that something so formerly abundant and contemporarily scarce be left out of today’s environmental problem-solving efforts? If we could get back just a part of what once existed, what could we achieve?

Permanent forests must be central to our most urgent environmental issues—sequestering atmospheric carbon, maintaining terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity, and promoting ecosystem services – such as water quantity regulation, and filtering and buffering of freshwater water quality. These are the intrinsic roles of an enduring forest cover, something which we are missing so much of. Yet on we forge, attempting to address issues in the absence of surely the most fundamental of tools—permanent forests.

Strategic and collective thinking is needed. People need not be isolated from their land to make way for permanent forests. Opportunities need to be realised to incorporate permanent forest cover into our working landscapes. Great opportunities await if we will just broaden our frame of thinking. Recent research illuminates options for the use of abundant exotic species as a nurse to nurture long-lived native forest trees. Spatially, creating riparian networks across lowland landscapes to achieve desperately needed terrestrial and freshwater outcomes would be a logical starting point. Incentivising and encouraging. Recognising when to leave land to regenerate. Balanced decisions. Recognising when more than just the money counts.

One has to ask, is New Zealand really serious about fulfilling climate change commitments and addressing biodiversity and water quality declines?

Although lost from sight in the miasma of today’s new normal, permanent forest cover represents the genesis of most of New Zealand’s natural history. Today climate, biodiversity, and freshwater quality crises bear down on us. Let us consider for a moment whether we are adequately including our most established tool to address these threats—permanent forest cover.   

Biodiverse, is the Forbes Ecology Blog.  You are able to follow this blog by entering your email address here.  You can unsubscribe at any time.