By 2050 planet earth's human population is forecast to expand from 7.5 to 9.6 billion people. We will require 70% more food (United Nations), 50% more fuel (International Energy Agency), and 50% more water (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). We also need to reduce CO2 emissions by over 80% (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). All of these will have to be achieved to ensure economic, social, political, climate, food, water and fuel security (Institute for Molecular Bioscience 2019). There’s no silver bullet, but there is one thing that can deliver increased primary production productivity while simultaneously delivering biofuel, improving water quality and efficiency, and improving the carbon balance – TREES. Trees are the ultimate renewable. Penny Wells, Chief Executive Officer of Private Forests Tasmania, explains.
“It is widely understood that growing trees is good for the planet and deforestation is bad. But what is not well understood is just how powerful strategically growing, harvesting and then replanting trees in a primary production landscape can be,” says Ms Wells.
Private Forests Tasmania is a statutory authority tasked with facilitating the expansion and development of the private forest resource in Tasmania. “Planting trees on farms with the intention of harvesting and replanting is a win-win for the environment, society and landowners.”
Trees can increase farm productivity: Trees on farms can modify the local microclimate providing benefits to crops and livestock that are grown or raised alongside trees. YES! Plus, the ‘trees’ that are getting all the attention are Australian hardwoods by-and-large.
The University of Tasmania’s Centre for Sustainable Architecture with Wood (CSAW) is utilising these new large-scale examples of timber use in transformation projects to encourage more collaboration between developers and local industry in the future.
Professor Greg Nolan, Director of CSAW enjoys the opportunity to bring together local skills and knowledge in innovate ways.
“Transformation projects are an excellent example of the positive outcomes of the Tasmanian Wood Encouragement Policy,” Professor Nolan said.
CSAW recently welcomed architect Gary Fleming as Tasmania’s first Wood Encouragement Officer. Jointly appointed by the Tasmanian Timber Promotion Board and the University of Tasmania, Mr Fleming will work with industry, government agencies and suppliers to identify opportunities that increase the use of timber products.
Nick Steel, CEO of the Tasmanian Forest Products Association said, “As a university on the cutting edge of science and technology it is fantastic to see them lead by example in these campus transformations by using timber, the ultimate renewable”.
Looking at these few paragraphs we can see the Tasmanian Timber Industry and within that contextual alignment we can see how ‘the industry’ – hardwood based as it is – has shaped and continues to shape Tasmania’s ‘Cultural Landscape’ post European settlement – and by-and-large how it continues so to do.
Wherever and whenever a ‘tree’ is planted it sequesters CO2. In the end, it might hardly matter where it was planted. On the other hand, where that is might matter enormously locally given that a tree’s placedness contributes to the shaping of Cultural Landscapes and their operative sustainability.
Arguably, lutruwita Tasmania’s Cultural Landscape, in the aftermath of colonisation, has been altered significantly, and given the colonial imperatives, not always sustainably. It is not for nothing that in two centuries lutruwita Tasmania has seen so many extinctions and with so many species under threat of extinction. Likewise, so many landscapes have been ‘modified’ for the benefit of a far away Eurocentric elsewhereness – think forestry and agriculture and wool production in particular.
By way of contrast 14,000 football fields planted to bamboo most likely would not deliver the same 'lump sum cash dividend' that the same areas of pine trees might. However, bamboo's environmental dividends, and their economic outcomes, might well eclipse the pine trees' cash invested to dividend earned outcome.
Importantly, lutruwita Tasmania's Cultural Landscapes would change more than significantly in 30-40 years. Yes, that is not an evidence base assertion but it is an idea worth testing. In any event comparing and contrasting such an area planted to a single species of any plant there are, and will be, consequences – many anticipatable and some not so.
Anne Frank ... "I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." A poignant understanding of "wilderness'' from another time albeit, currently, we might muse with the likes of Anne Frank and dare to imagine a different world in a different cultural reality, informed by a different mindset, in our time.
Rather than 'plonk' bamboo plantings in a place in such a way as to displace all that was there before would be folly. This is the folly we already know so much about as we have seen unsophisticated unsustainable monocultural plantings that have depleted and diminished a sense of place rather than nurture it for those who follow – our great grandchildren et al. This is where the colonial mindset kicks in.
This is the mindset that says that sustainable timber production is about its exportability. And speculatively, this mindset might have already reached the point where lutruwita Tasmania is approaching the point where the island could be a net importer of 'timber'. Interestingly, in this bamboo endeavour lutruwita Tasmania might do well to look away from the island's colonisers and to Indonesia's 1,000 Bamboo Villages initiative for guidance.
There are questions hanging in mid air waiting for answers in the midst of all this. We might well wonder if bamboo might have something to offer if a new and more sustainable mindset can evolve.
'What if' might well be the the preface to those questions still hanging.
Author
