My previous post concerned itself with a letter I sent to our local paper. I was surprised and really pleased to revieve a reply in the paper the next week. I foolishly failed to copy it, but the thrust of it all was that one of the instigators of the Dunoon Project (no longer a director but still very much involved) was expressing some agreement with my comments and offering to meet to talk further. It would have been rude not to take up his offer, right?

Of course, I first did the google search in order to find out who it was that I was meeting. We had met once before actually, at one of the local consultation events for the Dunoon Project a couple of years or so ago, but I was but one of many attendees. What I was not aware of was the forestry pedigree of the man. He had spent a whoe lifetime working the woods, and is a regular writer in the Forestry Journal. One particular article spells out his feelings about the damage done and overall wastefulness of modern forestry practices.

Some of his concern appears to be the damage done to the ground by massive machines, which typically require buldozed access roads and rip the ground up in operation (incidentally, releasing huge amounts of carbon in the process above and beyond the removal of the trees themselves.)

The cable-crane operation is best suited to small, self-contained teams, be they employees or contractors. The timber-harvesting world has been taken over by the big boys to the demise of the smaller guys who were predominant in the days when I worked a winch. Small, focused teams tend to take more responsibility. In those days, a big team was one that had a winch and did the cutting, and quite often the cutters were separate to the winchmen – but it worked. Today, with harvesters costing half a million, small guys can’t get into the harvesting game and, worse than that, the competition between the big guys and the pressure from the end user contrives to keep harvesting rates at unrealistic lows, making it unattractive for new entrants. There’s little or no money for training or research and we are faced with a downward spiral of corner cutting to make ends meet.

My knowledge of forestry practice is almost non-existent, mostly gleaned from looking at the Cowal hillside then going on a deep internet dive in order to try to understand better what I was seeing. The chance to talk to someone who had actually worked these hills for decades seemed too good to pass up.

So meet we did.

Firslty, what a lovely man. He invited me to his home, where he proved to be a fantastic host, full of good stories, good humour and we shared a love of cricket. I really liked him and hope our paths will cross again.

He told me that when my letter went in the paper, some of his forestry chums had been rather disparaging, but his question to them had been ‘but what of what he is saying is wrong?’

Later he took me on a tour of the glen where he lives, where there has been much effort to restore the land, including a new project to bring fish back to the burn, which has involved looking at the marginal planting along the whole stream.

The glen has three main land owners – not counting Forestry Land Scotland (FLS) – and all three have their own committment to land restoration. The owner at the head of the glen seem to be trying to establish a new plantation of Caledonian pine forest, which seemed like a strange choice to me, as the great pine forests of the estern Highlands never previously grew in these parts, but alongside this there is other planting going on.

My guide showed me remnants of old growth forest, as well as newly planted mixed woodland and even a restored meadow. He is a man who clearly loves the land and regards himself as a steward. There is no doubt in my mind that he will leave a legacy in the land that will live on and on.

He is also passionate about the need to remove invasive rhododendrons and frustrated about the fact that FLS do not seem to have the same commitment to this within the glen.

Much of the woods in the lower glen are owned and managed by my guide. He explained how they had taken hundreds of tons of wood out of the still-dense spruce plantations in order to thin the trees, thereby creating greater diversity. Laudable, but the woodland is still so dense as to prevent any undergrowth. It remains the same brown desert that all plantations in these parts seem to have become. Perhaps this will change as the space created is colonised by other species. Certainly my guide had noted how birds now flew through the woods when previously they would have been excluded. There is no doubt that the glen is a place of much more diverse planting than most other parts of Cowal, with a wide variety of trees, including the elusive aspen.

I very much enjoyed our chat, which never became contentious even in areas of mild disagreement. Perhaps we were both on our best behaviour, wanting to focus more on what united us rather than what divided, but I think it was more than that. I think my guide was reflecting on a lifetime in the woods – a good life, lived out in good places – and is genuinely worried about what is happened to our once-wild places. His worries take him to a different set of questions and different solutions to what my own ill informed ponderings have taken me, but we both see the same problem; plunging biodiversity and an unfolding climate change catastrophy which at very least is already putting our woodlands in a vulnerable place.

For him I think that the solution is to do forestry better. To look at the most damaging practices and change them. This seems in part about industrial-scale machinery, poor management practices and appalling waste.

What about those areas of mild disagreement though?

I start with a warning. I don’t really know what I am talking about. All opinions I express, particularly ones that might contradict a man of the forest. Having said that, I do bring some skills to this quest for knowledge. I am a left field thinker, one used to looking at complex human designed systems and trying to understand what they are about. This was my gift (perhaps the only gift!) in the latter years of my last career, but also is what fuels my poetry, which is after all another kind of quest for truth. I am far from unbiased, but I am trying to keep my eyes wide open.

My first thought is that it does not seem sufficient to manage our way out of the denuded state of our hillsides by trying to do the same things better.

My guide may well be correct in saying that the problem has revealed itself most since the break down of the old local forestry systems – the selling off, the privatisation, the lack of public interest or investment, the advent of large machine driven solutions. For instance, he spoke about how the old chief foresters for an area had a connection to the land and to the local community that is almost entirely absent now.

They way I see it however is that this was not the golden age, it was part of the decline. The damage had already been done and what seems like best practice from back then is infact part of the problem, albeit one which we have made even worse.

The reason that our hills are planted up alien species of trees goes back to a different kind of clearances which saw small scale subsistence farming – which had already slashed and burned in to the forests and driven back the wild animals and large herbivores – were themselves cleared from the land by land owners who replace them with sheep, who munched their way to creating ‘green deserts’. Empty rolling hills, which we can see in old photos of Innellan for example, or the bare hills in Victorian photos around Loch Eck. The sheep still munch, but the national pressure, post war, was to be more self sufficient in producing our own timber needs, something that we could argue has been an abject failure, given how much we still need to import.

This was what led to much of the planting of the Cowal hills, not least those above my house here in Innellan. In other words, we replaced the green deserts (albeit with small remnants of biodiverse forest) with brown deserts – dark, dank closely planted alien species of spruce trees, underwhich almost nothing lives, nothing thrives, nothing prospers, bar the midge and the deer.

There is a problem with these statements though, in that in the febrile and overheated polarised debate about biodiversity in forests, with the foresters on one side, rightly trumpeting their carbon capture and renewable resources, and the conservationists on the other side, pointing the obvious deteriorating situation for wildlfe accross the board, and in the forested hills in particular, the actual EVIDENCE is far from clear. Here is a quote from this literature review undertaken in 2020 looking at the situation in Norway which kind of sums things up;

The controversy between the forestry sector and the nature conservation sector relies on low quality of evidence. In addition, studies on other aspects of biodiversity like habitats, landscapes and genetics are needed to strengthen the level of knowledge. We consider that the debate will benefit from a more knowledge-based approach where Sitka spruce is judged in a rational way based on both negative and positive effects. The present body of knowledge suggests a future management modification of Sitka spruce in Norway, and forest managers should consider more stand-wise mixtures of tree species, increase the proportion of early and late growth stages compared to the thicket stage but also avoid plantations on high risk “take off landscapes with respect to spread” to restrict future spread into conservation areas.

So, we think it more than likely that th eplanting of Sitka plantations is problematic, but we need to know more. A lot more. Best practice is not well understood and not actively promoted, leaving the (often very wealthy and powerful) vested interests to make it up as they go along, based on their own private profit or personal politics.

The question of WHY this research is not being done rears its head here. Why are we not asking these questions, despite being well in to the third or fourth cycle of harvesting/replanting of spruce plantations here in Scotland? This must relate, at least in part, to those vested interests mentioned above?

Partly too I think this might be because forestry is such a long term issue. Any problems develop slowly and mostly belong to future generations – perhaps with the exception of the recent Phytophthora outbreaks which have so devastated our forests of late. Perhaps these really should be the warning that we all need to heed. The canary in the coal mine perhaps? However, mostly, generations come and go and mostly the forest appears unchanging. In fact, our landscape has changed radically. Here is Loch Eck, around 1900 for example, with not a tree in sight.

The next problem is one of OWNERSHIP. This is a summary of ownership of Scottish woodlands from here. It should be noted that this data was from a survey conducted between 2012 and 2015. It seems likely that ownership has been further concentrating into the hands of companies and individuals, driven by the carbon capture industry, as made clear by the Scottish Land Commission, here.

Ownership type	Woodland area (000) ha	% of country woodland area
Public Forest Estate* [National forest and lands]	527.9**	38.4
Local Authority	7.0	0.5
Crown, Church and Educational Institution	0***	0
Other Public – not PFE or Local Authority	21.4	1.6
Charity funded by voluntary subscription	37.0	2.7
Private forestry or timber business	57.7	4.2
Private Personal	546.1	39.8
Private Business – companies, partnerships and syndicates	146.6	10.7
Private Community	13.8	1.0
Mixed	2.6	0.2
Other	13.5	1.0

Since the great free market Thatcherite revolution, it was not longer tenable to allow a nationalised industry to stand in the way of the rampant and endlessly creative free market, so the hold of the forestry commission had to be broken, but despite the best efforts of Thatcher’s government somehow the Forestry commission remained in public ownership, albeit with an ever increased push towards profitability. The forests then became devolved matters for the Scottish government. As can be seen from the above figures however, the government only has control over just over 34% of the forest in Scotland. The largest percentage is in private hands. This is perhaps not a surprise, given that we already live in a country with the most unequal land distribution in Europe, and this is probably getting worse, not better.

Ironically, it would seem that some of the most innovative and conservation-focussed forestry practices in Scotland are not happening in the public forests, but rather due to the passions and deep pockets of individuals such as Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen, who own more than 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) across Sutherland and the Grampian mountains.

Other large scale land restoration projects in Scotland have been driven by community action, most notably the Affric Highlands initiative, or charity projects like Trees for Life’s estate at Dundreggan.

As well as the conservationist/forestry divide evident on the focus of these projects, we should also mention some other obvious differences of approach. The first and most obvious is the issue of profit. If the forest has to pay for itself as its primary purpose then all other considerations will be secondary. It will then become logical to extract as much profit as possible, giving justification to the kind of heavy machinery practices that my guide found so destructive. In a world driven by free market thinking modification of this profit imperative feels immoral. By the same token, the development of a different relationship with the land that is not driven by unmodified profit, or even sets economic production aside entirely in favour of other pressing concerns, is extremely difficult but experience has surely taught us that if our land is to flourish again, we have to free it, at least in significant part, from the chains of profit. This can not simply be left piecemeal to the whims of individuals.

The next major difference is notable from the very language we are using to discuss this issue. Forestry is about trees, plantations, harvesting, timber. BIodiversity on the other hand is not about trees, but rather about complex interwoven relationships between species of flaura and fauna and the land/climate in which they are located. The trees are a vital component of this biodiversity, but not all trees are equal. When we talk about forest, we are not always talking about the same thing.

On the tour up his beautiful glen, my guide pointed to stands of old growth trees up the hillsides. He pointed out areas where vast amounts of invasive species had been cleared and where old drains are being left to clog in order to restore wetlands. He made a comment something like this when you are in old forest, you can feel the difference. I very much agree, but I think there is another difference in the way we might think of these precious place is as repositories for preserving what is left.

A comparison (albeit one that runs the risk of further polarising this debate) might be made with how marine protection areas are intended to work. Research has shown how these contentious interventions into the free extraction of fish and the use of the sea have real, measurable benefits. The difference is that land based ecosystems are even more denuded than marine ones, so for many species, merely protecting what is left and allowing it to flourish is not likely to be enough, which means that conservation has to be replaced by a degree of restoartive engineering in order to create the circumstances in which a protection area might have a chance.

And so we return to the Dunoon project.

Ownership matters, so if this land comes into ‘public ownership’ then this presents us with a huge opportunity.

Profit matters, in that the burden we place on this damaged and denuded land will shape its recovery entirely. Also, not all profit is equal, and certainly not all measurable in terms of money.

The conversation is vital. We have to share ideas, good practice and unfolding research in order to inform the public about the whole breadth of this complex issue. At present, this conversation is not happening in Dunoon. Those involved in the project may have all this in hand, but it is not a shared conversation either in terms of specific or general information about the state of our forests.

I am very grateful to my guide for allowing me to get deeper into this conversation.