[Pil-pc-oceania] Carbon sinks may better as multi-species, not excusively native species

[RussGrayson]

On 23/9/07 11:47 AM, "Deb Guildner" <bocor at bigbutton.com.au> wrote:

> Breaking Rural News : AGRIBUSINESS AND GENERAL
> 
> Doubts raised over trees for carbon plan By STEPHANIE PEATLING - Australia
> Friday, 21 September 2007
> 
> Trees planted as part of a Federal Government scheme to make offsetting
> greenhouse gas emissions tax deductible will not have to be native varieties
> and there will be no legal mechanism to prevent them being chopped down.


MULTIFUNCTION THE KEY TO CARBON OFFSET FORESTS

It's an old argument that hints at dogma rather than good design.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) report, on The Greens attempt to stipulate
the mandatory planting of only native trees as carbon offset forests is
based on assumptions rather than economics, resource maximisation and
science. The Greens were pushing for an amendment to federal government
legilation on tax deductability for the establishment of the offset forests,
which was defeated.

Few, if any, would doubt the value of establishing forests as a principle in
landuse design, and of the value of native species to this. Native species,
after all, are adapted to Australia's soils, to our low rainfall regime and
to the periodic bushfires that sweep though our forests.


THE UNTHINKING PORMOTION OF NATIVES
For those interested in sustainable development, the problem comes with the
unthinking promotion of native species. The mythology that native is best
sometimes comes almost as a knee-jerk reaction. It's as if that famous quote
from George Orwells book, Animal Farm, had been modified to read 'Natives
good, exotics bad'.

The penchant for native plants is an artefact of the politically influential
native plants lobby. The lobby is influential at the local government level
where councils some years ago started volunteer bush regeneration programs
and hired bushcare officers. It is also influential on a broader scale
through the Landcare movement. Both of these movements have brought a great
deal of good to our cities and countryside and it is only their myoptic
valuation of native species above all others that is at isssue.

Permaculture people are aware of the strength of this lobby because they are
sometimes the victim of it. A few of the lobby's outspoken spokespeople
continue to point the finger of accusation at permaculture as the source of
bushland weeds, rather than at the true source of most of these garden
escapes, the commercial nursery industry.

Let's be clear, though, that the once-almost-universal condemnation of
exotic species by the native plant lobby has chilled out a little. Even bush
regenerators have to eat and many now have a less universalist attitude to
the establishment of natives.


NATIVES AS WEEDS   
I recall someone adopting the ecological point of view when commenting on
the popularity of native plants, telling an audience that: "Eucalypts are
weeds that come up in the presence of continual, low-intensity burning".

The speaker? Bill Mollison.

Bill went on to say that, in a crisis, you risk starving because you can't
eat natives. And for those who would counter that there's always bush foods,
it might pay to remember that their fruiting is seasonal - they are
therefore available only for restricted periods - their distribution is
patchy and they in no way provide a nutritionally balanced diet. The people
for whom they traditionally provided sustenance, Australia's Aboriginies,
used them as part of a wider selection of foods that included meat and fish
for protein and, in some places, the seed of native grasses.

Mollison was making the point that Australia's forests and other vegetation
systems are not pure products of nature, of biological evolution. Millenia
of burning by the low-intensity fires of Aboriginies, by which they cleared
the land and maintained movement corridors in navigable condition, selected
for the most fire-hardy of species. The rest disappeared. It is in this
sense that the Australian landscape is a human artefact rather than simply
the product of untouched nature.

The notion that emerges from this is that, because the human shaping of the
landscape and its vegetation is nothing new, farmers, ecologists and
environmentalists - and even The Greens - might adopt a similarly pragmatic
approach and design lO2 offset forests that serve people as well as nature.


BIOLOGOICAL ETHNOCENTRISM OR MULTIFUNCTION
The Greens advocacy of natives-only seems, well, a little biologically
ethnocentric. 

An alternative may lie in a design solution that makes use of permaculture's
principle of multifunctional elements. That is, the adoption of a design
solution that goes beyond simple revegetation for CO2 absorption... one that
establishes planting systems, whether of non-invasive exotics, natives or a
synthesis of the two, that provide benefits other than CO2 lock-in.

Such planting systems do exist and there's a name for them - agroforestry.

"The Greens want the legislation amended so that trees that are planted to
create a sink are natives, must remain in the ground for at least 100
years", the SMH report states.

One can only ask... Why? It may be a good idea in some locations but why not
go for multifunction to extract maximum benefit - benefit to nature and to
people - from CO2 offset plantings?

Agroforestry, as a farming system that combines more than a single use on an
area of land, provide's a good argument that CO2 offset plantings should
remain in the ground for less than the 100 years The Greens advocate. They
would combine more than a single function, such as forestry and grazing,
forestry and the cropping of smaller, productive trees or shrubs and other
combinations selected according to climate, land capability and market.

There is reported to be a system analogous to this in use in Western
Australia. There, an innovative farmer has planted strips of mulga trees,
used as a fuelwood, in his wheat fields. Before their harvest as a renewable
fuel supply, the mulga serve environmental functions such as wildlife
habitat, soil stabilisation and windbreak. This might be described as an
integrated forestry/cropping system, itself one of the many forms of
agrofrestry.

Another model of agroforestry can be seen around the Goroko region of the
PNG Highlands. There, village farmers grow coffee in the shade of Casuarina
trees. The taller Casuarina drop their needle-like leaves which carpet the
ground and suppress weed growth. As they break down, they release the plant
nutrient, nitrogen, into the soil where the coffee trees tap it.

Trees absorb a greater qualtity of CO2 while growing rather than after their
major growth phase has ended. This suggests that the periodic harvesting and
replanting of CO2 offset forests works better as agroforestry systems than
as set-and-forget forests.

>From a permaculture perspective, CO2 offset agroforestry systems that are
grown, felled then replanted would fit the proposal by David Holmgren that a
fuelwood economy would make an effective, renewable energy source in a peak
oil future. There's other uses for the timber than fuelwood, of course...
construction timber and so on.


MULTIPLE BENEFIT TO PEOPLE AND NATURE
An agroforestry approach to CO2 offset forests would achieve soil
stabilisation, biodiversity and furtherance of the environmental services
brought by natural systems in combination with the production goals of
multipurpose plantings. It could also contribute to the development of
David's fuelwood economy, empoyment in forestry and production values such
as sustainable and renewable resources.

In my opinion, a good model for C02 offset forests was the Ecoforest PL
plantation of mixed Australian hardwoods and rainforest species in the Upper
Hunter region. Not only was it designed according to sustainable landuse
principles, it was a project of permaculture early adopter, Damien Lynch.
Damien earned a place in the permaculture pantheon by starting ethical
investment in Australia back in the 1980s, through the still-in-existence
August Investments. Like that company, Ecoforest was an ethical investment
opportunity.

Ecoforest folded, as I understand it, in part because of a lack of investors
prepared to persist for the longer term. An unfortunate number of greens,
obviously, chose not to invest in the scheme in sufficient numbers.
Presumably, they preferred to keep their money in conventional investments
and the big banks. It might be revealing to know where these vociferous
Greens sounding off about C02 offset forests have put their funds.

"Legislation creating a tax deduction for the cost of carbon sink forests
was debated in the Senate yesterday, with the Greens raising concerns about
the extent to which the scheme would be environmentally beneficial", the SMH
reports.

The assumption of The Greens appears to be that that which is not native is
not sustainable. This is so much nonsense, but they are right in their
demand for a consideration of water consumption in species selection for
offset forests. It is perhaps here that native species would be optimum, as
they would for some of the production values I mention above.


A WORLD TOO COMPLEX AND CHALLENGED
The world is now too complex, the challenges of global warming, shortage of
fresh water and the likely peaking of the oil supply, after which demand
exceeds production, too great to stick to restrictive policies on species
selection for carbon offset forests. That is an artefact of an earlier
period of environmentalism that peaked, probably, with the coming of the new
century.

We need a more comprehensive, multiple purpose response to these and the
other challenges we face. It's really a question of design, of defining
multipurpose roles for CO2 offset forests so as we can maximise their
benefits.

...Russ Grayson

.....................................................

On 23/9/07 11:47 AM, "Deb Guildner" <bocor at bigbutton.com.au> wrote:

>  Breaking Rural News : AGRIBUSINESS AND GENERAL
> 
>      Doubts raised over trees for carbon plan
>       By STEPHANIE PEATLING - Australia
>       Friday, 21 September 2007
> 
>       Trees planted as part of a Federal Government scheme to make
> offsetting greenhouse gas emissions tax deductible will not have to be
> native varieties and there will be no legal mechanism to prevent them being
> chopped down.
>       Legislation creating a tax deduction for the cost of carbon sink
> forests was debated in the Senate yesterday, with the Greens raising
> concerns about the extent to which the scheme would be environmentally
> beneficial.
> 
>       "This tax amendment provides for the planting of so-called carbon
> sinks, but there is no definition of a carbon sink . The important thing is
> that there is no requirement for the trees to stay in the ground for any
> length of time," Greens Senator Christine Milne said.
> 
>       The Greens want the legislation amended so that trees that are planted
> to create a sink are natives, must remain in the ground for at least 100
> years and must first be subject to an assessment of the amount of water it
> would take to sustain them.
> 
>       Senator Milne predicted a riot in rural Australia at the idea
> companies would "effectively use their profits to take land out of
> agricultural production and take water out of agricultural production" to
> create sinks.
> 
>       But the Government refused to back the amendments, accusing the Greens
> of being "anti-forestry and anti-trees".
> 
>       "Providing carbon sinks is either important or it is not . If we
> believe greenhouse gases are a real problem then we should be encouraging
> this type of activity," the Minister for Forestry and Conservation, Eric
> Abetz, said.
> 
>       The tax deduction was announced in the May budget as part of a
> Government response to the growing trend for carbon offsets.
> 
>       Companies globally are scrambling to offer offsets as a way of
> assuring consumers the firms' products are not contributing to climate
> change.
> 
>       But concerns have been raised about the lack of regulation of the
> schemes in Australia, with several companies found not to have planted the
> trees they promised to.
> 
>       Carbon sink trees also face the risk of bushfires.
> 
>       Ideally, offsetting allows companies to plant enough trees to trap the
> same amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that would be
> created by the manufacture of their products.
> 
>       Environment groups remain wary of the schemes, fearing profiteering in
> the new market and claiming there is too long a lag time between when the
> pollution is generated and when the tree absorbs carbon dioxide.
> 
>       SOURCE: Sydney Morning Herald, a Fairfax Media publication.
> 
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> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tamara griffiths" <scarletwoman at hotmail.com>
> To: <pil-pc-oceania at lists.permacultureinternational.org>
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 3:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [Pil-pc-oceania] books/lesson plans for kids permaculture
> 
> 
>> I am wondering how we'd teach kids/young adults a PDC?
>> What is the youngest anyone has heard of someone doing a PDC?
>> 
>> I have two girls that come round most days and we make compost, plant, dig
>> swales, feed chooks etc, and I explain stuff to them but it's not the same
>> as doing a PDC...
>> 
>> Love Tamara
>> 
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