The trouble with trees

Like burning witches and wearing garlic to ward off vampires, planting trees or allowing "regrowth" is a modern superstition. An offering to the pagan gods whose anger has sent violent storms to lash us for our crimes against Eden. The mania for planting trees ignores the facts that trees can be net polluters (adding to the carbon load in the skies) and net damagers of soils (baring ground out beneath them as they colonise grasslands). But trees are green and easy to be seen, and we cut so many down. Wasn't the whole world one big forest before wicked white man stepped on the land?

Well, no, Virginia, it wasn't. Australia had millions of acres of grassy woodlands - widely-spaced trees with a grassy understorey - when the first explorers crossed the land and saw it as the Indigenous inhabitants were 'farming' it.

Explorer Thomas Mitchell explained 'firestick farming' in 1848: "Fire is necessary to burn the grass, and form those open forests, in which we find the large forest kangaroo; the native applies that fire to the grass at certain seasons, in order that a young green crop may subsequently spring up, and so attract and enable him to kill... the kangaroo... But for this simple process, the Australian woods hada probably contained as thick a jungle as those of New Zealand or America, instead of the open forests in which the white men now find grass for their cattle, to the exclusion of the kangaroo." This he observed in the central western districts of NSW. Ten years earlier he had observed around Sydney that: "Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there; the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives to burn the grass... the omission of the annual periodical burning by natives, of the grass and young saplings, has already produced in the open forests nearest to Sydney, thick forests of young trees, where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment, and see whole miles before him."

The vast areas of perennial grasslands encouraged by regular burning were noticed by explorers from tthe outset. In May 1770, Captain James Cook described the vegetation on Botany Bay's shore thus: 'the woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are such a distance from one another that the whole country might be cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree...' He also wrote: `the moors looked like our moors in England and as no trees grow upon it but everything is covered with a thin brush of plants about as high as the knees.'

In the next few blogs I will quote from other explorers' reports.

No, Virrginia, Australia was not a thick forest before the white man. I was a large kangaroo farm, featuring vast grassland pastures maintained by burning. So instead of rushing to plant a tree or let the woody weeds invade the grassland, get hip to what was going down when the black man ruled.