Pete Oswald grew up on a high country farm in the Awatere Valley in Marlborough, where he got into cutting down trees to fund his highly addictive, big mountain, free-skiing habit. Skiing then turned into a professional career which has taken him all over the world. Between just being an all round ethically conscious human, suffering some climate guilt over the travelling he did through his skiing career, and as a father raising his own children, Pete has always been involved in sustainability initiatives. Whether that be through him and his wifes greeting card and paper goods business, Little Difference, his Ski for Trees initiative, or now as the prokect manager for the Central Otago Wilding Conifer Control Group where Pete has come back full circle into cutting down trees – but this time in the name or preserving and regenerating our natural environment.
This blog shares insights into Beck’s conversation with Pete on The Whole Story podcast. This episode is strongly tied to Sustainable Development Goal #15 – Life on Land. Becks and Pete talk all things wilding conifers, and in this blog we take a look at some of the key messages to takeaway from their conversation.
What sustainability means to Pete
When asked the question of what sustainability means to him, Pete was initially a bit ‘freaked out’, as it sounds simple but it really isn’t. Pete landed on sustainability being the balance between economic, social, and environmental – trying to sustain those things with balance going forward. However, Pete also posed an important thought regarding sustainability that is something we should seek to ask ourselves.
…you’ve got to ask this question, what are we trying to sustain? And if you’re trying to sustain as we are now, or the resources that we have right now, is that our angle? Is that our aspiration? Or are we looking to progress and improve?
So I kind of look more at, well, in the job working with farmers and landowners and stuff, they look more at trajectory. So, where you want to be, where do you want to go, and how you’re going to get there, and then work backwards from that end goal. And that end goal is often like two, three decades down the line. And we’ll work back from that and see what do we have to do this season to get to that next step. So, I mean, often people aren’t in a place that they want to sustain, they want to progress and get better, to somewhere else. I think progression is key. And when you’re making small steps every day, they really add up. And like when I hear people talk about environmental stuff and like, well, it’s not really making difference, is it? But if you times 8 billion by like 0.000001, whatever, you know, you’ve got a huge number and a massive impact. So it’s those tiny steps every day to get towards your goal and that really adds up.
The work of Central Wilding Conifer Control group
The Central Wilding Conifer Control Group, also known as CWG, was formed in 2013/14 in response to concern about the spread of wilding conifers in the hills around Alexandra, Central Otago. A public meeting saw about 100 people turn up to discuss the issue of wilding conifers, and from this the CWG formed. They started with no funding but soon got funding through community grants. The wilding pine problem got more traction and then Government funding came in 2016.
The territory that CWG covers is a million hectares in Central Otago.
It’s a huge area, and the job is basically to support landowners. But the problem in Central Otago is that it’s so huge and so vulnerable to wilding conifers. So, 70% of it is vulnerable to a conifer infestation, meaning basically if nothing was done at all in several decades, you’d have dense, closed canopy cover over 70% of all of Central Otago, basically every bit of hill country. And, that would also infest all the little bits of native regeneration that we have on the hills. We’ve got regenerating stands of Totara forest and stuff, for example,.. but that would all be lost. So, that is how we are unique in Central Otago. It’s a big area, but so much of it is vulnerable.The work of CWG is all about supporting farmers and landowners. This involves helping farmers understand the problem of wilding conifers on their farm, creating a strategy around how to control it, and then choosing the most effective control methods.
But it’s basically breaking down those barriers for landowners, for farmers to enable the work. Because, you’ve got 101 other problems including all the other animal pests and trying to run a business at the end of the day. You don’t need more problems. You want someone just to help you out and break down those barriers, and set that on a path and not have to do the planning, the thinking, and know that your spend of your time and your money is the best possible spend you can on the problem. And then they can kind of rest easy and crack on with everything else. So, that’s how kind of how we are there to support. Why are we talking about getting rid of trees?
There might be some of our audience who are a little confused here because there’s been a big push into actually getting trees into farms. And, growing trees is meant to be a good thing, right? That’s meant to be helping the environment. But here we’re talking here about actually getting rid of trees. So, what is the problem with wilding pines?
Well, they’re only really a problem when they’re wild, right? So people ask me, like, what is the wilding species? Well, that question is geographical and it’s nuanced to your location and where you are.
So in a nutshell, pine trees, conifers, they outcompete all of our native species for light and water. You have a little area of regenerated native, and then you have wilding conifers nearby. They will almost always come in and infiltrate that forest. They’ll grow taller, they’ll take more water, and they will kill off all of those species eventually, and then they’ll spread further. So in Queenstown, you see Douglas fir penetrating dense, mature, primary, native beech forest because it’s shade tolerant. It seeds in there, it grows up, grows taller, shades it out, and it penetrates and kills it off over the long term. And so the conifers and pines, they just love New Zealand conditions. And our forests haven’t evolved to compete with that at all. So these species from North America and from Europe, they grow up a lot higher, a lot faster. They take up all the water. If nothing’s done, that’s all you’re left with. You lose all that biodiversity, all those species, stuff like that. The other thing is the water, like in Central Otago, we’re sometimes classed as a desert with such little water. So there’s studies done over 30 years on the Lammermoor range where it’s anywhere between 30 and 80%, depending on how much rainfall in that particular precipitation event is how much they soak up. So you take away 30 to 80% of water yield from Central Otago, it’s already got very little. And suddenly you have a very big problem and everything suffers, including those ecosystems that rely on those little bits of water, but also farms that need to irrigate and drinking water, recreation, all of it.
To go back to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, is the first statement in there, protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, and then sustainably manage forests. What we’re doing in New Zealand is kind of contradictory to that goal. So it’s well known that conifer forest, pine forests, are not exactly harbours of great biodiversity. We’ve got to ask our questions, what is the opportunity cost there when we cover hundreds of thousands of hectares in a species that is not going to help us with that goal? The opportunity cost is quite high because that could be native forest. And then halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss, I think in New Zealand, we’ve got a bit of an issue here about how we’re trying to achieve that goal and how far down the line we’re looking. So the problem with conifers is we now know a lot more than what we did when a lot of these problematic forests went in.
Sometimes I fear that we’re not looking far enough back and taking enough notes about what happened in the past to draw that forward. It’s a very problematic thing. We’ve set up a system here where it really rewards people for planting these forests, but they are not working towards those goals that you just identified there.
The challenge of afforestation
Oh, yeah, I mean, like I said, I don’t profess to know heaps about the agriculture sector really, apart from my little sliver of wilding conifer control, but I’d say that we’re at a real kind of transition stage. This push for afforestation into pine trees is really heavy and sometimes I feel like not all factors are considered. So people are really incentivized to put their farms into pine trees, and what does that mean for their neighbor? What does it mean for the land in the future? What does it mean for biodiversity? So what we’re finding is a few of these people who have had a forest go in next door, now they’re 20 years down the line, they’ll say, no, it wouldn’t be so bad having a forest as a neighbor, and now they’re learning not only is there a wilding conifer problem, but there’s so many other little things that come with a forest. So what we’re hearing from these farmers is it’s a haven for pests. So pigs have to live in there, come out and dig things up. They carry pest seeds with them. With forestry comes like other pest seeds. You often get a lot of broom and gorse come in with machinery and contractors coming in and out and stuff like that. And the other thing they’re seeing is it’s a real pathway for stock theft, which we’re seeing in certain areas of Central Otago. There’s just many different aspects there that people aren’t really considering about having forests right there.
But I’d say that to flip it on its head, we’re under this framework of the ETS, but there are farmers out there registering native forests in the ETS. And failing that, maybe some pushback from the farms to say, hey, we want more incentivisation for native sequestration on our farms, because then you get the collateral benefits of those native plants as well, the biodiversity and everything else that goes with it. But just some pushback against that ETS framework, which seem to be so problematic and incentivise exotic species so heavily. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to serve our children’s generation very well.