Joined Up Thinking

Would be a Good Idea...

This piece could also be titled, Does the Left Hand Know What the Right Hand is Doing? We could go even further- what about the left foot? The right foot? Its been on my mind for several years as I regularly pass a good example of un-joined up thinking, which I'll get to below.

One of the things that appealed to me about permaculture design when I first encountered it, back in 1989, was the integrated or holistic approach. That's the idea that rather than approaching challenges one by one in a piecemeal way, we can, by careful analysis and protracted thought, design simple, elegant solutions that address multiple challenges at the same time.

Growing your own food is probably one of the best examples of this. Small scale gardening for food increases personal and local resilience, is proven to be good for our physical and mental well-being¹, increases the diversity of our gut microbiome, can be done as a group activity which increases community interaction, can reduce the need to travel and if it follows organic or permaculture ethics and principles, is far less damaging to the environment than mechanised, chemical agriculture, among many other things.

Another example I often raise is that whenever we need to make paths, tracks or roads, we inevitably impact on water management. By careful siting of such access routes we can increase the water storage capacity by choosing routes that follow contours and incorporating swales (perfectly level to allow water to soak down into the soil) or close-to-contour routes and water ways (ffosydd dyfri) that allow for infiltration but also steer excess water into longer term storages like wetlands, bogs or ponds. We can also take advantage of the waterways and their edges to grow specific species for cropping in various ways.

above: almost perfect- several hundred metres of contour track in Coed Y Brenin with a ditch operating like a swale on the up side, trapping run off from above and slowly infiltrating it into the soil and under the track. A rare example of accidental good practice!

All too often, despite the growing demand for water, here in the UK, local authorities and other bodies' primary concern still seems to be to get rid of water as quickly as possible. This seems to occur even if there is a department within such an organisation that is actively trying to conserve water and develop longer term strategies for sustainable management of water resources.

This lack of joined up thinking within and between various bodies seems to be built into the systems where separate departments may be in competition for resources. Some past examples from Forestry Commission Cymru and the current Natural Resources Wales (NRW) make the point.

Here in Cymru, power and communication companies have various devolved powers that in some circumstances allow them to run lines strung on poles across landscapes without applying for planning permission. Coed Y Brenin has a number of such lines of poles, coming up the steep sided valley from Ganllwyd and over Mynydd Penrhos, delivering power or telecoms to various properties, whether isolated or grouped together. Indeed, our own landline is served by an additional 13 poles running from a neighbour about a mile away and about 800 metres of buried, armoured cable.

The power companies have the right to enter the land, whoever it belongs to and cut vegetation, particularly trees, usually birch, under their lines, so nothing grows up high enough to interfere with their cables. The cut material is always just left, usually roughly piled to the sides of the swath they cut. Here, it dries out and adds to the fuel burden of the forest floor. The conifers growing on either side of the swathe have access to more light and retain their lower branches, often down to the ground, offering useful ladders for fire to climb up into the canopy. So the cut swathe, running up steep slopes, layered with dead material that dries out, provide ideal routes for fire to race up and as I've mentioned in previous articles, fire on a hillside can move very quickly as it preheats material above it on the slope.

A further point is that one of the species that gets cut under the lines is rhododendron which is pervasive pretty much throughout the southern end of Coed Y Brenin and the western flank of Mynydd Penrhos is, or was, particularly heavily infested. This plant can grow in about 90% shade, casts an even denser shade and nothing will grow underneath it, hence it can drastically reduce the diversity of an area, especially of native species, as it becomes established in ever growing patches. It responds well to cutting, rapidly sprouting new growth.

Under the power or phone lines, when the combination of trees and rhododendron is repeatedly cut (in effect coppiced) its the rhododendron that wins out, growing on to smother the other vegetation. So in some places the cut swathes are now filled with rhododendron, running up into the plantation and beginning to spread out into the surrounding stands.

above: swathe cut through the forest under power lines showing nicely coppicing rhododendron and neatly piled cut birch drying out ready for the fire.

But we're not finished here. Natural Resources Wales (NRW) employed contractors to undertake rhododendron clearance on the western flank of Mynydd Penrhos a few years ago. The contractors used the “stem injection” method which sounds quite sophisticated but basically just involves drilling holes as low as possible in the branches and squirting poison into them. The poison is systemic, spreads throughout the plant and kills it over the course of a season or so.

Admittedly the contractors did a good job although wandering off piste, as I do, I find the odd one or few they missed which, unless there is any follow-up, will go on to spread yet more seed and start the whole process off again, an old story in this locality. Also, they marked out each area as they worked their way through it, by tying coloured, plastic tape to branches, which did not get collected afterwards. These, many hundreds of them, will inevitably break down into micro particles and end up in the soil, water and ultimately the seas and oceans,

The point I'm making here though is that the power company team happened to carry out their regular cutting of anything under their lines before the rhododendron killing team got there. When the rhododendron team worked their way through that area, looking for the dark green, evergreen foliage, they failed to notice the plants that had been coppiced under the lines, so they didn't get poisoned. These have now returned to vigorous growth filling the whole swathe, again.

above: the same swathe on the other side of the track. Freshly sprouting rhododendron looking very happy, thank you very much for removing the competition! The bare shrubby branches in the foreground and right mid ground are dead rhododendron plants that hadn’t been coppiced so got poisoned, now drying out nicely and ready to burn. Oh yes, the smoke from burning rhodi is poisonous…

This is the classic piecemeal approach which leads to an endless cycle of actions that do not work, favour the species that is seen as the problem and increases the fire risk in the forest, rather than decreasing it.

A permaculture approach would be to treat the swathe under the power lines as a system and design it. This would go along the lines of identifying the maximum height allowed under the lines and selecting suitable species; this would then give you the timing of a regular coppice cycle of harvested material. There's no reason why this sort of work should not be undertaken by a local group rather than the power company. It then becomes in the locals' interests to look after the swathe, as in care for it, rather than be careless about it.

I can imagine a linear coppiced apple orchard, as envisaged by Phil Corbett and currently being trialled by Chris Evans²[

https://www.facebook.com/ApplewoodPermacultureCentres

] or soft fruit. This turns maintenance into harvesting, transforming work for no product into a locally productive venture.

I'll offer another simple example of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

In the late 1990s we got a contract with the then Forestry Commission Wales to clear conifers from the riparian zones of the streams on Mynydd Penrhos; that's the sides of the streams. In some cases the streams had conifers, varying in height from seedlings to young trees, shading them completely and the water had taken on scary colours like bright orange, blue or yellow. Letting the light in provided the opportunity for native species to get going and has greatly improved the quality of the water. As we were in effect improving our own watershed, we did a really good job.

However, when you are in effect hand weeding a forest of several tens of thousands of conifer seedlings, most of which were western hemlock, it is inevitable that you will miss one or two (at least!) and the same is true with rhododendron. So a sensible approach would be to repeat the clearance process in say three or four years, when the ones you missed the first time will have become more obvious. This second go would require far less work and ideally, a regular sweep of the same areas maybe every five years or so.

above: hillside meticulously weeded of conifers some 25 years ago flourishing with rowan, hazel, oak and willow but the dark shadows up at the right background are just a handful of western hemlock that got missed and, without follow-up, have grown on to dominate the upper slope. The smaller hemlock to the right of centre has appeared more recently and is still of a size suited to guerilla forestry…

Does this happen? No. Has the small stand of eighty year old western hemlock trees that are providing probably 80% of the seedlings been cut down? No. Result, many of the areas that we cleared so scrupulously are once more thick with the trees that have seeded since we did the work and even in places where we missed only a few hemlocks, these have grown into broad monsters with branches down to the ground and nothing growing under them.

On this same contract, under the direction of the Forestry Commission Conservation Ranger we also cleared a small marsh of conifers and again, as it was on our own watershed, did a really good job. However, in the same year, only some six months later, we found it had been planted up with closely spaced Norway spruce! Duh! I could go on but you get the point

above: a peat bog, believe it or not, again, meticulously weeded of conifers but then planted with conifers…many of which have died or fallen over, probably because they were planted on a bog. Duh!

Unfortunately, apart from inter-departmental rivalry or sheer ignorance, governments and other bodies are still all too often caught on the hop and respond to crises by throwing money at a challenge without really thinking long term (take the UK response to Covid for example), leading to a limited number of individuals and businesses profiting from extravagant wastage (PPE for example or the scamming of furlough money) and the ordinary person (the tax payer) having to foot the bill and suffer a reduction in services as budgets are cut to reduce government spending.

We could save considerable energy, time and money if different departments within organisations and different organisations could coordinate their efforts and develop a collaborative approach. This sort of joined up thinking, exemplified by permaculture design, is going to be even more vital as we move into a future of static or shrinking economies when resources are going to be more and more constrained.

Thanks for reading and welcome to new subscribers. Some more Konsk is on the way plus the next bit on fire, hopefully before the fire season kicks off. However, if the weather continues the way the spring is going here, (that is, pretty wet), then I might get away with it for another year, meaning more time to prepare, hopefully.

Till next time, comments, suggestions, requests most welcome. Hwyl! Chris.

1. Coincidentally, as I started to write this piece, Dr. Michael Mosley's Radio 4 series “Just One Thing” began on the radio and the morning’s programme featured the wide variety of benefits of gardening. You can listen to it here.

2. You can watch a short video of Chris Evans explaining his coppice apple trial here. The permaculture designer Phil Corbett was largely responsible for developing the ideas for sophisticated coppice orchard systems and own-root-fruit trees and I have benefitted from his advice (and plants) over the years.

I coppiced several of my trees here at Penrhos but in our wet, humid climate, found the dense regrowth very susceptible to mould, canker and rot. I’ve just re-coppiced some of them to see if global warming will make any difference…I’ll also try thinning out some of the regrowth and possibly tying them down to let more air in. I’ll probably write a bit about it at some point.