Jason Kingsley 0:01
We often use trees as a shorthand for how well our ecology is doing. We generally see more trees as a good thing. Today’s guest, however, Ben Rawlence has seen the proliferation and movement in habitat and various types of tree as an indication of how fast and how seriously our climate is changing. And he’s here to tell us what that might mean for our future. Welcome to Future Imperfect. Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Future Imperfect. I have with me Ben Rawlence, who’s a writer, journalist, and he’s written a book about forests, and we’re going to go into more detail about that. Ben, could you introduce yourself in any way, shape or form you feel right?
Ben Rawlence 0:54
Sure. So my name is Ben. I’m 47. I’ve got two kids. And I live in the Black Mountains in Wales. I came here because my wife’s family’s from here. But prior to that, I lived in Africa for many years and in the United States, and I worked as a journalist, political analyst, activist, human rights researcher. And now, for my sins, I have founded a climate change college called Black Mountains College in Wales, which is informed by some of the stuff I saw in the Arctic, which made me appreciate the urgency of the changes we need to make.
Jason Kingsley 1:31
Well, we could start with that. Can you tell me more about that college? That sounds absolutely fascinating and very worthwhile thing to do, but but quite a complex thing to do to start a college?
Ben Rawlence 1:42
I wouldn’t recommend it. And if I was going to do it again, I would do it quite differently. But yes, I mean, in a way, this is the sort of end of the book and it’s perfectly good way to start at the end. All of the true insights I found on the frontline of climate change in the Arctic, that the Arctic is warming faster, and has been warming for longer than the rest of the world made me realise that we’re not ready. I think that’s abundantly clear to people increasingly, as the years go by, that our governments and our institutions are not responding adequately. And I don’t just mean by cutting emissions, I also mean, by reimagining our way of life. For me, I think the takeaway of that journey around the Arctic is that climate change and all of the kind of related catastrophes that already underway, as a result, are well beyond carbon. This is also about our way of life. This is about a disruptive attitude towards nature. It’s about our relationship with the natural world and each other, and the kinds of political systems and economies that have grown up based on to be blunt, raping the natural world, and extracting value, all our language, our whole concept. And everything about the way in which we relate to our habitat has become really difficult, and we need to be reimagining that. And that’s really at its most bold what the college tries to do in practical terms. We’re doing short courses to do with regenerative horticulture, composting, coppicing, so ways of extracting timber without cutting down the forest. We’ve got some online courses on shareholder activism and kind of flat-pack democracy. And we’re doing some residentials on climate adaptation, retreats about reimagining ourselves and our relationship to the world and each other. And then we’re doing vocational courses. So, a one-year NVQ in coppicing, regenerative horticulture, and seasonal catering, cooking with the seasons, and in time, we have plans for a sort of interdisciplinary degree, which is mainstreaming ecology, neuroscience, politics and economics. And that will be validated by Cardiff metropolitan university, but I’m on a journey to raise about 6 million quid to make the degree part happen. The other stuff is happening already. So in a nutshell, that’s sort of where I personally have ended up after this close encounter with climate change.
Jason Kingsley 4:04
Good grief. Okay, well, that sounds admirable. I mean, how do people contact you if they’re interested in getting involved in that?
Ben Rawlence 4:10
So blackmountainscollege.uk is our website, we’ve got short courses on there on the What’s On page. NVQs are free in Wales. So if you’re based in England, and you want to come and study for a year, come and join us. It’s three days a week, and there’s a Donate button if you’d like to make a contribution. I’m raising money all the time.
Jason Kingsley 4:30
Well, that’s great. So tell me a little bit about this moment in your life when you suddenly saw the changes happening. And that I think triggered you to write about this book called The Tree Line.
Ben Rawlence 4:42
That’s right. So my former life, as it were, was as a foreign correspondent and human rights researcher. We were in Africa for about 10 years. I studied Swahili at university because I did a gap year when I wanted to escape from my small town in England and go very far away. And I fell in love with Tanzania. There, I learned Swahili, and that took me in the end to a career in journalism and human rights. And I ended up writing my last book about the world’s biggest refugee camp, which is called Dabaab in the Horn of Africa. That was at the time a city of 500,000 people who were fleeing drought and conflict in Somalia. And it was just becoming apparent – this is 10 years ago – that the conflict in the Horn of Africa was being driven by climate, that this was the beginning of the perturbations in rainfall patterns and so on. And I think that’s been borne out by the last 10 years. So I thought, right, okay, if this is what we’re seeing here, the Sahel is a very sensitive region where you can see climate impacts. Where else on the planet, can we see climate change as history where it’s already happened, where we can get a glimpse of the future, and we can learn some of the lessons, both practical and also emotional, and psychological, that we need to learn in order to get ready for this coming change. So that’s why I started looking at the Arctic. And quite quickly, I came across this image of the tree line moving north, we’ve all heard of the ice melting and the permafrost and the polar bears and all the rest of it. But I hadn’t grasped that the vegetation line, the line of vegetation was, of course, galloping towards the North Pole, turning the white Arctic green. And I thought, Wow, that’s a hell of an image. And I’m going to work with that.
Jason Kingsley 6:27
This is because trees of that type can only grow at a certain temperature, I presume, and therefore, that makes a maximum north, but if suddenly young trees that grow north of that, go: actually it’s okay, here, they can then grow. And then you get this line, this advance of the Ents, if you like, this march of the trees north. Which actually isn’t as romantic as we think, because he’s actually marking a very clear change, you know, they either can live there or they can’t. So it’s very clear indicator, I would imagine.
Ben Rawlence 7:00
That’s exactly right. Yeah. So the tree line is one of the definitions of the Arctic Circle. The other definition is the 10 degree average temperature around the North Pole. And both of those things are zooming north. The line of latitude on the map is not changing, but those natural demarcations of the Arctic Circle are moving. Just to be clear, the trees are not uprooting themselves and marching with their roots, but the conditions for the forest are improving. And so trees that pollinate really fast or spread themselves disperse really fast through wind pollination, like birch, for example, are spreading at 50 metres 100 metres every year, you’re getting more and more seedlings further and further north. And this process has been underway for 50 years, I spoke to people in Norway, who were born on the tundra, and whose town is now in the middle of a forest. So this has been going on for quite some time. And it’s accelerating. So the trees are moving faster and faster towards the north. And in some places, they will run out of land, because the Arctic Circle, the Arctic Ocean will stop them.
Jason Kingsley 8:06
Wow, that’s really interesting. So you’ve got average temperatures, which are retreating north. So is it a particular type of tree? You talked about birches, and those are pioneer trees? From what I can vaguely remember from some of my studies, there are pioneer species, and those are the species that would grow first and then change the landscape as they grow.
Ben Rawlence 8:27
Yes, that’s right. So I’ve learned so much in writing this book. And as ever, when you learn lots you want to share it. So please do read the book and get into the detail. But I found it absolutely fascinating that the boreal forest is relatively species poor. It’s not like the Amazon rainforest, where there are 1000s of species in a square metre. In the boreal forest. There’s a few hardy conifers and deciduous trees, which have come and gone with the ice ages over the last millions of years. So these trees, these species are people for whom climate change is their core business. They’ve been riding the tides of ice up and down with the ice ages for millennia. And they’ve adapted with this very, very wide climate niche. So you have Scots pines, Birch, spruce, for example, nearly at the equator, but you also have them right up there at the tree line. And that means these are the survivors if you like, and there are actually only seven species at the tree line. So that was really handy. If you want to write a book, you can chop it up into seven chapters. So we’ve got pine in Scotland, we’ve got birch in Scandinavia, we’ve got larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska, and balsam poplar in Canada, and then mountain ash grown in in Greenland. And each of those species is responding in different ways. And each of those species has a fascinating history about why it’s even there in the first place. So delving into that history is an opportunity to reflect on the impact humans have had on the northern hemisphere: why larch is in Siberia, for example, pine is in Scotland. And it’s not what you think. And also then to think about the future, say, well, we need these trees. And if it’s getting warmer and they’re not sequestering carbon, and they’re not transpiring in the way that they should, what does that mean? What does that mean for our assumptions about off-setting, and how we think we’re going to survive.
Jason Kingsley 10:19
And I would presume that tree cover changes the albedo, the sort of reflectiveness of the landscape as well. So that strikes me that might be an accelerating effect, because I think snow basically reflects more light back into the atmosphere. So it has a cooling effect. And we get that idea of snowball Earth in millions of years ago, that moment where almost the whole of the planet was encased in ice. But this presumably means that the further it gets, the more it will absorb, and it will be an accelerating phenomenon. Is that right?
Ben Rawlence 10:51
That is true. One of the many interesting conventions that I had was, we think that planting trees is good, more trees is good, we need more trees, but actually in the right place, and the Arctic is not the right place, because when those trees spread exactly right, they push the snow out of the way. The albedo is not reflecting all that radiation back into space. And then the roots, of course, are warming the soil, they’re increasing microbial activity, the Birch is pioneering and paving the way for other species more trees. So the trees are actually accelerating permafrost melts. And it gets worse because in Alaska, the trees are food for beavers, and the Beavers are then damming rivers. Water carries HEAT much further down into the melting permafrost. So the trees are actually an accelerant of warming.
Jason Kingsley 11:47
And there’s an awful lot of gases trapped in the material in the permafrost. I remember watching a documentary on the way that they build foundations in some sort of Arctic research stations where they sort of, they melt a tube of the earth, and they just put the piles in, and then they let it freeze again. Yeah, but that only works. If the ground is so cold, it’s just gonna freeze again, whereas presumably, they’re all starting to sink into the mush.
Ben Rawlence 12:09
They are. And so there’s so much fascinating stuff happening in Siberia, which is also terrifying, but the whole cities sinking, and these buildings tipping up. And most frighteningly of all, oil refineries where big storage tanks are cracking because they’re based on the permafrost. So you had this huge oil spill from Norilsk when I was there, turning the whole river red. But what I found most fascinating actually was meeting some of these scientists who are studying in Siberia, looking at permafrost, and methane. And I didn’t realise that there’s only four sites in Russia, where they’re measuring methane, where they actually have a sense of what’s happening with the permafrost. And even that data is really patchy is really hard to capture me thing. So we know theoretically, that there’s this huge problem. But actually, we cannot quantify it. There’s all these unknowns. You know, there’s a sort of complacency that you know, there are so we just follow the science of climate change, actually, the science of climate change, is riddled with all sorts of unknowns, and all kinds of unexplained feedbacks, which, you know, we’re just figuring out all the time. So that’s partly also what triggered the college was, you know, oh, my God, it could be so much worse, we just don’t know. And therefore, we have to prepare for uncertainty.
Jason Kingsley 13:26
I mean, the natural world is so immensely complex, and you do get unintended consequences, don’t you think? One thing and then something else happens? You think, ah, in hindsight, that was obvious early. But you know, it’s all so interrelated, the idea that these trees then extend the territory for beavers that then knock them down for food and create dams to create more landscape for them, we won’t be landscaping wetland, which has an effect of melting it faster. And we tend to think the natural world is in balance, but it kind of is sometimes but it’s also horribly not in balance in other ways. You know, it can, it can have a runaway effect, and it doesn’t really care about us. This is one of the things is sometimes explained to people. It doesn’t really matter. As far as it’s concerned. They’re just doing their thing. Beavers are being beavers, they have existential crises about destroying their environment, they reproduce, they die, and they’re running around and beaver things we can see that is going to cause massive problems we can project into the future. And you know, you’re going to have, well, there are huge populations being displaced. So we have models for that. But what do you think the consequences are going to be of even more disruption? Are places that are more familiar to us, perhaps in the West going to be suffering this kind of displacement? Is it already happening?
Ben Rawlence 14:43
It is already happening and it’s happening in places hitting our news screens. Often like the the wars in the Horn of Africa, it’s the war that’s reported, but actually, the underlying drivers are this collapse in food prices, there’s conflict over water resources and so on. And I think when we look back now, you know, from the very first famines in the 80s, in Ethiopia, and so on, what we see is a mounting pattern, which in hindsight is going to look very different. And I think it’s the same. Now when we look at the history of North America in 10 years time, we’re going to see the harbingers of what is in the future now, actually, in the presence and in the past already with the wildfires with agricultural yields down by 30% in North America this year. And you know, the breadbasket in Ukraine and all of this stuff, I mean, it is already happening. And it’s not just the tiny islands in the Pacific. It’s all these other kinds of systems changes, like the cost of living crisis. Actually, we should be talking about that in climate terms, because the base inflation has been driven by the cost of food, by the futures prices of wheat, and maize, and soybeans because of these collapses elsewhere. And so nobody’s joining the dots, I feel, and everything, I think, if you take the lens of climate and the changes, all of these things start to look connected. I mean, I could say a lot more about sort of Siberia, but one of the scientists I met who I talked about in the book has done modelling, where she’s got a very clear picture of the zone of human habitation and what is possible in Siberia under certain scenarios of warming. But what she can’t predict is the border policy of the Russian government. And if the Russian government allowed migration, and she can model all the species moving north, except humans, and if you were to allow humans to move freely, you would expect them to colonise the whole of Siberia over the next 80 years. You can see the tension then you can see then what some of the political fallout is going to be.
Jason Kingsley 16:48
Just the movement of the tree line mean that if you go further south, you’re actually changing the crops you can grow further south as well. Does it mean more land is being opened up for food growth?
Ben Rawlence 17:01
Perhaps it does. So it means lots of different things, the forest is shrinking, or at least the forest is shifting, so the window of the forest is going up. And the steppe in Kazakhstan and Mongolia is expanding, and the farmable land in Siberia is rapidly increasing. And Russia is investing billions in farming in Vladivostok and other places in Siberia. And it’s aiming to be the number one wheat producer in the world in the next 10 years. And they probably will. So Russia is sitting very pretty from a sort of geostrategic point of view in terms of taking advantage of climate change. But then if you look at Africa, we’re talking about genocide, I mean, a couple of degrees have increased, and you’re going to get massive crop failures all over the place. So it’s different in different places. That’s, I think one of the really important things to understand. I mean, here in Wales is pretty wet, and we don’t grow wheat above 300 metres. But soon, that’s what we’re going to be doing. So we have to get to know our neighbourhood, we have to get to know our ecosystems and see how they are changing because how they fare is going to be how we fare.
Jason Kingsley 18:07
That’s interesting. So why can’t people grow wheat above 300 metres is because the soil is too thin or too cold, and it’s too wet and miserable, right? But you could see that shifting, changing. That is interesting. I was studying a little bit about the mediaeval period and how grape harvests in the south of England were fairly substantial English wine whilst not being the highest quality, and it was still widely produced. There’s a little bit coming back. But I wonder whether things like grapes or maybe even olives, but you know, you typically imagine those as being sort of Mediterranean, the places where you can plan those and they can grow successfully is kind of creeping by 50 metres or whatever it was, or the treeline isn’t moving. Right. Wow.
Ben Rawlence 18:47
Yeah, I can’t remember the date. But I think London is going to have the climate of Barcelona by 2050, if not sooner. And the climate of velocity of the UK is the equivalent of going south by 12 miles every year.
Jason Kingsley 19:00
Good grief. So water is going to be a very interesting issue because obviously Spain water is a huge resource. But are we going to lose the raininess, I presume we have to if we’re going to be like Barcelona, this is gonna be a wet and steamy Barcelona.
Ben Rawlence 19:15
Well, one thing perhaps to tell your listeners about is that we’re having an ecological futures camp with Welsh Water here at Black Mountains College, camping at the end of August. It’s going to be free. And you can apply on our website very soon. It’s not there yet. But what Welsh Water have modelled is, instead of a kind of, you know, it rains every day in Wales. That’s the sort of traditional, traditional picture. What we’re going to have is six months of drought and six months of floods. And we’re already seeing that shift in that pattern of rainfall. And the question is really why I said earlier that we’re not doing enough is if we were preparing, what we would be doing is looking critically at all our reservoirs so that we can catch enough rain. When it does rain. So that we can survive the droughts. Because at the moment, that’s the problem.
Jason Kingsley 20:04
Yes. And of course, floods hitting dry soil,soil depletion is a big issue as well, that’s going to sweep that out and then start to need more plants surface to avoid impacts on naked soil, farmers going to have to start modifying their ploughing and you know, that way they leave the land naked over the whole winter. That’s just it’s gonna get swept down the mountainside. Yes.
Ben Rawlence 20:27
And we see that every winter here. I mean, one of the things I’d say in the book, it’s a bit of a throwaway line. But I would like to explore it more in an article maybe is that ecology should be an issue of national security at the moment, we should be having strategic planting, we should be having strategic water harvesting, we should be looking at which parts of the coast are going to be uninhabitable. We need to be building transport networks that are resilient, that are connecting the right kinds of places, I think people are going to be running for the hills, which is, you know, we sort of made a bet on the hills here. You know, and what I think people don’t appreciate is the speed. Because the IPCC report, it lays it out in pretty clear terms, but not many people get through to page 87, or whatever it is, you know, all of this is not going to arrive at the end of the century, in one fell swoop, this is already starting to happen. And it might sound like 1.5 degrees, two degrees is not that great. But when you understand what that means for crops, and for the oxygen sequestering capacity of forests, it means that we are going to start to see food and water shortages and shocks in the next five to 10 years. And you know, this kind of cost of living crisis is the first sign of that. And I sense it’s only gonna get worse.
Jason Kingsley 21:41
We talked about governmental level things, some of these things really do need that kind of power behind it, but other things that people can do locally or for themselves on an individual basis to try to help. Yes,
Ben Rawlence 21:54
I think so. And that’s very much where I’m at with trying to set up this educational facility is that we can’t wait for governments. And you know, at the best of times, they’re very imperfect institutions for looking after people.
Jason Kingsley 22:07
Yes, I would agree with that, as would probably everybody actually, wherever they are in the world. Yeah.
Ben Rawlence 22:12
So I think there’s a lot we can do. I mean, I think if we accept that change is happening, we accept that the status quo is not great, then I think it opens the door to action. There’s an awful lot to do. And I think it starts with educating yourself, educating other people being open to new ideas, questioning everything, looking at your assumptions about your kids, your family, your communities, your job, and not necessarily in its kind of despairing way. But saying, Hey, come on, this is not the end of human life, actually, in northern Europe, we’re in a pretty good place to be able to weather some of this and slow it down. And we need to be doing everything we can, we need to find that common purpose, both at the political level, but also the local level, growing more food, you know, really reconnecting with our environment, learning the names of all these beautiful plants that provide us with oxygen, teaching that to our kids, and then we stand a better chance of proper environmental laws that respect the natural world instead of destroying it.
Jason Kingsley 23:14
So in a way, part of what you’re doing part of the book is to try to help educate people. Because if people don’t know this is happening, they can’t be prepared for it. But at least if people are aware, these things are happening, and they’re given some indication of what can be done. 100 million people doing a small thing makes quite a lot of difference actually, on balance. If people have, what difference does it make, it’s like, well, if there’s a million of you doing it, it obviously makes a huge difference.
Ben Rawlence 23:40
It does. And if every person on the planet planted six trees in their lifetime, we would already be in the right place, not in the architecture. We plant, everybody planted six trees, we would already be well on the way to drawing down a significant amount of carbon to slow things down. So you know, carbon is important in terms of slowing it down. It’s not the only piece of the puzzle in terms of the Earth’s system. But what I did with the book, you’re absolutely right was it’s a travel book. It’s an adventure story. We’re on a journey, learning about the science in these places, and these wacky people who drive these crazy big snow buggies up in the Arctic Circle. But we’re also learning about the Earth’s systems and what’s happening and ending on a positive note, but it’s not, by hope, a note of false hope, because I’ve read too many books where it says, you know, we must choose if only that, well, yes, but two degrees is coming. It’s bad. It means this, but we can get ready for it. We can prepare, we can slow it down, we can work together. So I think one has to be clear eyed about the situation in order to be hopeful because real hope comes from you know, being genuinely aware of the situation that you’re in.
Jason Kingsley 24:56
Isn’t there going to be massive refugee issue, people being displaced from the landscape, I always think the word refugee brings with it too many connotations. It’s like people that can’t live in places where they used to be able to live, and therefore need to travel. Yeah, so there’s going to be a lot of displaced people.
Ben Rawlence 25:13
There are, I think the UN forecasts 3 billion by 2040, something like that, or 2050, I can’t remember exactly, but it’s quite soon. And I would say we’re already seeing it, I would say that the refugee exodus from the Sahel region of Africa over the last 10 years is the thin end of that wedge. And it’s principally going to come from there, because that’s the place that’s going to be hit first with food shortages. But then it will start to impact other places. And I think I’ve seen reports talking about Central American refugees to the United States, in the same terms that the people are fleeing hunger, they’re fleeing crop failure. And this is, you know, the beginning of something.
Jason Kingsley 25:51
So they’re not economic migrants, in the same way, we might think of them as coming to sort of better themselves, it’s like they’ve got no blimmin choice. They stay where they are, and die or migrate,
Ben Rawlence 26:01
Or they stay where they are, and have a rubbish life eking out a living, but the idea of economic migrants I always find a little bit complicated, there are people who make the choice. But largely, it’s because there is an economy that’s not sustaining people there.
Jason Kingsley 26:16
So let’s think of Spain as very hot. And while there are parts of Spain that are quite arid and hot, presumably that’s going to get worse, or is it not as simple as that? Is it not as simple as places further south getting hot and places further north, getting more warmth, is a bit more complex than that.
Ben Rawlence 26:33
It’s broadly right. But there are some tweaks and I would urge people to look at the world. The IPCC report itself sets out really clear scenarios and really clear maps. There’s quite a lot of graphics on my timeline, which is at Ben Rawlence on Twitter, where I’m tweeting climate scientists who have done that mapping. The other thing you can look at is something called climatecentral.com, which is an American Open Data website where you can put any parts of the world in, and you can look in 3d Google Street View, how it’s going to look, in terms of sea level rise. So you can predict all of that kind of stuff. But I think what I would say is, there’s a certain amount that we know, but there’s an awful lot that we don’t know. So we can predict certain temperature rises. But what we don’t have any idea about is how the permafrost is going to respond, and also how ocean circulation is going to respond. So if the Gulf Stream switches off, Britain will be actually probably pretty much the same for 10 or 20 years before it starts to get warmer again, because the Gulf Stream keeps us naturally warm at the moment. So all sorts of earth systems are in flux and are shifting. And, you know, that’s like the sort of big changes in the United States. So you see, like this line down the middle of the US where one half is snowing, and the other half is 40 degrees, because the jet streams gone bonkers. So I think my takeaway from the book is just the Earth is a wonderful, fascinating, complex system, and she’s alive. And you know, you can’t treat it like a ledger, like a game of accountancy where it’s net zero, and we put this in and we subtract that and so on, doesn’t work like that. We need a lot more humility and a lot more sacredness.
Jason Kingsley 28:19
Do we need to rethink agriculture? You talked a little bit about permaculture, which I find very interesting, the idea that you can grow things which can crop continuously rather than having to replant them and grow them from seed again. Do you think changes in the way we grow food worldwide is going to have to be a part of that plan?
Ben Rawlence 28:39
I absolutely do. Yes. And I think the sort of tragedy about agriculture is that what’s often called peasant or artisanal modes of agriculture were often very productive in terms of biodiversity. So you look at the Gwent levels here in Wales, where you have wetlands that were used as water meadows, or you have, you know, hedgerows and the kind of grazing within forests and so on that sort of traditional practices. All of that was really good for biodiversity coppicing, harvesting wood from woodlands is fantastic for door mice and all kinds of other species. What we’ve seen, and it’s actually only in a generation or two is the capture of agriculture by the fossil fuel industry in terms of pesticides, fertiliser, all of those things directly come from fossil fuels, and tractors and all the rest of it. And it’s because of this demand for production and cheap food and so on. And I understand that, but we can actually feed people so much more effectively on a small plot of land that was intensively cultivated using permaculture.
Jason Kingsley 29:43
I’d heard that! That in fact, the industrial agriculture per square foot is actually incredibly inefficient. You know that gardens here allotments as we would have them in the UK, your small area can actually produce quite a substantial amount of your food Yeah. because you’re doing it in a small scale and getting best use out of every square foot.
Ben Rawlence 30:05
Yeah, there’s a lot of research into this. There’s also a lot of debate about it. But I think yeah, for me, the answer is, we’re going to need also much more diversity in terms of different crops, growing at different places, because we need other species that are resilient, and that are hardy that can survive in these very uncertain, rapidly changing periods. If we’re just reliant on one GM strain of wheat, which only grows under certain conditions, then we’re finished. So we have to have that diversity. And I think most countries in the world and Britain is no exception have got so much land, which is not used productively or not used to its best advantage, there’s no reason why we couldn’t be self sufficient in food here in a way that was also compatible with nature.
Jason Kingsley 30:48
I always find it fascinating the amount of energy put into people’s lawns, and the amount of time and effort into growing and keeping grass short and looking like a carpet I always think I can see the aesthetics of it. You know, a bowling green can be nice, a cricket pitch can be nice, but they should be the rarities and the you know, there’s so much more you can do with your garden than just have a green carpet with no biodiversity at all. I mean, my farm, I’ve got lots of corners, that I just leave wild, because why not? They’re great to leave. Why don’t I grow grass, my horses in particular. But there’s always a tendency for people to want to tidy up the corners. And I like having these quite substantial parts of the farm, which we can’t grow crops into very easily because it doesn’t really work but they’re brilliant for wildlife. He just let it get on with it. It takes no effort whatsoever. And it looks great. You get wild animals there, you get birds, you get all the insects, you get the wild flowers. I think it looks lovely. And this whole idea that it’s untidy, I think is a really bad way of looking at the diverse natural world.
Ben Rawlence 31:52
People are probably familiar with Isabella Tree’s book Rewilding but it was very interesting for me to see in the boreal forest, this idea of nature as a dynamic system. So a forest, a static forest, is actually a bit of a biodiversity desert, where you get the biodiversity is in the change is when you burn the forest. So the Anishinabek people, for example, First Nations in Canada, burn the forest every 100 years. And when they burn it, the first thing that happens is you get all these little shrubs. What lives on the shrubs is rabbits, what comes after the rabbits, his foxes. What comes after the foxes is the wolverines and the bears and then you get the moose and the elk with other layers of forest. So it’s the edges, the dynamism of the system that gives you the biodiversity and it’s the same in Scotland, for example, where you get the limit of the tree line where the Pines stop growing. And then you get the montane scrub, which is Willow Juniper, all these smaller plants which support all these species of birds that love the edge effect. So you have the snow bunting, the dotterel, lapwings and hen harriers, they literally survive on that sort of two to three metre stretch. But when you remove that through deer or sheep browsing or whatever, Woodland plantations, you’re taking away that habitat, but it’s only a tiny piece. But it’s as a result of this dynamism of the shifting tree line that creates that. So I would totally agree, and I definitely think it’s the scrub, we need the scrub
Jason Kingsley 33:26
Woodland edges and changes. Sometimes we’ve had this terrible winds recently, and the storms and a few big trees have come down. And what I tend to do is I tend to leave most of it in place because it creates space in the woodland canopy and a whole bunch of stuff this summer is going to grow in that space, that clearing where that great tree was, was, it’s incredibly sad to see it, that’s the beginning of the next phase, those saplings will grow up. And in 50 years, there’ll be more great trees there. But in the meantime, there’s going to be this patch of kind of crazy scramble for this new opportunity in this little tiny patch of my local temporary woodland. And I kind of love that because I also like going back into it and watching it change. And one of the great things I’ve found about the lockdown is that I’ve lived in my local area more I haven’t gone backwards or forwards to work nearly so much to my office in Oxford. I’ve been here every day. And I’ve seen tiny changes every day, I’ve seen new growth and I’ve seen things fall down and get very sad. And then I’ve thought actually, that’s just the way of it things die for an opportunity for other things. So it’s not changed that we should be frightened of in many ways. It’s how we manage that change and how we how we cope with it, and we should plan for it and not deny that it’s happening in many ways.
Ben Rawlence 34:41
Absolutely. I mean, you probably know this but in the Scotland chapter I talk about the ancient woodland and what counts as ancient woodland. And ancient woodland is basically 50% dead wood and dead wood I think supports four times as much life as a living tree because of all the bugs and the fungi and all that stuff. Right. And that is what gives the ancient woodland its biodiverse kick is that the beginning of life is death, you know, it’s a cycle. So it’s worth remembering that. And on the point about management, these people in Canada, the Anishinabek, they were asked to produce a land management plan for their woodland. And they said, No, you can’t manage the land. You can use the land. So they changed it to a land use plan, not a management plan, because the land managers itself, that was their take.
Jason Kingsley 35:33
It’s absolutely true. I do think we’ve also got to work on people being obsessed with tidiness as well, I don’t know where tidiness comes from. I think it probably comes from control, actually, and people feeling they need to control things, and you can’t control the natural environment, not without doing devastating damage to it. I think we’ve got to get used to things being slightly scruffy and untidy look at Grass verges where there’s no safety issues. Why are we bothering cutting them? Why don’t we just leave them to go a bit wild and scruffy and bonkers? But the simple answer is, some people don’t like the look of it, and just think, What a crap reason for damaging the world. Because you don’t like the look, well start to like the look, then you change your attitude. And then we can do something about it all these bits of municipal land which we spend money on, chopping down, it makes me really frustrated because it would save us money and make the world better if we just left them to be scruffy.
Ben Rawlence 36:27
Well, I think it’s part of a broader challenge, which is sort of where we started the conversation really, which is looking at nature afresh, looking at our habitat afresh. And as soon as you start to see it as alive, and you start to understand your dependence on it, and you start to have you know what, we’re all born with what my kids take for granted, which is that, you know, my God, you don’t kill a beetle, you don’t kill anything. It’s got the right to life, that innate, instinctive respect for other species, which we extinguish as we raise our kids, we need to actually nurture and then I think the sorts of things you’re talking about that perspective shift is natural. And it does completely become absurd to cut down grassland, which might be the habitat for something. I think we’ll look back in 100 years and say, What on earth went wrong? You know, we we forgot the world was alive with something which actually only two generations ago was common amongst agricultural people in this country.
Jason Kingsley 37:25
Wonderful. I think that’s a really interesting place to end. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. So the book is called The Tree Line. And is it available from all usual places where you can buy books, all good booksellers?
Ben Rawlence 37:38
Yes, absolutely.
Jason Kingsley 37:39
And what about if people want to hear more about you? And we’ve also mentioned the college that you’ve mentioned your Twitter feed as well, you want to re mention that again? Yeah.
Ben Rawlence 37:49
That’s @benrawlence, so follow me there. And the college is blackmountainscollege.uk. Those are probably my two public places.
Jason Kingsley 38:01
Was there anything else you wanted to add that I’ve not kind of allowed you to say?
Ben Rawlence 38:06
No, I don’t think so. It’s been a pleasure and more power to anybody who wants to grapple with these issues, and start to think about them more deeply.
Jason Kingsley 38:15
I think scruffy and wild is good. I’ve always felt that. All right. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Ben. I really appreciate it.
Future Imperfect 