Focusing more and more on less and less

01-06-2010 | Denis Hocking

We seem to live in a world increasingly populated and controlled by specialists.

I gather it was medical types who first described specialists as "knowing more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing", but it seems true of many aspects of modern life.

The reductionist approach, pulling things to bits and studying the bits in detail, takes precedence over the generalist approach of putting the bits together and working out how the whole system works.

Regular readers of this column (those who read it at least once every six months) will be aware that I am a fan of a generalist or integrative approach to land use, with forestry one of the suite of land uses that land owners should be including in their mix. Sadly, the narrow, specialist tendencies of our controlling agencies don't always help in this regard. Forestry is carefully kept in its own silo, isolated from other land uses and the world around it.

I have seen numerous examples of this problem but the most recent manifestation is the national environment standard (NES) being developed for forestry. Pressure for a forestry NES originally came from the forestry corporates, keen to get greater consistency of forestry rules across different regional councils. Having one forest entity being governed by three or four sets of rules is not going to encourage efficiency and good use of resources. So the Ministry for the Environment set out to produce an over-riding set of rules through an NES, although there will always be significant areas where regional, and also district councils, can impose added standards.

Considering the efforts being made in various parts of the country to get more forest cover for environmental reasons, e.g. the East Coast afforestation project, the Horizons regional council sustainable land use initiative and the Government's afforestation grants scheme, you might expect a national environmental standard to reflect such plans and be mindful of how forestry can - indeed should - be used to advantage. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Current drafts represent a "specialist" approach, the work of policy analysts sitting in walled-off bunkers, thinking only about forestry and oblivious to the wider world.

This is not to argue that you don't need good environmental practice in forestry. You do. But the default option for land use where forestry is blocked by environmental restrictions is generally pastoral farming, though in some cases it may be reversion to indigenous. So shouldn't the environmental standards be cognisant of the default option? At this stage they are not.

I need to be careful in quoting examples because the NES has not been finalised. However it is difficult to reconcile the NES desire for rigid setbacks, from streams, lakes and wetlands with the drive for riparian plantings in farmland to reduce agricultural run-off. The present reality of course is that on many, perhaps most, sheep and beef farms animals have ready access to streams. Likewise trying to control damage to indigenous species that have appeared in a plantation is questionable. I see the arrival of indigenous species under an exotic canopy as a vote of confidence by those species, not a necessity to handicap the forestry operation. What are the incentives for forestry and better land use if more rigid environmental standards are going to be placed on the environmentally more benign option?

There are several significant differences between farming and forestry that do need consideration. Forest roads are normally required to carry large numbers of heavily loaded trucks and therefore need to be constructed to much higher standards than most farm roads. There are detailed roading manuals for forestry (such as the 1999 LIRO forest roading manual), and specialist (there's that word again) forest roading engineers are used by most forestry companies. Notable here is the emphasis given to fish access, not a big feature with farm tracking. What might be asked of the NES is - when does a farm woodlot require a forest road? This is a real question that somehow is missed by the theory.

The other feature of forestry operation which can cause serious trouble is debris on hauler skid sites. There have been problems with collapsing "bird's nests", generally located in steep country, and some prosecutions. There is no doubt that this is an area that requires good standards and policing.

In a perfect world I would favour a national environment standard for land use that covers all land uses and is not directed at one specific activity. I doubt this will happen, it may well be impossible, but attempts to come up with credible and effective land-use rules do illustrate the fact that there is really no substitute for on-the-ground experience and common sense. This, in turn, needs well-informed, open-minded land owners/managers, multi-skilled land management officers and a system that emphasises education over enforcement. I fear there may be a slight delay in the flight to nirvana.

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