Corlan y Coed - Gwyl Afon Ogwen Festival 23.9.23

It’s hard to imagine, but trees have got controversial.

I think perhaps because they’ve got all caught up in a panic. Instrumentalised as ‘The Solution’. Carrying the can for our misdemeanors, so we can just carry on regardless. Seemingly. At least for now.

I have been worried about this for many years now, and yesterday I attended a consultation meeting for the Eryri National Park Tree and Woodland Strategy, which was inviting our ‘visions, principles and pledges to inform the strategy. Our group of just 9 people was a perfect microcosm of institutions, policy-makers, farmers, woodland owners and community initiatives trying to work out what to do. There was talk of how this strategy would connect (or not) with other (in my mind likely unrealistic) strategies and targets (like 43,000 hectares of new forest in Wales by 2030 and net zero), how a study had shown that for farmers, trees had become a symbol of insitutions that they disliked (rather than disliking trees in themselves), the pernicious effects of woodland strategies that had already resulted in the destruction of family farms, habitats, landscape, iaith Cymraeg and culture by corporations creating plantations for carbon trading profit… and the question of ‘how long’ this strategy should cover - with suggestions ranging from 5 years to 7 generations?

In order to contribute, it was time for me to come out of the closet, and get my thoughts in order. And, alongside the Tree and Woodland Strategy process, this blog is the first in a series in which I will try to bring my artistic and conflict resolution practice together into relationship with the complexity of the tree controversy.

A bit of context

In these times of great uncertainty, as Tyson Yunkaporta says:

“Anyone who thinks they know the solution is an idiot.
All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence…”

You can see how existing thinking, thinking that got us into this mess, the [neoliberal] powers that be, seek to perpetuate itself. Simplistic thinking, ‘this is the answer’ applied everywhere. Centralisation. Control. Instrumental thinking which goes something like ‘trees, under our control, are to sort out the mess we made’ . But these things are the desperate moves of an extractivist, neoliberal mindset and are (of course) actually making things worse [Carbon Offsetting as a classic example].

Tree planting and Rewilding

"Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today.
For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstrated failings in many environments, have flourished as an art of environmental governance that we term arboreal biopolitics.
Colonial forestry, we therefore conclude, continues to haunt contemporary policy, contributing pathological ecologies...often with pernicious effects on local people" - Ecologies of the colonial present: Pathological forestry from the taux de boisement to civilized plantations - Diana K Davis and Paul Robbins

Meanwhile, Rewilding…

"‘Rewilding’ – the process of restoring wilderness areas – is flavour of the month. But rewilding is inconsistently defined, and at its worst, it can be actively harmful. Advocates need to ask: who is this green utopia for? Rewilding has mesmerised the public with visions of untouched landscapes where “beavers, butterflies and everything in between” can thrive.
But the question of land ownership is critical in determining who will benefit from rewilding. Land ownership in Britain is “astonishingly unequal”, with over 50% controlled by less than 1% of the population – typically aristocrats and corporations – and at present, it’s they who benefit most from rewilding. Rewilding, alongside carbon markets and environmental subsidies, is a key driver of growing land concentration . In 2021, the average price of land rose 87%, meaning locals are increasingly priced out and excluded from shaping and benefiting from rewilding. The rewilding rush has also led to an increase in off-market land deals, further limiting community-led rewilding.
To promote accessibility, the rewilding movement needs to re-integrate rather than further separate humans from nature by bringing nature to marginalised communities – but without contributing to eco-gentrification - and call for the democratisation of land ownership via community buyouts and the establishment of council owned farms" - Maozya Murray

So I understand the backlash to Welsh Government’s declaration to farmers that they have to have 10% tree cover on their land, following hot on the heels of giving a tree to plant to every citizen of Wales and ongoing controversies over commercial forestry and ‘rewilding’ (which have a particular colonial resonance in Wales - Iain Biggs has written a brilliant series around the colonial nature of ‘rewilding’ here if you’d like to find out more about this), while we suffer widespread Ash Die Back pandemic spreading from imported seedlings. I think this backlash is opening the cracks in the system and inviting us to engage in the complexity of the place and entanglements, and radically (as in ‘at root’) change our mindsets and systems.

radically Embracing the nuance

So I’m wondering what might happen if we slow down, notice, embrace the nuance, work in the cracks… [it’s hard to do, but try to quieten that voice in your head that says ‘this is too small, too complex, too unknown, too slow’ for that is the voice of our condititioning by the dominant modernist, neoliberal world order!]

“We need to frame ourselves in alliance with other beings rather than framing ourselves as alone, as if saving the planet is really up to us alone. We need to begin to recognize how we could conspire with the plants – seeding plant-people conspiracies - connecting people and plants together to breathe together, justice for people, their plants, plants and their people” - Natasha Myers: Growing the Planthropocene

This series of blogs will be a story of some of the tiny, messy ways I’ve been working with others to try and bring different ways of thinking and relating to trees. As well as being stimulated by the Strategy process, it has been inspired in itself by a conversation with an old oak opposite my bedroom window, which asked me “Be’ ‘dy dy hanes di?” What is YOUR story”…

Be ‘dy dy hanes di? Oak Gall ink, collage and pen on paper. 2023 (with contribution from bird flying over)

The blogs will be structured something like:

Blog 1: Tree planting vs rewilding… what about ‘Corlan y Coed/Treefold’ - a third way?

Blog 2: Learning to relate to trees (and all other beings)

Blog 3: Noticing - Specifics of place - working with different perspectives

Many of the things I’m going to cover come through the explorations of Utopias Bach. Our loose creative collective has been going to places that we might not have dared to go individually… and we have ended up doing things that are like seeds of tiny revolutions in our relationships with each other and the world. I - maybe we - are now moving into taking these things out to those outside the Utopias Bach cosmos, into our milltir sgwar (square mile), into the ‘wider world’.

Tree planting vs rewilding … what about ‘Corlan y coed’, a third way?

Y Ffridd (mountain fringe pasture) is ‘typified’ by scattered trees on grazed, unimproved pasture. It is a unique habitat, home and summer residence to all sorts of plants and creatures that need this mix of grazed grassland, boggy bits, fast running streams, heather and trees. The picture above is of Y Ffridd behind my house here in Nant Peris. Here, with the pressure of grazing by goats and sheep (and mice and voles), the scattered trees find they are not able to regenerate themselves, so with every storm, every drought, every passing year, they are slowly disappearing.

Back in the late 2000s, I started to notice that tiny seedlings were growing on the slopes. But they would be eaten well before they reached 10cm. So in 2014, when I met the farmer, I asked if I could try protecting them to see if they grew. He was not convinced that they would, but said I could try, so long as it didn’t look like ‘scrub was encroaching’ because this would mean he didn’t get the subidies. So Corlan y Coed was born.

Since then I have found and ‘protected’ and documented the lives of more than 250 self-seeded tiny trees (birch, oak, hazel, holly, hawthorn, rowan). Roughly 40% of which survive, the tallest (birch) now over 2.5m high, having been initially protected at 1.5cm. And the tallest oak, the same age as the birch, is now 61cm high, from a seedling protected in 2014 (see image, with parent tree behind).

You can see more about Corlan y Coed here.

This way of working with tiny trees requires a culture of care - spending time listening, noticing and getting to know the details of a place, and what is going on, of relinquishing ‘control’ and working in radical alliance with trees, supporting reproductive justice for trees.

It is different to ‘rewilding’ (excluding farming activity) or ‘colonial forestry’ (at least one person has said to me that the ‘entire valley should just be reforested’). It enables trees to grow where they are happy to grow rather than where we ‘want’ them to grow… and it enables grazing to continue. It is interesting that our farmer didn’t mind me doing this until he thought (as I replaced home made protections with ‘official looking’ enclosures) that I was planting trees. After reassuring him I hadn’t planted a single tree, he was happy for Corlan y Coed to continue.

It can be heartbreaking too, when trees I have spent years with lose their protection and are eaten. So it is a way of becoming entangled in the realities of life and death, the struggle to survive, a sense of how our own survival is tied up with a grounded connection - radical alliances? - with that of the more-than-human world.

So my question is this: What if Corlan Y Coed became a third way of working with trees, considered alongside ‘rewilding’ and ‘planting’? It is labour intensive, it couldn’t be done by farmers alone. Might it be a way of bringing local communities closer to the land?

Gwyl Afon Ogwen- September 2023

In September, I took Corlan y Coed to the woods at Parc Meurig, in the centre of Bethesda. I invited people to find self-seeded tiny trees that ‘wanted to be adopted’, tie a red ribbon around them, map and draw portraits of them in oak gall ink. The backdrop to our table in the woods, was the Siarter Y Coed, created as part of Utopias Bach’s Ysgol Arbrofol Dod At Ein Coed - Tree Sense Experimental School. I’ll come back to that later.

Such is the pervasive nature of ‘tree planting’ assumptions, several people thought I was inviting them to take a tiny tree and replant them. After some confusion, the response of of all ages was wonderful: several saying that they had never noticed the young trees before, and committing to revisiting and watching the progress of ‘their’ tiny tree. Others said it had made them think differently about tiny trees growing in their gardens, thinking of them as individuals and working with them rather than planting or moving or pulling them out…

So what would i put in the Eryri Tree and Woodland Strategy (TAWS)?

Vision:

TAWS as an ongoing process of engagement and learning rather than target driven. It stimulates a way of reconnecting people and place, of bringing communities and stakeholders such as farmers, conservationists and institutions together to work out how to work with land through a period of immense change and uncertainty: thinking about trees as an integral part of thinking about land as a patchwork of places with particular food, culture, linguistic, conservation, landscape, mitigation and adaptation value.

Principles/approach:

Long term (7 generations) – a rush/quick fix will likely (re)create more problems than it will solve
Upfront: Acknowledge controversy, and mistakes/effects of past policies on what is going on now [don’t blame the farmers!] and set out what will be required to make sure these won’t happen again as a result of this strategy (including for example how it will prevent commercial carbon trading forestry destroying family farms, habitats, biodiversity, language and culture)
Recognise the potential for this strategy to be seen as 'colonial forestry and rewilding', and make sure it is framed to show why it is not
Trying out and learning from a range of approaches. Blanket targets around planting, the default mode, has already had pernicious effects on small farms, communities, landscapes, and habitats. Instead have a menu of options eg

Existing (ancient) woodlands - Support livestock fences/walls, and maintenance of these including communities involved in noticing/maintenance?
Support natural regeneration in areas around existing woodland, along rivers (by excluding livestock through fencing and maintenance of that fencing)
Rewilding some carefully chosen areas, decided in partnership (not just consultation) with stakeholders
Corlan y Coed on y Ffridd (protecting tiny self seeded seedlings while grazing continues on the land - this is labour intensive and would require cooperation between people living near the land and the farmer)
Tree planting (of what type of trees, where, why, how)

These for now… more to come in future blogs!