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ONLY RE-GROWTH
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Published in "Living Now" magazine, Nov-Dec 2001
website: wwww.livingnow.com.au
Is your beard not really your beard because it's "only regrowth"? Do you treat the new skin on your grazed elbow with disdain because it's "only regrowth"? In a crisis, would you sacrifice your children because they are only your regrowth and not fully mature?
I hear over and over again that we can chop down forest which is "only regrowth" with impunity for bypasses/charcoal plants/woodchips/highway expansion, etc., etc., and somehow the tag connotes an inferior status unworthy of our protection and respect.
It is true that a forest ecology, if undisturbed, will eventually reach a conditon known as "climax" in which all the trees are fully grown, the canopy is an unbroken roof that excludes light and minimizes undergrowth, and little change occurs. It becomes a bit like an ageing adult, an extremely valuable and necessary entity but with ever-diminishing diversity and dynamism. However disturbance is in the nature of Nature and the effects of natural disturbance are new growth, diversity and the recycling of energies and materials.
Imagine you are standing in a mature forest in the deep, green light, breathing the earthy smells of fungi working in the humus, surrounded by the windless silence, when a huge, long-dead tree falls down. The earth is ripped open, vines are torn out of the ground, trunks and branches of many other trees splinter and fall with the dead giant in a huge swath of destruction sixty metres long. Sunlight pours in. The air changes. A deep bed of new nutrient settles down into the soil. New plants burst forth from previously-doomed seeds dropped by birds and mammals. Different plants strive to fill the gap and attract different animals. The patch of destruction becomes a new colony of pioneers, children, regrowth, new life for an old forest.
In a forest there are many such patches in various stages of regrowth. The whole forest is a mosaic of little ecologies, all part of the whole, like people of different ages and occupations in a human society. This diversity is what we call "biodiversity" and it is the way that the maximum number of different kinds of living things can occupy the Earth together in harmony. A forest, like a human society, is not static but ever-changing, sometimes changing slowly, sometimes quickly. The forest as an entity is vastly older than any individual trees and in this sense all forests, and indeed all ecosystems on Earth, have re-grown.
When a forest has been exposed to a fire or felling, it becomes like a giant colonial patch, a child of the mature forest which, if given the freedom to grow, will struggle to establish itself without parental protection and will eventually grow to maturity. Like a human child in this uncertain world, it may not be a carbon copy of its parent, certainly not for a long time, but it will keep and pass on the spirit of life.
We need forest, lots of it, much more than we have left now. At present forests are in the hands of people who will classify them out of existence. We can no longer afford to adhere to these foolish classifications that justify the rather pathetic protection of only a tiny proportion of the forested land, the old-growth forest, and permit the destruction of the new. It is like saving a handful of elderly people while killing all our children.
So next time you are walking through a patch or a vast expanse of "regrowth", take the time to understand the life processes occurring around you. You are poised between the precious forest of the past and the equally-precious forest of the future. We cannot justify destroying it again.