By Gary Schneider

It still amazes me that as a culture we put so much faith into plantations.  I sometimes have landowners tell me that if they want to grow pure plantations of white spruce, or red pine, or whatever, they should be allowed to.  And I totally agree.  Absolutely.  But that doesn’t mean you should get taxpayers’ dollars to help with that.

It would be the same as if you wanted to plant an acre of corn, or potatoes, or almost any crop.  But that’s not how things happen.  If we left plantations up to landowners, hardly any would ever see the light of day.  They’re too expensive and there is too little certainty that they will bring economic return.  The risks are so high because they are not corn.

With corn or potatoes, there are lots of risks associated with growing these crops.  The weather could be terrible – too hot, too wet, too Fiona-y.  Prices could be down.  Insects and diseases could overwhelm the plants.

But trees pose an entirely different set of problems.  Let’s look at insects or diseases.  No one grows potatoes without figuring out how to control beetles or blight.  Whether organic or not, these crop threats have to be controlled.  While control is not easy, potatoes are a 4-5 month crop and are short.  If you need to spray, you can cover the plant quickly and efficiently.

Trees are a totally different story.  We’ve seen red pine plantations that appeared to be fine for years, then are attacked by Sirococcus Shoot Blight and quickly go downhill.  Or even worse, 40-50 year old trees snapped off by Fiona.  We expect trees to last 50-100 years before harvesting and there are many insects, diseases, and weather conditions that could kill them well before any harvesting is feasible.

Another problem is that we have no idea what wood markets will be like in 50-100 years.  Will we still be using trees for biomass?  Will hardwood lumber be all the rage for furniture?  Will the non-timber forest products be more valuable than the timber?

One of the things I learned early was not to put all your eggs in one basket.   There is no resiliency in this type of action.  If you plant an area in one tree species, or invest in one stock, or only grow one species of fruit, you’re bound to run into problems.  And when those problems occur, you have no fallback position.

In a healthy mixed forest, we may well indeed have an insect that comes in and attacks the yellow birch.  But it most likely won’t kill all the yellow birch because they’re spread throughout the stand and mixed in with the sugar maple and beech and red spruce and hemlock.  Though it would be sad to lose a lot of yellow birch, we still have many other species of trees and shrubs that will work together to maintain a healthy forest.

I believe that the author, physicist, and ecologist Fritjof Capra was right when he wrote “The more complex the network is, the more resilient it will be.”   This is a lesson that we are still learning.