Monoculture conifers on a hillside in Wales shielded by a curtain of native trees
British farmland, our rural communities and even UK food security are at risk from ‘tree- mania’ led by venture capitalists egged on by government grants in a scramble to fulfil tree-planting promises made by multinationals to ‘offset their carbon footprint’.
One of them is the Foresight Group, based in the Shard office block in London. Their subsidiary Foresight Sustainable Forestry Company Ltd are buying prime agricultural land in Wales with Government grants and planting monoculture conifers on it.
Their activities are not remotely ‘sustainable’ because (1) they damage the eco-system and rural life and (2) better trees than those they are planting are being cut down in a rainforest across the globe to plant and raise the food that the land they bought should have produced to feed our population.
We prepared a leaflet to give out at the Shard on 16th December 2021. Here is the text of it:
Shard-based speculators destroying farmland in ‘tree-mania’
‘I think that I shall never see,
‘A poem lovely as a tree’ Wrote the poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer.
We all love trees, and planting them is seen as one way to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plants use the energy from sunlight during the day to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic matter based on carbon. In the process they release oxygen into the air.
Greenwashing
Multinational corporations are engaged in ‘greenwashing’ to offset their carbon footprint. And that normally means promising to plant trees. Woodside Trust say Lloyds Bank, Sainsbury’s, DFS and the People’s Postcode Lottery have all promised to plant trees, and there are thousands of other corporations in the same climate-savvy boat.
But where will they plant all these promised trees? And in the rush, will they plant the right tree, in the right place, for the right reason?
If a tree stores 250kg of carbon over its life and each UK person emits 12 tons yearly, it would need the entire UK area to plant the required 3.2 billion trees for one year’s emissions. It’s absurd and ignores all the other carbon sinks such as grassland, peat moorland and above all, oceans.
Worldwide, in July this year, Oxfam crunched the numbers and found that if all the trees the global companies have promised were planted, they would occupy an area five times the size of India, or all the farmland on the planet.
In short, there just isn’t enough land to fulfil the tree-planting promises and even to attempt it is a threat to global food security.
Enter the Foresight Group
Of course the companies making these unrealistic virtue-signalling promises are not planting trees themselves. They sub-contract the job out to a tree-planting firm. Venture capitalists are now jumping on the band-wagon.
The latest is the Foresight Group and its subsidiary Foresight Sustainable (sic) Forestry Company Ltd. They are based in the Shard, the glass-clad office block at London Bridge.
The directors are listed as Richard Davidson, accountant Sarika Patel, consultant Josephine Bush and timber industry veteran Christopher Sutton.
Monoculture
These speculators have spotted a way to make money out of Climate Change and Net Zero aspirations. They are buying up good grazing land in Wales. Then they apply for Welsh Government grants and pay another sub-contractor to dig it all up, releasing carbon stored in the ground, and plant trees on it.
They plant a monoculture of quick-growing conifers, usually alien species like Sitka spruce, perhaps hidden behind a thin net curtain of native trees.
The Woodland Trust say native trees such as oak, ash, beech, hazel, Scots pine, randomly planted or self-sown, are far better for bio-diversity than non-native conifers such as spruce. Monoculture conifers deprive many meadow flowering plants, butterflies and ground-nesting birds such as curlews of their habitat. They also decrease public access and involvement in nature.
Planted on hillsides
Non-native tree-planting has been done in the past in Wales. Vast areas of moorland and scrub hillsides were acquired by the Forestry Commission and planted with conifers as far back as the 1920s. The Brechfa Forest in Carmarthenshire is just one example. The object then was to increase the production of domestic timber for construction.
As Sitka spruce takes between 25-35 years to be ready for harvesting, many of these non- native forests have already been harvested or are being harvested right now. In some cases, the foresters are having the courtesy to replant the hillsides with native trees like Welsh sessile oak.
Prime Agricultural Land
But the Foresight Group are buying, not hillsides, not scrub, but prime agricultural land. The United Kingdom currently imports 45% of its food. If young farmers in Wales are denied the opportunity to raise livestock on good Welsh land, not only does that impact rural life, but it means the livestock we need will be raised elsewhere.
That will probably mean cutting down trees in Brazil and converting land that was rainforest into grazing. It won’t be very good grazing land and won’t last very long before it is exhausted. So collectively we have cut down a better tree on poorer land in Brazil and grown a worse tree on prime land in Wales.
Not sustainable
All ways around that has damaged bio-diversity, released more carbon than it has gained, harmed UK food security, increased food miles and desecrated good land, all for a quick profit. It is not remotely sustainable.
Foresight are not saving the planet. They are making money. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, it is hard to think of any get-rich-quick scheme which is quite as irresponsible, grasping and destructive as that being pursued by the Foresight Group and Foresight ‘Sustainable’ Forestry in the Shard.
Care for Creation
People of all faiths and indeed of none are concerned about the environment and human society, but as we are a Christian group, we’ll just take this opportunity to bring you up to speed with what we believe.
We worship God as the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth. In his first commandment to Adam and Eve, he gave them, and us their successors, a duty to care for his creation and put it in order:
Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (KJV)
Creation is here for us, not us for it. People have a God-given right to socialise, to earn a living, to house, clothe and feed themselves and their families.
So the Almighty is concerned about the whole of life, about nations, families and even individuals. He gave us righteous laws to live by and to ensure a stable society. Men always think they know better than God, but trying to go another way brings instability and ultimate destruction.
A bit of good news
At a personal level, sin separates us from God, but belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ forgives your sin and gives you the power of the Holy Spirit to live a new, better, forgiven life. The first public words of Jesus, recorded in Mark’s Gospel, were:
Mark 1:15: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye and believe the Gospel’.
The Gospel does not just mean forgiveness and salvation, it brings healing and deliverance. Whatever sin or spiritual power is holding you back, you will find release and freedom in Jesus to live life to the full. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ today, and know his purpose for your life.
Prayer and Action!
Pray against this irresponsibility. Pray for wisdom from on high for those in authority. May Almighty God bring the destructive schemes of the mighty to naught.
The same scandal appears to be taking place all over England and Wales, and probably in Scotland nand Northern Irealnd as well. Use this link to the UK Parliament website to email your MP to ask the Government what assessment they have made of the impact on UK food security and biuodiversity and on worldwide deforestation of planting conifers on prime British farmland, and if they will end Government grants for this practice.
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1 comment
One thing I found out a while back was the conifer, and in particular it was said the leylandii, is an excellent absorber of the deadly particles found in fuel which would otherwise get breathed in and kill people who live in cities. Some epidemiological study was carried out in London whilst measuring level of particulates and the evidence was there to show more die young and get bad illnesses where they live near these peak spots. There is also some sort of moss they have developed to soak up CO2 and this moss is supposed to be very efficient, like better than trees. Trees also help to cool the temperature in summer and increase oxygen levels.
There again it was about 100 years ago the founder of modernist architecture Le Corbusier wrote a book call The City of Tomorrow where he proposed large green spaces in the centre of cities to “let them breathe”. He was right then, and right now, but I guess we should have listened to him. The idea was to run all the transport and infrastructure underground. London is an old design though. I think we will have to do a radical rethink in the future. It is possible to build a house where the insulation is so good you hardly need any energy, but you can only do this by building new, and a lot of our housing stock is nearing the end of its life. I suppose we are going to have to build on some of that precious green land. Option two may be to complete level some places and start afresh, but the money would be huge to do this and last time we built all of those houses we were funded by an empire. It’s like we are running as fast as we can and still not keeping up with remaining static. (Red Queen hypothesis)