Woodland League Newsletter

Continued fromhttp://www.woodlandleague.org/newsletter/index.php?itemid=56

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5(a). IN THE NEWS – Local

‘COMER DEMESNE PLANS SCUPPERED AFTER MAST GETS GREEN LIGHT
By Naoise O' Donovan Coogan

An Bord Pleanála has granted planning permission for the development of a 36 metre telecommunications mast in Castlecomer.
The controversial mast which drew much opposition from local residents' associations is to be located in the picturesque Demesne area in the Ardra townland on the outskirts of Castlecomer town.
Locals lodged several objections to the location of the mast in the Demesne area which has in recent years been developed as an amenity area with two lakes, fishing, walks and plans for much more. Kilkenny County Council granted permission for the mast twice in the past four years, however, An Bord Pleanála overturned the decision once but finally allowed it in recent weeks.
Ger Ferris of the Ardra Residents' Committee said that they were very disappointed at the news that the mast had been given the go-ahead as they had high hopes for the development of the area.
"Castlecomer Demesne Company along with the assistance of Kilkenny County Council has already carried out a lot of work in the Demesne park. People fish in the two lakes every day. The interpretative centre is in the construction phase, the locals walk there every day and the Estate Craft Yard is doing very well. We had hoped to do even more in the future with the area as we feel it has much more potential than is currently being utilised. We want this area to be an amenity for the entire southeast region. We have plans for canoeing on the lakes, orienteering along the tracks, absailing from the cliffs and mountain biking through the land. Some of these activities will now not be possible as the mast site is too close to the tracks for biking and orienteering and it would be too dangerous."
Permission was granted By An Bord Pleanála to O2 Communications for the mast following the appeal by the Ardra Residents’ Association who opposed the decision which was made on February, 28, 2006 by Kilkenny County Council. An Bord Pleanála stated that permission was granted following consideration of the national strategy regarding the improvement of mobile communication services in the area which are currently relatively poor in parts of Castlecomer.
An Bord Pleanála added that the location of the new mast was within an established forestry area and was removed from proposed public amenity facilities and that the mast would not seriously injure the amenities of the area and would not be prejudicial to public health.
A number of conditions were also outlined for the development of the structure. The Board said that the permission is only for a period of five years from the date of this order. The mast will be removed unless planning permission is granted for the retention of the mast after five years. The Board also required that the company reinstate the original site where the mast is located if the mast is to be removed in the future and a cash deposit was required as a bond of insurance that this work would be carried out should the mast not be reinstated in five years time.
Ger Ferris said that following the granting of planning permission, the group has sought clarification on conditions surrounding the ground level which is required to be 1.58 metres above sea level.
He said, "we're baffled as to why An Bord Pleanála have changed their minds this time round. The Council is also giving with one hand and taking with another as it is pumping money into this amenity area yet the potential of the area cannot be reached if this mast goes ahead. It simply defies logic and that is why we are seeking clarification."
Coillte are the owners of the land in the area and they have permitted 80 acres to be developed as an amenity area by the Castlecomer Demesne Company, however a further 120 acres remains in forestry. The residents' association is concerned that in the future many more masts will be required to cope with the new technology that is emerging daily and therefore the area will be seen as a 'good location' for even more of the same, dwarfing plans for the restoration of a beautiful amenity area.

© Kilkenny Advertiser, September 13 ‘06


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5(b). IN THE NEWS – National

WEYERHAUSER PLANT FOR COILLTE

Caroline Madden
Coillte, the State-owned forestry company, announced yesterday that it had purchased the Weyerhaeuser Europe plant in Clonmel for an undisclosed sum.
Gerry Egan, company secretary with Coillte, said yesterday that the company did not expect any redundancies among the US group's 200-strong workforce to result from the takeover of the medium-density fibreboard (MDF) plant.
"We envisage that the business will be run as a going concern," he said. "We don't envisage any major changes."
The takeover will provide a very important platform for the development of Coillte, Mr Egan said. "There are two kinds of synergies. The first is because is using wood as its main raw material, and Coillte is the largest producer of wood in the State."
In addition, Coillte already owns a wood panel business, SmartPly, in Waterford, which it acquired from US company Louisiana Pacific in 2002. The Waterford plant manufactures oriented strand board (OSB). "We would see MDF and OSB as being very complementary products."
Mr Egan anticipates that the takeover will greatly strengthen Coillte's position in the wood panels market in general, and in the UK in particular.
"Coillte has already established a good position in the OSB market through SmartPly," he said, adding that the purchase "opens up all sort of interesting opportunities down the line".
The purchase is currently pending approval from the Competition Authority, which Mr Egan says could take between one to four months.
The first steps in the transaction were taken in November last year when Weyerhaeuser Europe's US-based parent company, Weyerhaeuser, announced its intention to exit the composite panel sector, and placed all seven of its manufacturing plants on the market.
At the time, chief executive Steven Rogel said: "We believe that the skilled employees at these highly competitive and efficient mills will provide greater value for a new owner who is more focused on this line of business products."
Weyerhaeuser Europe made an operating profit of €3.45 million in 2004 on sales of €74 million, mostly in the UK market.

© The Irish Times, August 22 ‘06



MUSSEL POWER LEAVES THE TREES STANDING
Enda Leahy

A TINY creature is about to cost the Irish forestry industry millions in lost revenue. The pearl mussel, which lives 120 years and is extremely sensitive to pollution, is set to change forever the way trees are grown and felled in parts of Ireland.
The difficulties for Coillte, the state forestry agency, began after phosphorous and nitrate silt leaked into the Owenriff river in Galway in May 2004, and caused an algae bloom that asphyxiated most of the mussels living downstream.
The bivalve is a protected species under European law, and Ireland has the largest remaining population.
Mary Coughlan, the minister for agriculture, imposed a moratorium on forestry activities in all pearl mussel areas last May, some 18 months after officials in the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) recognised the problem. Coillte can now neither continue fertilising the trees in these areas nor cut them down in an economically viable way. Gerry Egan, Coillte’s company secretary, said yesterday less than a quarter of the company’s forests, were affected. But internal documents and environmentalists suggest otherwise.
Aine O’Connor, an environmental officer at the NPWS, began an internal debate on the issue in an e-mail to her colleagues in October 2004, five months after the bloom emerged.
“I am very concerned that populations in other river catchments are at risk,” she wrote.
“Current evidence suggests that clear felling of conifer plantations in blanket bog and heath catchments lead to massive losses . . . I believe that all forestry activities in mussel catchments should be suspended.”
One of her colleagues, Noel Kirby, replied: “Having looked at the Owenriff situation it is my impression that we are sitting on fertiliser time bombs that are coming to the fore after 50-plus years of fertiliser usage for forestry.”
A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture said last week that clear felling had been prohibited in 25 river catchment areas and there was now a ban on new planting as well. Studies are being carried out to decide what kind of forestry might be more suitable in these areas.
The mussel is known to live in 25 rivers nationwide, including the Shannon, Suir, Barrow, Nore, Slaney, Bandon, both Blackwaters and Lough Corrib. The Department of Agriculture confirmed that if the mussel is discovered elsewhere, the ban will be extended to those rivers too. In the past the species has lived in most Irish waterways.
In another internal e-mail released to Friends of the Irish Environment under a European access to information law Pat Warner, a Forest Service inspector, warned the problem could be bigger than expected.
“Please be aware,” he wrote, “that unless are a lot more rare than I think, you are contemplating closing down a significant amount of the state’s afforestation programme, both private and public, if you ban fertilisers in whole catchments. You can’t grow commercial timber in uplands without fertiliser.”
Coillte’s forestry model, which involves regular clear felling of swathes of forest, is now known to acidify soil and dump huge amounts of phosphorous and nitrates into the ground and rivers.
Jim Ryan, an official at the NPWS, told his colleagues he was “stunned” at the amount of fertiliser used by Coillte and the Forest Service and referred to one study in the Cloosh forest in Galway where phosphorous levels in the water from fertilisation and clear felling were 40 times the accepted limit.
Coillte, established in 1989 with the principal remit of making a profit, has almost exclusively grown non-native coniferous trees in poor-quality peat uplands, the same areas susceptible to the chemical leaching that pollutes rivers and kills the pearl mussel.
Last year the European Environment Agency found that 83% of all forestry planted between 1990 and 2000, most of which is still waiting to be harvested and sold, was on peat. While Coillte and the government say the study is wrong, another analysis by University College Cork (UCC) found that at least 50% of forested land is planted on peat bogs.

© The Sunday Times, September 17 ‘05


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5(c). IN THE NEWS – UK

THE RISE AND FALL OF BRITAIN’S INDUSTRIAL FOREST
Millions of trees are being felled and left to rot, in the biggest deliberate destruction of forest Britain has ever seen. So why are conservationists rejoicing?

By Michael McCarthy

Of all the ideas that are impossible to shift, one of the most tenacious is that planting trees is a Good Thing. The very act seems self-evidently benevolent. Trees provide shade and shelter, wood for building, homes for wildlife; they give us the oxygen we need to breathe, and they soak up the carbon dioxide that is causing the climate to change. We also like them a lot. Perhaps a major reason we are drawn to trees is the idea of their apotheosis, forest. In the human imagination a forest has long been a special place, mysterious and secret. In Britain our template is the ancient wildwood: great oaks towering over dappled light and shade where badgers play and deer graze. We cherish a forest as a world apart, where the riches of nature are especially concentrated.
Yet in the 20th century in Britain, a new and entirely alien type of forest was to be planted in the uplands, a forest which nobody loved and which many people eventually came to hate, yet which for 70 years carried all before it. It strode over the hills in knife-edged straight lines, ignoring the contours of the earth, wiping out the singularity and variation of the landscape with great regimented, geometrical blocks. The trees, all conifers, came from abroad. They were all identical, same type, same shape, same size, and they were squeezed together like passengers on the London Underground in the rush hour, packed so tightly that little light penetrated between them: there was no dappled shade, no wildflowers on the forest floor, just darkness and sterility. This dark green army marched on and on, decade after decade, and it was not until myriad special places had been lost under it and the area of Britain covered by trees had increased by 100% that at long last it went too far, and it met its Waterloo.
The story of the great 20th century conifer afforestation of Britain is rarely told, but it was one of the biggest changes ever to the look of our landscape. It was extraordinary for the way in which the process proceeded unquestioned for so long, and even more for the dramatic way in which it ended, with the bitterest battle over conservation Britain has ever seen. When it was done the country's main wildlife watchdog body had been dismembered in what many saw as an act of sheer political spite, and much wonderful wildlife habitat had been destroyed; but the new forestry had at last been tamed.
It came out of the Great War, and the critical need for wooden pit props to keep the coal mines going, at a time when Britain ran on coal. We could not produce enough of our own, and the German submarine blockade of 1917 very nearly choked off imports. Never again, said the Government when hostilities finished: we will create a strategic reserve of timber for pit props and other essential uses; and in 1919 the Forestry Commission was born. The new quango was to build up a major British timber resource as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It could not do this by renewing the native forest of oak and ash and all the other shady, whispering broadleaved trees that had been beloved for centuries. They grew far too slowly and irregularly. What was needed were trees that would grow fast and straight in poor soils, so the Commission turned to conifers. Britain's one native conifer suitable for commercial forestry, the Scots pine, was too slow-growing and dependent on dry earth. For the damp climate of the uplands, where most of the new afforestation was taking place, the Commission looked to the conifers of the northern Pacific coast of the USA: above all, the Sitka spruce.
The Sitka spruces and their fellows did indeed push up quick and straight, and they made possible a forestry of an entirely new sort, industrial in style and scale. It was anything but a recreation of the diverse natural woodland Britain had known before. Rather, it was intensive tree farming, using alien trees. Over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after the Second World War: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time. No matter that sites of beauty and conservation value were being swamped. The dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5% of the land, had doubled to over two million hectares. And then it hit the Flow Country.
Of a11 the candidates for Britain's most extraordinary landscape, the Flow Country - the peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland - must be near the top of the list. This is a region beyond the Highlands, both geographically and in spirit, a true wilderness: a vast open plain of quivering peat bog, dotted with thousands of dark pools (dubh lochans in Gaelic), whose nearest equivalent is the Arctic tundra. Stretching for miles in every direction, it seems empty for seven or eight months of each year, but in spring it explodes into vivid life: flowers cover the peatlands, and a great pulse of millions of hatching insects draws in the most remarkable upland birds in all of the British Isles.
Greenshanks, dunlins, golden plovers; black-throated and red-throated divers; scoters and skuas, eagles, harriers and falcons; curlews and snipe; oystercatchers and sandpipers; wigeon, wheatears and ring ouzels, with meadow pipits and skylarks in their thousands: a litany of rarity, beauty and diversity that is matched nowhere else. When the tide of Sitka spruce got to the top of Scotland, it ran smack into this amazing aggregation of birds, and started to destroy their moorland nesting sites.
It was not directly the Forestry Commission's doing. Private companies had come on the
Scene, attracted by the realisation that investors in forestry could claim not only planting grants but also substantial tax reliefs, at a time when personal tax levels much higher than now. These forestry management companies bought and planted forest blocks on behalf of investors never saw the trees, but took advantage of the reliefs. One of them, Fountain Forestry based in Perth, realised in the late Seventies that it could buy up large parts of the Flow Country very cheaply - as the land was no good for agriculture - and turn it forest. No trees grow naturally on the Flows: in the nutrient-poor waterlogged peat, tree roots cannot establish themselves. But advances in technology changed things. Foresters had discovered if you ploughed the peat deeply - and new wide-tracked ploughs made this possible - you could, with liberal use of fertiliser, get trees established in the plough "throw", the peat thrown up to the side of the furrow, and you could then help them by draining the peat with a network of ditches.
Fountain Forestry turned out to be a particularly assertive company. Between 1979 and 1985 it bought and planted, mainly with Sitka spruce, no less than 40,000 hectares of prime peatland. The effect on the breeding birds was immediate: their moorland nest sites started going under the plough. When the Royal Society the Protection of Birds (RSPB) eventually raised the alarm conservationists were outraged, and battle began.
It was an acrimonious public fight, enlivened by the revelation that some of Fountain Forestry's wealthy tax-break clients were famous names - Terry Wogan, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins. It was intensified by the feeling of Scottish politicians that this was an inference by English busybodies in Scottish affairs. That came a head in 1987 when the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), UK-wide wildlife watchdog, published a report entitled Birds, Bogs and Forestry, which criticised the foresters in unusually outspoken terms (and was launched in London rather than Edinburgh). The Scottish establishment was furious and prevailed .)n the Government in 1989 to break up the NCC, so Scotland could get a wildlife agency a11 its own. But by then the battle had been won. The Government had realised that a tax break for rich investors which did damage to wildlife was a classic example of perverse subsidy, and terrible publicity. In his 1988 budget Nigel Lawson scrapped the forestry tax reliefs. That halted the planting. The Forestry Commission, to its credit, began to see that conservation could no longer be sidelined, and turned to a much broader approach which respected Britain's landscape and native species.
But what of the Flow Country itself, where the issue was decided? Journey north, far past Inverness, until you come to Forsinard with its tiny railway station, then venture boldly off the road: you will see one of the strangest sights of your life. Around you are millions of chopped-down young trees, lying where they have fallen in the long straight plough furrows which form vast grids across the naked land, This is not a harvesting, as the trees are far too immature to harvest: this is destruction, probably the biggest deliberate destruction of trees Britain has ever seen. They are mostly Sitka spruces, Christmas-tree size or a bit bigger. Now their greenness has all gone and they are fusing into each other as a knee-high thick mix of dead branches and needles and thin bony trunks which has a name of its own ("brash") and covers the landscape in a great sad ash-grey littering.
"It's not pretty," murmurs Norrie Russell, who has supervised the destruction. "You would never call it pretty." But it is strangely moving. The RSPB is trying to put things right. Helped by EU money, in a partnership that involves Scottish Natural Heritage, the wildflower charity Plantlife, and yes, the Forestry Commission, it has bought and is removing more than 2,000 hectares of Fountain Forestry's unhappy plantings and trying to restore the underlying peat bog to what it was. More than four million trees have come down, but the restoration isn't easy or quick. Experiments showed that the best way of removing the spruces was to fell them into the plough furrows and let them rot down (the wood has no commercial value). But the process will take decades. "How long will it take till it's an active bog?" muses Norrie, the RSPB's Forsinard site manager. "It could take 30 to 100 years. It's quite hard to predict. But as long as the climate remains the same, this landscape wants to be covered in an open bog, it doesn't want to be a forest. It will happen."
We walk out on to the still untouched peatlands, where the flowers are starting to bloom: the cottongrass, the sundew, the bog asphodel. The gaze stretches away unimpeded to the far horizons, and suddenly a greenshank takes flight, the elegant, nervy wader, seeming to embody in its melancholy call the very essence of wildness. Planting trees is only a Good Thing, sometimes.

© The Independent, June 2006


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6. WOODLAND LEAGUE CONTACT DETAILS

www.woodlandleague.org

Andrew St. Ledger, PRO,
+353-(0)87-9933157

Brendan Kelly, Liaison Officer,
+353-(0)91-687778 (evenings)
+353-(0)86-1529176 (mobile)
brendankellywoodlawn@yahoo.ie

Ciarán Hughes, Secretary,
The Woodland League,
c/o Caherawoneen, Kinvara, Co. Galway, .
+353-(0)87-9652992
info@woodlandleague.org


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