Trees and the Environment
Only the third great branch of agriculture, that of tree cropping, is essentially beneficial to the environment. As I have described elsewhere [Noël, 1985b], this can be explained logically and reasonably in terms of the efficiencies of the different approaches in the use of light, land, water, and people. There are also some philosophical grounds.
Trees -- and this word is used here to mean the whole class of perennial woody plants -- are by their nature equalizers. They have evolved to live through all the seasons and through all the cycles of years, through years of high rainfall and drought, through hot years and cold. When the grass is gone, the cattleman may need to move his stock to other pastures, but the trees withstand. When the rains do not come, the wheat farmer will not plant, but the trees grow on. They smooth the benefits of land use out through the years, trimming off the peaks and using them to fill the troughs. They are essential for sustainable, long-term agriculture.
Such agriculture should not be based on trees alone, but on a thoughtfully integrated combination of tree crops, field crops, and stock raising, a sort of planned synthetic ecology. People whose traditions stem from Europe are accustomed to the idea that their food comes from the wheatfields and the cattle pastures, and need to look back before the two centuries of industrial development to realize how important tree crops were to their ancestors. In these two centuries, a huge hole developed in their tradition of land use, a hole which was largely filled by importation of goods from other ‘less-developed’ countries.
In some of these ‘less-developed’ countries, the traditional tree-based economies have disappeared under the influence of western ideas, in others they have hung on and may well prove to be the superior system in the end. When examined closely, an ‘unsophisticated’ swidden or slash-and-burn system such as that used in New Guinea is revealed to have astonishing complexity, subtlety, efficiency, and durability — no wonder it has been used with success for more than a thousand years.
Such systems are good ‘natural’ examples of integrated tree-field-animal ecologies in which man participates as a vital fourth factor. We are only just beginning to appreciate the interlocking of the isocons and microecologies involved. In another place, I have tried to show how biennial bearing in fruit trees can be explained by study of just such a system, involving the wild pigs, nut trees, and people of Borneo. It is vital that we attain not just a knowledge, but also an understanding, of the workings of such systems if life on our planet is to continue.
[For the full item containing the above, go to http://www.aoi.com.au/matrix/Nuteeriat-P162-181.pdf. The original item was published in 1989 in my book "Nuteeriat".
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Last update 2006 Feb 6
