Brown gold
Today is National Tree Day* and if you head down to the Yarra River this week you’ll see the wattles along the banks dropping their blossoms onto the water in drifts and swirls turning the Yarra into a river of gold.
It’s odd how over the last 30 or so years we’ve increasingly wanted to know where our food comes from, but when we’re asked the same question about our wood the answer is often a shrug and a tentative, “Bunnings?”
While our attention may have been on the provenance of our produce, the question of trees and where our timber comes from has long been occupying the minds of local agro-foresters and salvage sawmillers.
While native loggers were clear-felling themselves out of business, agro-foresters like Rowan Reid were imagining farms growing forests for timber, improving soils and waterways, providing habit for wildlife, sequestering carbon and perhaps surprisingly making farms more beautiful places.
Reid’s thirty five year experiment turning a rundown Otways property into a productive permanent forest grazed by sheep has now matured into a intentionally beautiful living classroom that’s inspired thousands of farmers around the world to include timber trees on their farms (that’s Rowan’s place below).
At the same time Reid was planting his Shining Gums and Redwoods, salvage sawmillers like Rob Horner, who was rescuing disused wharf timbers from the future Melbourne Docklands, began cottoning-on to the truckloads of incredible timber being wasted as farmers pushed over and burned their aging macrocarpa and sugar gum windbreaks.
With their crane trucks and mobile sawmills Horner and others approached farmers, went into paddocks and began saving what would be tens of thousands of cubic metres of timber from the bonfire.
CERES Fair Wood timber social enterprise was launched when architect Paul Haar suggested Fair Food should be connecting agro-foresters and salvage sawmillers with green builders and architects in the same way Fair Food was doing with organic farmers and city-eaters.
In the five years since Fair Wood opened there’s been a another tree reimaging. With increasing heat waves in our future Melbourne’s 32 local councils have committed to doubling the urban tree canopy by 2040 – we now live in a City Forest.
Urban trees, once seen as mainly decorative, are becoming valued in other ways, this includes their timber. Recent State Government policy means urban trees removed in government road or rail developments must now be put to their highest and best use.
CERES Fair Wood’s Urban Forestry project is now sawmilling urban trees into high value timber saving them from the mulch pile and the tip. The timber is being sold to build houses and furniture or is returned to the communities to create park infrastructure such as playgrounds and picnic areas.
As logging in Victorian native forests ends, as we hurriedly establish our new tree plantations and double tree canopies in our cities to counter the heat island effect, we seemed to have come in a humbling 200 year circle with increasingly hot and bothered Mother Nature asking us if we could please put all those trees we’ve cut down back where they came from.
Happy National Tree Day and don’t forget to get down to your river or creek of gold, it’s quite something.
Chris
*National Tree Day is Planet Ark’s annual celebration of trees and the many benefits they have in our society from many different perspectives.
