You have to be brutally honest about human behaviour and
we consume, that's what we do we use a lot of shit
and you have to stop and question where it comes from and what impact it has on the environment.
Well it's a difficult environment to work in.
[dialogue]
"Oh it's a jungle isn't it?" "It's turning into one." "You come in here with a bloody chainsaw
mate." "You wanna sit down?" "It's not actually wet it's quite dry for you." John Dronfield,
long-suffering indigenous forester. I've been involved in beech forest management for productive
use for the best part of 24 years and I also now own a sawmill which is a brilliant career choice
and I process the beech we harvest and produce products for health-based building. I'm Robin
Curtis, I'm a director with health-based building and the health-based building team,
I've worked with John over the last 10 years alongside his passion for sustainable practices
and harvesting and glad to have the product and the story involved with health based building.
Around the world this type of forestry is well known not so much in New Zealand
and it's called lots of thing it's it's called continuous cover forestry, indicating that
we maintain the forest at all costs and take a regulated harvest out rather than clear felling.
It's called near natural forestry meaning that we're trying to mimic natural processes
that occur in different ecosystems. Our objective is that if you look at this
forest from a landscape perspective there is no discernible change. Definitely there have been
trees harvested in here but the canopy remains, the species remain, the trees grow healthily.
We're actually standing right in the middle of a harvest site harvested 19 years ago. This whole
stand of trees through here was senescent or old so they're dying back. We look for places
where we can take a harvest that's kind of working with the natural system and we've created what's
called a light well in the forest and it lets light in which favours the advanced regrowth and
all these beautiful young trees that you can see around us have responded in those 19 years. So
these things are now 10 or 15 meters high. We're only taking mentionable product out,
a good 40 of the stem volume remains on the site and that's really important in a natural
forest. So it stays in here to rot down. so all that goodness stays in the forest.
Extraction is not by roadways or bulldozing trees, extraction is by helicopter harvesting.
It's clear felling that's an issue, anything that's clear felled in a hardwood species as beech
is, that is just not sustainable. You can't regrow from clear felled forests, they are eliminated
and you go to the next one. I started in this when I was around 25 and I distinctly remember
going to Southland to do my master's thesis and standing on the edge of a clear fell native forest
and just having a visceral reaction to it really it just there has to be a better way than that.
You can either look for I guess solutions by shutting everything down or you can
work within the industry to make it better is what I was taught. I may be considered a pariah for
wanting to harvest some native trees in the forest like this but you have to think where else you're
getting the product from. If you're just importing it from Siberia or the Congo and saying, "it's
all good we didn't do it here." That's a cop out because it's not helping global sustainability.
Okay, so this is a very real taking ownership of a problem. You know my industry, the few of us left,
probably produced three percent of what we utilise in this country for decorative timbers.
Three percent of what we use okay, so that's not very much. Where does the rest come from?
These are red beech logs and this one in particular is naturally durable.
So the heartwood is naturally durable, chemical-free. That's the boiler so all our waste
wood gets ground up under chip and and feeds the boiler so we don't buy any coal or any electricity
or energy. I guess I needed to work in an industry where I felt I was doing something good for the
world and people may look at me and go well that's just counter-intuitive you're cutting down trees
and destroying nature but far from it. I believe I'm working with nature to produce a product to
help society you know. This was largely a forested country and we've cleared huge swaths of it,
so what's remaining is extremely precious but we also have to find ways to
be accountable for what we need as a society. I saw the tail end of the clear felling years
and it is, you're destroying the future really when you knock over a forest like that
but I also think that we can use our knowledge and our skills and our regulations to take a
yield out of that forest, to get an economic return off that land for the landowner.