(soft synth music)
- Peter has a question here.
My question
centers around the point that was made that,
"we need to be very careful
about disturbing established wilderness."
Near my home, my town owns a large piece of land,
75 acres that is protected from development
because of a historic battle that occurred there
during the revolutionary war.
There are beautiful walking trails
that have been installed
around which are open to the public.
The land is not wooded,
rather it looks like a piece of farmland
that nature is slowly recovering.
There are all kinds of grasses, bushes, and shrubs,
and the odd small tree here and there.
A forest is being rebuilt naturally.
I see opportunity to speed up the recovery
using a carefully planned permaculture design
and hope to propose such a plan to my town.
That said, I see how arguments could be made
to leave it alone to nature.
Can you comment on where to draw the line between wilderness
to be left untouched
and natural areas
which could benefit from human intervention?
Well, we call that in Australia,
regeneration or 'regen' for short.
There's a lot of funding
and actually it's an industry standard study now,
you can take courses in 'regen.'
So, we do move into farmland that's recovering,
and we put in pioneer species.
We put in natural fixing pioneers.
We look at nature and we see the way nature pioneers,
usually with the leguminous species first
or weeds, then the leguminous species
that understory to the native forest
and the native forest emerges.
So we can speed that process up.
And I do quite a lot of it here at Zaytuna Farm.
I have a large native legume tree here.
This is black bean.
I have a large nut tree here, which is bunya pine.
I have a lot of fast growing acacias
that only live for a few years and then die.
They do their pioneering sequence.
So you can look
at what are the pioneer in sequences in your local area
and suggest that you can speed that process up.
You can work with the natural system.
Of course you can use non-native
and you can use non-provincial,
in other words, from another part of the country,
but a lot of time,
the purists that are going to come in,
they're not going to take the new nature approach
of Fred Pearce, the famous book,
'New Wild', should I say.
'New Wild' written by Fred Pearce
has the subtitle 'Invasive species, the saviors of earth'.
And there's a whole new science on this now.
But if you have purists
and they only want local provincial species,
you can look at the local system.
You can look at the selection you have
of species that naturally pioneer
and the sequence can be speeded up
going through to climax species
of what you call a natural forest.
'Cause they're always evolving.
Now you could even suggest decompacting the soil,
restructuring the soil with, rip lines on contour.
You could even put it in swells.
That might be a bit contentious.
It just depends who you're dealing with
and how purists they are.
Of course you're talking about an area
that's got a heritage because it's had a battle
that hasn't got a battle,
a human battle hasn't got a lot to do
with the natural system,
but the way it pioneers is the key.
So, if you look at what are the fast pioneers,
fast-growing, short-term.
What are the medium pioneers,
medium speed growing and medium size
and medium life span.
What are the long term pioneers
that take longer to grow,
larger in size and live for a longer age
before they let go to the larger canopy.
So, you can look at those sequences
and as we go through the course, you see a lot of that.
So you need to,
you need to propose that in a formal
and botanically acceptable
or ecologically acceptable way.
This is just the natural environment
where we're using as a model to go through repair
to the long-term natural climax system.
(soft synth music)