Rethink and Restore JOURNAL Issue 77 — Winter 2020 CONTENTS TREES JOURNAL 1 AN INVITATION TO RETHINK AND RESTORE By James Kemp Part 1 — THE SOIL 4 INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS AND IMAGINED BOUNDARIES Photo: Nana Kofi Acquah By Merlin Sheldrake 6 AGROFORESTRY By Roger Leakey 10 THE PRACTITIONER’S PERSPECTIVE By Mark Kebo Akparibo AN INVITATION Part 2 — PEOPLE TO RETHINK 14 TREES FEED MY SOUL By Noelle Leigh MBE AND RESTORE 15 THE RESTORATIVE POWER OF TREES By Lucy Jones 17 ‘I AM GRETA’ By Michelle Carstarphen 18 TREE BEINGS By Raymond Huber 20 WHY COMMUNITIES ARE ESSENTIAL FOR TREE PLANTING SUCCESS By Sam Pearce 23 ‘ARE WE OUT OF THE WOODS?’ By Alistair Yeomans Part 3 — RESTORATION We start this volume of Trees Journal in the soil. soil is examined by Professor Roger Leakey. If we Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life: How incorporate trees into agriculture (agroforestry) at 27 THE FUTURE OF LANDSCAPE RESTORATION IN KENYA Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds scale, we can restore the health and productivity By Teresa Gitonga and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2020), of our land and create just, sustainable economies explores the intricate relationships between algae, in food and other forest products for millions 31 A WORLDWIDE, COMMUNITY-CENTRED APPROACH fungi, bacteria, plants, animals and great swathes of of people. Development specialist Mark Kebo By Ricardo Romero life. He reveals myriad interdependencies between Akparibo offers an example from Northern Ghana. species, and invites us to rethink boundaries. By helping a community rethink their approach to 33 HOW SCIENCE CAN BOOST THE GLOBAL REFORESTATION MOVEMENT Where one creature begins and another ends is farming, degraded soil and farmland was restored, By The Crowther Lab not so obvious after all. In fact, the boundaries we biodiversity loss reversed, and the local economy see in nature may be imagined more often than strengthened. 35 CAN WE SUSTAIN NATURE AND CIVILIZATION? not, and with destructive consequences for the In part two, our attention turns inward. By Paul Hanley ecosystems within which we live. We look at personal relationships with nature, and We move through soil into roots and trees. how communities relate to the landscapes they call The role of trees in creating and restoring healthy home. We begin with one of our longest-standing Cover photo: Nana Kofi Acquah 1 AN INVITATION TO RETHINK AND RESTORE members, Noelle Leigh MBE, who reflects on what Ricardo Romero, ITF’s Programme Part 1 trees mean to her: “Trees feed my soul. Trees Manager knows what a difference these principles speak to me, not in words but in feelings”. can make. Many times has he seen how their Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden: Why careful application can transform a community’s Our Minds Need the World (Penguin, 2020) helps relationship with nature, from exploitative to us to understand why nature is so important to our regenerative. The potential of trees in farming mental health and even to our sense of hope. Is it and landscape restoration is vast. With the aid possible, Lucy asks, that “we need ancient and awe of data from around the planet and advanced inducing trees to be a compassionate and caring computer modelling, Crowther Lab is helping the society?” There is evidence to suggest it is. By global restoration movement to understand and rethinking our relationship with the living world, fulfil this potential. Working with thousands of we come closer to our true natures. organisations around the world, including ITF, Like Lucy, Raymond Huber is drawn Crowther Lab partnered with Google to develop to the beech tree. An author of children’s books Restor – a digital platform available to everyone and a teacher, Raymond shares his thoughts on to help accelerate ecosystem restoration. Farmers, trees as beings – tree beings. Raymond invites gardeners, governments, businesses, researchers, you to befriend a tree, just as International Tree and NGOs are invited to use this tool to better Foundation (ITF’s) founder Richard St Barbe inform their planting and conservation decisions. Baker, Jane Goodall, and many others have. As the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration gets Slowly but surely, communities are under way, Restor will help us all accelerate the beginning to take their rightful place at the centre pace of change. of forest restoration and tree planting. ITF’s Sam To close this volume we turn to Paul Pearce describes how an Oxford community saved Hanley, author of Richard St. Barbe Baker’s hundreds of trees from dying during the driest biography, Man of the Trees (2016). Richard St. THE SOIL UK spring on record. This community created Barbe Baker was a visionary and his life story is the green space in which these trees will grow for inspiring, for he dedicated it to restoration and generations to come. peace, knowing that neither is possible without “A culture is no better than its woods”. the other. To conclude part two, Forestry Consultant Alistair Yeomans echoes W. H. Auden’s concern. “ Vision building builds hope. There is, however, a way to help renew the Hope, a commanding hope, is an essential UK’s woodland culture: the UK Tree Charter, ingredient in a transformative movement.” published in 2017 on the 800th anniversary (Paul Hanley, 2020) of the Charter of the Forests. Its ambition is to “place trees and woods at the centre of national This volume of Trees Journal is a hopeful decision making, and back at the heart of our invitation to rethink our relationship to nature – lives and communities.” Across the world, people to the soil beneath our feet, to our food, ourselves, are rethinking their relationship with forest and each other, and our home. Imagine what we can woods – we encourage you to take a look. achieve by the end of the UN Decade of Ecosystem ITF was founded in Kenya, as Watu wa Restoration if we accept this offer. Miti, in 1922. Our Kenya Programme Manager, Teresa Gitonga, introduces part three – By James Kemp, Editor restoration. With only 7% tree cover, Kenya is now one of the least forested countries in Africa. The Kenyan Government has committed to restoring 5.1 million hectares of degraded landscape by 2022. Teresa sets out six principles needed for ambitious restoration projects to succeed. 2 TREES JOURNAL INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS INTIMATE “The view of plants as RELATIONSHIPS autonomous individuals AND IMAGINED with neat borders is causing destruction.” BOUNDARIES By Merlin Sheldrake Photo: Hanna-Katrina Jedrosz If you put fresh, fine roots in a dish of water, soils and grow it without its fungal endophytes, it bacteria that live within its networks: the fungus challenges of a desolate and windswept world in you’ll see fine fungal filaments – or hyphae – won’t be able to survive in its natural habitat. The ‘plants’ bacterial populations, then cultivates, the earliest days of life on land. Together, they stringing off them. If you boil roots, stain them same goes for grasses growing in hot geothermal harvests and consumes them. There is a division of evolved a form of agriculture, although it is not with a dye, and mount them on a slide, you’ll see soils. In a series of dramatic experiments, labour across the network, with some parts of the possible to say whether plants learned to farm fungi winding along and branching into delicate researchers swapped the fungal endophytes that fungus responsible for food production and some fungi, or fungi learned to farm plants. Either way, feathery lobes within plant cells. It’s difficult to lived in each type of grass so that coastal grasses for consumption. we’re faced with the challenge of altering our imagine a more intimate set of poses. By means were grown with hot geothermal fungi and vice Advances in the microbial sciences have behaviour so that plants and fungi might better of this relationship, plants are able to obtain versa. The proclivities of the grasses switched. deepened and expanded the notion of the individual cultivate one another. minerals foraged by the fungi in the labyrinthine Salt-loving grasses could no longer survive in and transformed swathes of biology – the study It’s unlikely we’ll get far unless we rot-scapes of the soil. In return, plants supply coastal soils but thrived in hot geothermal soils. of living organisms – into ecology – the study question some of our categories and loosen fungi with energy rich carbon compounds – sugars Hot geothermal grasses could no longer grow in of the relationships between living organisms. the grip of some of our certainties about how or lipids – produced in photosynthesis. the hot geothermal soils but thrived in the salty The implications are far-reaching. A large study we divide the world. The view of plants as Both plants and fungi use the other to coastal soils. published in 2018 suggested that the ‘alarming autonomous individuals with neat borders is extend their reach, and have done so for hundreds Plant traits, in other words, may be more deterioration’ of the health of trees across Europe causing destruction. The word ecology has its of millions of years: it was only by partnering than ‘plant’ traits. In fact, what we call plants was caused by a disruption of their mycorrhizal roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning ‘house’, with fungi that the algal ancestors of land plants can be thought of as algae that have evolved to relationships, brought about by nitrogen pollution. ‘household’,’ or ‘dwelling place’. Plant bodies, were able to move onto the land. This makes farm fungi, and fungi that have evolved to farm In viewing soils as more or less lifeless places, like those of all other organisms – including our mycorrhizal associations – from the Greek mykes, algae.