Restoring Depleted Lands

Unexpected earth lessons from a New Zealand trip through suburbia.

Suburban scapes. Once again I am taking a long bus ride through a strange landscape and wondering why. Opposite, a serene giant of a Samoan man with traditionally tattooed arms, an airport worker’s shirt, and the deeply compassionate, inward-focused expression of a beautiful ancient god, sits motionless throughout. It is the South Pacific.

I am traveling up the Hutt Valley in Wellington New Zealand to a camp on climate change. From across the harbor before I started out I could see that the long broad valley was shrouded in cloud and a blustery cold wind blows. The light is bright, colors harsh. People are a mix of Maori, Pakeha (European origin), Asians and Pacific Islanders.

I alight and from memory of the google directions start walking through low, small wooden houses. They are shabby, seemingly temporary. Each perches on a small plot of gardenless lawn dotted with cars, fences graphited. Twenty minutes later it is clear that the directions were wrong. Nobody is around to ask.

Climate change camp. Suddenly I am enveloped in the darkness of a patch of dense native forest. There are some sizeable trees. Damp earth smell of New Zealand “bush” permeates. Emerging I walk along a high river-flood embankment, and sight an encampment of about 50 small and a few larger tents including a North American teepee.

I sit outside a tent containing 20 or so people dressed in woolen hats, parkas, tattooed, ring-nosed, listening intently to a slowly developing discussion in the local nasal twang on restoring New Zealand’s severely depleted landscape. It is fascinating.

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I learned early about depletion. As a child I spent my weekends with the other children climbing the steep hillsides above our village, grassy slopes ridged and cropped close by sheep. Having avoided annoyed farmers, their dogs, and dangerous bulls, we got lost, fell in bogs, and mist descended down the few wire fences. There were thunder storms, rain squalls in gale-force winds, rainbows, and fantastic views of farmed, often sun-bleached, hills and valleys arrayed in serried ranks to ocean on both sides.

Once we rested in a high area dotted with strange mounds covered with wiry dry growth. I parted the covering on one mound and to my astonishment discovered a huge, slowly decaying stump of tree underneath. For a second the whole landscape was covered in towering forest filled with melodious native birds—then back to mountains scrubbed clean and bare by the settlers in this once densely forested land of new opportunity. Wow! What have we done?

* * * * *

This talk described it. We have removed the trees, channeled the rivers, washed away the soil, drained the swamps, poisoned the aquifers, destroyed the fertility. And, in a hundred years or so, just all over the globe.

A way to restoration? Two rangy, bare-foot young speakers were describing an agriculture different from sheep, dairy, and cattle farming. It yields, they said, 7 times the tons of food per hectare of land, protects soil, retains water even with low rainfall, and builds fertility. It is all about allowing water to work for us.

We start by growing 3 foot high weeds on the tops of hills to add nutrients to the descending water, and by not draining the cleansing, nutrient-rich swamps. When rivers are not channeled by concrete and boulders and the banks are shaded by plant growth, 90% of the water permeates the mossy soil on either side keeping the landscape moist for food plants. Loss of soil and water out to sea in huge damaging floods is greatly reduced.

Soil, nutrients and moisture are retained by growing fruit-bearing trees. These are under-layered with berry bushes and interspersed with open patches of vegetables. Placing barriers of organic debris like logs of punga (tree ferns) on hill slopes rapidly builds soil and retains water to create paddy fields growing water vegetables, rice and fish. Chickens and ducks live naturally in such terrain without damaging it.

The mosaic of varying water paths, soil, sun, wind, steepness, etc within a landscape is carefully studied to choose appropriately different plants and management. The method has various names—terraquaculture, natural farming, and others — and its modern emergence involves a New Zealand developer of permaculture, Haikai Tane. He has studied examples of traditional terraquaculture in China, India, and South East Asia.

This new way is old. Yes, it is an ancient Asian-Pacific farming method used over several millennia. It is intensive in labor and highly productive. In some places in Asia, individuals do not own continuous land but pieces located in different kinds of terrains, each producing different foods. The mayor gets the land at the bottom of the mountain so he feels the effect of his regulation of everyone else’s use above. So Dion told us.

Vigilance needed. After a young woman kindly suggests that I not use my camera, I briefly join a meeting in another tent on my rights should I be stopped or arrested by police for taking action on climate change.

Local evidence of depletion and restoration. In heavy rain and with poncho flying, I am shown the role of planted willow trees on the riverbank. Soil re-establishes by itself, then nitrogen-fixing weeds, and eventually native plants as birds bring seeds. The difference in retention of water and fertility was marked between the bulldozed, boulder-lined and lawn-topped embankments and the tree-clad, mossy outcrops starting to project naturally into the riverbed.

"Purist" versus "realist" conflict. A passionate verbal fight breaks out. The purists (romantics says Dion) want to preserve our ~2,500 very slowly regenerating native plants (almost none of which produce human food) along with their associated culture and sacredness. The realists see that selection from the non-native 40,000 to 50,000 plants already introduced to New Zealand, could be helpful in establishing food-bearing fertility to feed our human population on land destroyed by deforestation and chemical farming. These viewpoints do not seem mutually exclusive to me.

Action! Now, we need real working demonstration farms and statistics so that the many can experience and learn the practicalities of growing food this way, and take it up.

Could terraquaculture be a possibility for reviving productivity of depleted land near you?