Back in 2006, Peter Andrews’ story was voted by viewers as the most popular episode of ABC’s Australian Story.

It told of the ridicule Andrews’ sometimes faced in explaining his innovative ideas on how to heal the Australian landscape – and the work he did in regenerating his own degraded broadache property.
As a result of this problem Andrews’ set out his ideas on how we can repair and re-green and help return water to the Australian landscape – a process dubbed as ‘Natural Sequence Farming’. Here is an edited extract from his latest book Beyond the Brink.

According to one published estimate that I think is probably right, approximately a quarter of the planet has now been stripped almost entirely of vegetation. In other words, one-quarter of the planet has been stripped of its ability to moderate temperature -which, you would have to think, must have some influence on the planets temperatures.

Polish limnologist, Willlie Ripl, has done a lot of research work in the area of climate change, much of it based on mud samples taken from lakes in various parts of Europe. He found a dramatic change in the functioning of the landscape, relative to vegetation, after the last Ice Age, which may have ended as recent as 10,000 years ago.

At first, there were temperature extremes, severe erodion and a loss of salts from the landscape. But as a vegetation in Europe slowly recovered and, as a result temperatures were moderated, things returned more or less to normal. A few thousand years later, though, the landscape suffered another shock: the start of intensive farming, which, of course, required large scale clearing of land. The land clearing produced much the same changes as the Ice Age – namely, extremes of temperature, erosion and loss of salts or cations.

All this points to a basic truth: that trees and other plants can, and do, have a profounf influence not only on how the landscape functions, but on climate. Yet in the great public debate on climate change that has been underway for some years now, trees and plants have hardly, if ever, got a mention.

As we know, the focus of the discussion has almost been entirely on carbon dioxide. Now, in the context of climate change, I do not doubt for a moment that carbon dioxide produced by human activity has certainly been a contributing factor. But, like a number of independently- minded scientists, Willie Ripl among them, I cannot accept that it has been a main factor. Why? Because I have yet to see any convincing evidence that human activity produces other than a small proportion of the total quantity of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each day.

The termite factor.

While ants actually produce more carbon dioxide than humans do, just by chewing wood. Accorsing to one estimate I saw some years ago, termites are responsible for as much as 60 percent of the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere each day and agriculture is responsible for about 20 percent.

My own belief is that our traditional agricutural methods, especially ploughing, are at the root of the problem. This applies even to the termite problem. Ants are the termites’ main perdators, but each time we plough a field we destroy the ant population there. So ploughing allows the ant population to multiply. So does draining the landscape of water, a practice that foolishly has been adopted in many parts of Australia in the vain hope of reducing salinity. The more the land dries out, the more the termites proliferate…another illistration of how we always create problems for ourselves when we upset the natural systems.

The value of weeds.

Ploughing increases carbon dioxide emisions in another way. If you plough a field and let it lie fallow for months, as farmers do everywhere, the carbon in the soil does not just sit there doing nothing. It starts oxidising immediately, thereafter producing a steady emission of carbon dioxide. Since there is around three times as much carbon stored in the soil as in all the trees and plants growing above the soil, the scale of this particular problem is clearly immense.

Which brings us back to the assertion I made before – namely, that trees and other plants have a significant moderating influence on the climate, provided there are enough trees and other plants to do it. So does this mean I am in favour of planting vast forests across the landscape? Well, I’m certainly in favour of forests, but I do not think that planting them is the sole answer to the present problem of global warming.

Forests take too long to grow, so they cannot be the only solution. Twenty years and more from now they will start to do the job we want them to do. But in the meantime we need another quicker solution, which means fostering the growth of fast-growing plants.

I don’t suggest that we actually plant these faster-growing plants…for the most part that are pioneer plants, or weeds, that grow of their own accord.

System of self-management.

We need forest strips, wildlife corridors, wide hedgegrows, whatever you like to call them. The important thing is that they must be established relative to the landscape hydrology. I mean by this that plantations of trees and other kinds of coarse vegetation must be established on higher points of the landscape, so that the in-ground water, operating under the force of gravity, can distribute the fertility generated there throughout the land below.

If you dobt the importance of having trees on the high ground, consider this: wherever the trees have been cleared from the high ground, the landscape has gone into decline. Not sometimes or somewhere, but everywhere and always. It happens in every single case: take out the trees on the high ground and you will lose fertility below, regardless of what else you do below.

If I sound less than enthusiastic about embarking on massive tree-planting programs, it is because I know that how and where plants get distributed is best left to the trees themselves.

The Australian continent evolved its own self-management system, and, as part of this, plants have had there own self-distrubtion system.

Where plants are best suited to grow, they will grow of there own accord. Our responsiibility is to make sure that the plants, once they grow are not attacked with herbicides or fire.

Those who doubt that vegetation can influence climate significantly would doubt no more, I believe, if they could be transported back 60,000 years in a time machine and see for themselves the pristine environment that existed then in Australia, and study the effect it had on climate. I say 60,000 years because this is about the length of time that indigenous Australians have been here, and I have no doubt that their routine, buring of the landscape seriously reduced the ability of vegetation to moderate climate.

Of course, things have got much worse again in the 200-odd years that the country has been settled by Europeans. Not only are temperatures higher now: they are more variable.

Conclusion.

Let me state my position again: I do believe that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays more than a marginal role in global warming. Still, it is a factor we could eliminate entirely within a few yearsby encouraging the growth of more vegetation. One way to do that, of course, is to abandon the practice which generations of farmers have followed of killing plants on a large scale.

This is an edited extract from Beyond the Brink, by Peter Andrews.