Trees & climate

00:07 Tiahni: Trees are the lungs of our land. They provide essential functions for all life on Earth. Many of us share personal connections with them. One of my favourite trees is the Willawilla Karra Kuu. The Kaurna shelter tree, which is a big River Red Gum on the bank of the Wirraparinga River (Brownhill Creek) South West of Adelaide. It was hollowed out and once used as a shelter for Kaurna families. This beautiful tree is estimated to be 500 years old, well established before colonization began, it has seen and weathered many storms. Twenty years ago, the Willawilla Karra Kuu was suffering. Weeds, compacted soil and bank erosion threatened its existence. But by employing Traditional Land Management techniques, including the revitalization of yam daisies, cultural burns and bank stabilization, we saved the tree. Now it stands tall, a statue that reflects the condition of the environment surrounding it. The large trees that we share country with are our ancestors and are some of the oldest living organisms on Earth.

01:21 Tiahni: Climate change is here. And you've heard all about what that means. Warmer temperatures, extreme weather and biodiversity loss. But what about biodiversity as a solution in and of itself? This podcast is about where nature and climate change intersect. Join us as we traverse the back roads of this magnificent continent, finding the stories of hope that we all need right now. I'm Tiahni Adamson, and this is Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage.

02:06 Tiahni: Trees are biodiversity magnets, making them a vital partner in our fight against climate change. I want to learn more about our relationship with them and how we can better embrace them to build a more resilient future. To do this, first, we're taking you to an island on the edge of the Earth, Pakana Country, Lutruwita (Tasmania), to talk to someone who, among many other pursuits, has spent his life dedicated to their protection. 

02:39 Bob Brown: These… it's very hard to believe that these trees, particularly the rainforest species down here and in the Tarkine, are the same forests that were being eaten by the dinosaurs.

Tiahni: I'm sitting with Doctor Bob Brown at his cabin in the lush Liffey Valley, an hour southwest of Launceston, now known as Oura Oura Reserve, and managed for conservation by Bush Heritage. Clouds rise above a rocky bluff hanging over us. It's a jagged silhouette, the beginning of the plateau and the gateway to a World Heritage area and more wondrous nature. The air is crisp, and the landscape is so beautiful it's almost surreal. We're peering over at a walnut tree. It's not native and it does look strangely out of place at the edge of a forest, which is mostly dominated by gums and Blackwoods. But it's below this tree’s branches and leaves that the modern environmental movement in Australia found its roots.

03:37 Bob Brown: And under that tree - particularly in the 1970s and 80s and 90s - we've had lots of meetings to talk about such things as the fact that the Franklin was about to be damned, the bulldozers rolling into the valley, all the media and the political parties were in favour of it, the federal government said ‘go away’, the High Court said, ‘don't bother us’. It looked completely hopeless. We had a meeting here to decide whether we should go on. But we did decide under that the shade of that walnut tree, that while there's life, there's hope. Eighteen months later, the dam was stopped.

04:17 Tiahni: Much like the walnut tree, Bob has many feathers in his cap, yet remains stoically humble. His conviction as an environmentalist and towards other causes he believes in has, and continues to, shape parts of our history. Among many of his achievements, it's thanks to his leadership that in 1983, the damming of the Franklin River and Tasmania was stopped, meaning its icy fresh waters still run free today and continue to support all those ecosystems dependent on it.

04:46 Bob Brown (historical audio): “We're all fighting for the same thing, not just the Franklin River.”

04:49 Tiahni: But this victory went further than the protection of a river in Tasmania.

04:53 Bob Brown (historical audio): “We are an amazing organism, which is able to think and reflect on the universe and it's awesome and infinite wonder.”

05:04 Tiahni: His campaign brought the plight of the natural world into the homes of millions across the nation and abroad. It changed Australian constitutional law and public opinion towards nature, galvanizing the environmental movement. For his efforts, it also brought Bob into some cash.

05:23 Bob Brown: I went to America in 1990 and was given the Goldman Prize, which was 30 or 40,000 US dollars, quite a lot of money.

Tiahni: You don't normally get prizes for being an environmentalist. No, not with money anyway.

Bob: Well, the other thing was, I felt very embarrassed about it because I knew that the Franklin River had been protected by hundreds, if not thousands of people being involved, and in fact maybe a million people changing their votes when it got to the election in way back in 83. So what to do with it? And I when I arrived back then, neighbours told me former saw miller down the road was selling two blocks, a forest one up on the bend of the Liffey River, just below the falls, and the other up here on Glovers Bluff, which is a flat area under the bluff, which has got rainforest, beech and those white goshawks nesting. I was horrified because who wants those but the wood shipping industry to come in and clear fill it, and take it off as wood chips? So I had this prize and I got a friend to go to the auction. I was in the Tasmanian Parliament at the time and he rang me up in the Parliament and said, Bob, you're the owner of two New Forest blocks. It will cost you $250,000. Well, I had $40,000. So to cut a long story short, with good friends, we set up the Bush Heritage Fund to raise the money to pay for them. And from that we quickly learnt that people were interested in putting money into land. But it was very tough at the start.

07:01 Tiahni: This was the seed that sparked Bush Heritage, sprouting better and much needed at the time model for land conservation in Australia. It offered people agency over their love for nature through donations. They could give back to it and see it protected and managed forever. From the two forest blocks in Liffey, the organisation has grown into a national conservation non for profit that helps protect and contributes to the management of over 21 million hectares across Australia. Oura Oura is one of those reserves. Nestled in a lush valley protecting endangered forests, it's home to Spotted-tail Quolls, Eastern Bettongs, White Goshawks, and many other native species. It's crazy to think what might have happened here, if Bob and his mates didn't step in. What would this place be like now if it was turned into wood chips? Which makes my mind zoom out further. What is a world like without trees?

08:01 Dr Gregory Moore: We're not here. If you don't have trees, the whole ecosystems collapse. Every species of plant has its place, so without trees, the planet that we know doesn't exist and there would be no place for organisms like us. And this is sort of fundamental ecosystem science and just inconceivable.

Tiahni: That's Doctor Gregory Moore, a botanist and colloquially known as Melbourne University's Tree mechanic, where he has been a senior lecturer and lecturer in plant science and arboriculture since 1971. Greg is also the person that ABC calls if they need to know a thing or two about trees.

Greg: I'm very interested in the physiology, the structure, so morphology, anatomy and physiology of trees, why they do what they do, and how that relates to what we do in the world. But I think some people have lost the idea that the earth as we know, is the earth as we know it because of plants and amongst the plants - all plants are important, all species are important - but trees have a special place. Because they're so long lived and large, and so what they do over a long period of time has such a huge impact.

09:28 Tiahni: Trees provide our world with remarkable functions and benefits. They produce 1/3 of the world's oxygen and help to purify it. They naturally cool the Earth, provide shade and of course, habitat.

09:41 Greg: They did a study on a single oak in Britain, an old oak, over a long period of time. It was a doctoral study. And they found that that tree was associated with 2000 other species. I often talk to people about the fact that a tree is an ecosystem in its own right. Just a single tree is an ecosystem that has whole lots of species. And we used to talk about, you know, having 30 to 50 species dependent on that individual. And so, if you lose the tree, you lose virtually all of those.

10:15 Tiahni: But the list doesn't stop there. Trees contribute to cloud formation and precipitation, preventing flooding and stabilising riverbanks and coastal areas. Their roots connect to microbial communities, and they sequester and store carbon just like us. Except trees live longer, and they don't need as many other resources to survive. In 2022, Flux Research found that as Australia's land based ecosystems grow, of which trees are a serious main character, they sequester approximately 150 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Helping to balance the amount we emit. It's also estimated that approximately 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in our woodlands and forests. As most of you know, climate change is driven by increased levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. So, the more healthy standing trees we have on Earth, the more carbon sequestered and stored, improving our chances against the worst impacts of climate change. Protecting trees and biodiversity at large is an important in fact, vital form of climate action.

11:21 Greg: But you've also got the human health benefits, which are absolutely enormous. You've got the developmental benefits for children. So we know, for example, that when you've got a complex green space, which nearly always involves trees - probably doesn't have to, but nearly always does - and the more complex that space is, the experience that children have with those spaces in terms of multitasking really sets them up for a whole sort of future.

11:52 Tiahni: Every year we continue to add to the list of benefits these remarkable and familiar organisms bring to the world, and what is becoming more abundantly clear through these conversations and many others I've had. There is no us without them.

12:08 Hank Horton: Hank Horton’s my name. An Aboriginal fellow from Lutruwita (Tasmania). Through my bloodline I go further back to the North East corner of Tasmania, so I'm a Pakana male from the North East. Come from a little clan group called the Trawlwoolway people.

12:24 Tiahni: Archaeological digs show sights of the Pakana people's occupation in Lutruwita (Tasmania) that date back beyond 41,000 years, meaning the knowledge and culture Uncle Hank holds has survived the last Ice Age. The most recent major climatic shift the planet experienced.

12:43 Hank: When we say land mass we mean land and sea and water that we, we're managing it all as one. Yeah. So I think, you know, we had a way of managing our environment in harmony with the land. We worked with the country, didn't we? We worked with that.

12:59 Tiahni: This concept of being side by side with country and, better yet, belonging to it and caring for it holistically, is familiar to me. It's something I feel physically and emotionally, and which I continue to learn about through time spent with different aunties and elders.

13:15 Hank: You know, it's our lifeline, isn't it? Those trees created our environment. And why did my people farm the area with special fire regimes to only burn certain country at certain times of year? Because they needed those trees to thrive. If they burn them at the wrong time of the year, we would lose the tea tree growth, or the dogwood growth and therefore we wouldn't be able to make spears or humpies or lean-tos and have nowhere to live. We wouldn't have nothing to spear our animals with. We wouldn't be able to hunt and gather. So those trees were really important. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to survive for 40,000 years as we did here in Tasmania.

13:56 Tiahni: Hearing Uncle Hank talk about First Nations’ knowledge and his acute understanding of nature’s interactions makes me think once again of the Willa Willa Caraco tree and those traditional techniques we employed to make it once again stand tall, healthy, and strong. It's a real reciprocity and relationship between people and trees and country and the environment. There's a lot of different challenges that we're facing in the environment sector and a lot of pressures from climate change. You were talking about dams and logging and that sort of impact that’s really strong on forests. It must be pretty devastating for you when you see native forests being cleared.

14:40 Hank: Oh yeah, doesn't it… you know, and it still hurts, doesn't it? In the late 1990s, early 2000s we had the regional forest agreement go through, which they said they would stop native forest and old-growth forest logging but they didn't really stop it. Something my father and family were dead set against was clear felling forests.

15:03 Tiahni: Across the country, half a million hectares of native forests and woodlands are bulldozed each year. Our approach to native logging use differs state by state. And while there are strong movements to put an end to it, the practice still continues. Sadly, sneaky loopholes are being found by those keen to keep plundering our forests globally. We're not shaping up that well either. Despite over 140 countries making commitments to halve deforestation by 2030, we're still losing more than we're gaining.

15:34 Hank: Because you know, you just get so hurt when you see it happening. You know that the spirit of the land is going to be hurting. So, yeah, I still try and … it still gets to me. Even today, it really does get to me. So we have to try and educate.

15:51 Tiahni: We know that education and knowledge is our biggest strength. It's one of the only things as people that can't be taken away from us. Our tree mechanic also agrees.

16:00 Greg: The importance of education. Absolutely crucial. I think we've got to educate, and just remind people, that we are custodians. I think it's a great word because I think it encapsulates the concept that we've got to do the looking after and in return, we will be looked after. And the benefits will far outweigh the effort that we put in.

16:24 Tiahni: After everything we've learned, it seems bonkers that clear felling and the logging of native forests continues made even more crazy by the fact that climate change isn't just knocking at the door, but now taking a comfortable seat inside.

16:38 Greg: That old saying about their best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now - absolutely true.

16:51 Tiahni: On a recent trip to Noongar Country in the southwest corner of Australia, near Albany, I dropped into another Bush Heritage reserve, Red Moort. Once a degraded sheep farm with bone, dry topsoil and an eerie silence from lack of birds, Red Mort has been brought back to life. At some of the revegetation sites on the reserve, over 120 plant species have been put back in the ground. Now, 8 years later, species are spontaneously moving back onto the reserve to build homes, including the threatened Malleefowl. This is a restoration success story - one we’ll explore in the next episode of Big Sky Country. But it does make me wonder, can we ever really replicate what's been lost?

17:35 Greg: With complex revegetation work, it will never be a natural ecosystem that has been lost. But it doesn't mean it won't be a functional ecosystem that is a big improvement on perhaps what was there before it. So, I don't think we have the capacity, no matter how we try, to restore an ecosystem that has been lost to what it was before.

18:03 Tiahni: So while the saying Doctor Moore refers to is absolutely true and we're not here to discredit how vitally important restoration is, and that it does bring back functionality and species to the landscape, the fact is, once the forest or woodland is cleared, it will never be the same again. This raises the significance of another tool in our belt to work with trees to mitigate the impacts of climate change and the biodiversity crisis.

18:32 Greg: From my perspective, if you can save parts of the ecosystem and then reconnect them, even if they're relatively narrow corridors, the future is much, much brighter than it might otherwise have been.

18:44 Tiahni: Research confirms that not all forests are the same. All are effective carbon sinks, but it's the more mature forests that store the most carbon. Avoiding the loss of more forests and woodlands is actually in our better interest than adding new forests. We reflect on the vital role trees play in our world, especially in tackling the climate crisis, it's important to acknowledge the complexities around timber. While protecting our native forests is crucial, the demand for wood products is real. Thankfully, innovation is offering pathways forward. We're seeing a growing shift towards sustainably managed plantations, a rising consumer demand for certified timber and exciting alternatives like Mod wood and even green steel emerging. We can strive for a future where our need for timber doesn't come at the expense of our precious native forests. Finding solutions that benefit both our planet and our economy. It's astounding that in Lutruwita, the home of so many staggeringly beautiful ancient forests, we're still seeing native logging still watching on as these complex living organism, sometimes hundreds of years old, are cut down.

19:55 Bob: These trees growing here in Tassie and growing elsewhere around the world, are the biggest living creatures ever on the face of the planet. That’s worth thinking about. And they live much longer than we do. And they've got an ancestry going back much further than ours, and we need them. Absolutely need them. As a hedge against climate change, which we've created by bringing long dead trees out of the ground, that's coal and gas from ancient forests and burning it into the atmosphere. It was safely down there. As we had a climate which led to human beings flourishing on this planet. Now we're digging it up, burning it, heating the planet, and at the same time threatening all the trees around the world through these massive fires and droughts that we're and storms that we're seeing. And these companions of ours of life, we should be respecting in a much better way and it is the laws of nature, but we have to listen to it. And I'm looking out across towards the Blackwood tree over there, which is flowering and there's half a dozen or maybe a dozen Robins all dependent on trees. And for our delight. And if this place was clear felled they wouldn't be here. Where clear fell foresting occurs... no birds. Get rid of the trees, you get rid of the birds and therefore you get rid of such a delight.

21:37 Tiahni: I marvel at Bob, who's had to put up so many fights in his time, yet he still notices the Robins and looks to nature for inspiration. His glass remains half full.

21:47 Bob: I get very often asked, speaking to schools and so on, ‘Why aren't you depressed?’ And I say to people, you got to look after yourself, and if the going is getting tough, well, make sure you say yes to the party. Make sure you go out. Make sure you get good companions. You find a life companion so important if you can. And get that certificate. Do your studies. Travel. It's important not to wear a hair shirt and feel too anxious and feel like you've got to drop everything and give up everything to stop the planet from the plunderers. They want that. They want us to burn out. They want us to feel over-awed and ineffective. But we mustn't get into that mindset. We must be optimistic. We must be defiant. We must feel like we're on the front foot. We've got every right to because we are defending our planet. That gives us everything. They're plundering. We're defending. I know which side I want to be on and I know which side makes me feel vigorous about getting involved and enjoying it.

23:03 Tiahni: What advice would you give to a young person? And I'm sure you've been asked this question so many times.

23:10 Bob: I think it's very important for young people to take it all in, but put the problems that you can't fix on the shelf. Keep knowing they're there and what's going on, but put them on the shelf and deal with the ones you can and get involved with the ones you can. It's really important to feel like you are actually capable of helping create a success. And with our environmental work, you know, encouraging people to get involved in that, but not to get burnt out by it. It's really important to have fun along the way. Life is about having fun and laughter and love and, you know, enjoying being here on this planet for this one existence that we have and being able to feel at the end of it, well, yes, I enjoyed life, but I also did what I could for those who are coming after us to enjoy life, and for our fellow creatures on this planet, because they are us, we are them. We're part of an integrated magnificent, almost beyond belief, integrated living ecosystem on this planet. We're totally dependent upon it. It can do without us. But we can't do without it. And we got to look after it. And young people are inspiring because they're not going to put up with it. And I run into that everywhere. They don't want this world destroyed. And so there's a tide here. It will at times get angry. And at times it will get frustrated. At times it will feel this is all hopeless, but that's been common to all the great movements that have succeeded in human history.

25:00 Tiahni: When I say goodbye to Bob and walk away from the cabin, I spot a white gum clinging to the restored Bank of the Liffey River, standing tall. This tree is a micro Tassie metaphor of all the trees, forests, and woodlands on planet Earth. An example of what's possible when people get together to protect trees and allow them to thrive, much like a beacon. The light bark reflects the dipping sun and contrasts the clouds brewing above the bluff. And outstretched limb bends in the wind, waving almost. Without thinking, I wave back.

25:42 Tiahni: We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands where this podcast was created, the Pakana and Wurundjeri people. We recognise and respect the enduring relationship they have with and the knowledge they hold of country, and we pay respects to all elders past, present and emerging. This episode was produced by Bee Stevens, Will Sacre and Tiahni Adamson. Thanks to our guest Doctor Bob Brown, Uncle Hank Horton, and Doctor Gregory Moore. Special thanks to Mike Bretz and Paul Thomas, this episode was mixed and mastered by Mike Williams with original music by Mike Williams and Timothy Nicastro. Our theme music was generously contributed by the Orb Weavers. Big thanks to Rory Noak from Pod Booth Adelaide for his expertise and guidance. Join us next time as we delve into the question, ‘Can we replicate what's been lost?’

We'll be exploring some of this country's most ambitious restoration projects in the city, the ocean and inland. Thanks for joining us for Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage for now. If you enjoyed that episode, click subscribe. Tell a friend. And leave a review.