On Woodland Management
Photos and thoughts from a week of woodland management work with Wild Sussex in a beautiful small woodland in Surrey.
Our plan here was to increase biodiversity and age stand diversity by widening rides and creating glades at the same time as removing a percentage of diseased ash trees. In truth, I’ve had a troubled relationship with the idea of woodland management since I started looking after the woods here at home 10 years ago; I always want to be certain I’m doing things right and spent so much time researching different points of view on the subject that forging a path forward felt overwhelming. I’m cursed with a yearning to see things on both sides of every argument which can often lead to a lack of clarity and ultimately apathy. I’m also suspicious of using tradition as justification for continuing to do things a certain way; just because something has been done for a long time, does that automatically make it good?
Some of my favourite woodlands are those with no management at all; they are rich in dead wood and decaying matter, home to bustling mycological communities, mosses, liverworts, bats and bugs. In these places natural process reign supreme and new opportunities for pioneers are created by storm, decay and gravity conspiring to create openings and glades for new life to occupy. Traditional management however relies on the hands and tools of the woodcutter to create larger clearings and rotational harvesting of timber or coppice to create diversity; these woodlands are regularly flooded with light and are home to vibrant wildflower and butterfly communities, song birds and small mammals. For a while I shunned the idea of traditional management; there seemed to be too much fiddling for my liking, too much gardening. I thought it disingenuous that the biodiversity gains were cited as the main driver for management when in reality it was an accidental byproduct created by the process of extracting a resource from the woodland. Now though, I see there is space and indeed necessity for both forms of management.
Recently, I have been thinking about the management of small woodlands as a kind of model for the way we can work alongside nature whilst at the same time reaping some of nature’s bounty; that it is ok for us as humans to take from nature as long as we give back. The small woodland management model demands of us a respect for trees and forests and of the finite supply of natural resources, for if we overexert our desire to take from the land we ultimately end up with nothing, hurting not only the land but ourselves along the way. This relationship asks of us to give back perhaps even more than we take, something which I think many woodland managers are totally fine with; a healthy, biodiverse woodland is resilient and creates opportunities for the future. As we struggle in the face of the climate crisis, shocking habitat and biodiversity loss, to me it seems the only fix is to radically rethink our relationship with nature across the whole of society. Although it is often perceived that any human influence on the landscape is negative, perhaps as well as creating space for nature to flourish undisturbed we should afford more focus on building better relationships between people and the land, one that creates a culture of care and emotional connection to the land for the benefit of both society and nature, one that gives back to the land, one that moves us towards something more akin to symbiosis.