Next gen reforesters digging in
Record numbers are volunteering at Whakatipu Reforestation Trust planting days, including an unmissable contingent of young people and children, as a concerned new generation rises up in battle to restore the land.
“There’s a lot of eco-anxiety and climate concern out there and coming along to a planting day is a tangible action that gives people a sense of agency,” trust operations manager Karen O’Donahoo says.
“Many people can’t afford to buy an $80,000 electric car, but they can come along to a planting day and feel like they’re making a difference.”
People seem keen to be part of a collective action. “Knowing that kōwhai tree they’ve just planted will absorb carbon for years to come and feed native birds is a great feeling, especially when it’s on a large scale. We have an opportunity to make a difference here that we wouldn’t have in a big city, and people want to be part of that.”
The trust had a record of more than 110 people turn up at Lake Hayes Showgrounds to plant on 9 September, many of them young people and children. By midday the area was filled with 650 native trees. The previous weekend at Whitechapel 80 volunteers planted 1500 trees in several hours.
By the end of this month, and this year’s planting season, trust volunteers hope to have planted 80,000 natives around the basin. They could hit 100,000 next year, with some big planting projects planned.
It’s greatly heartening for trust founders Neill and Barb Simpson and the handful of original volunteers who started 10 years ago trying to rescue and restore the basin’s biodiversity. For a long time the Simpsons were lone voices advocating for this locally. Back in his 20s, long before catch phrases like ‘climate change’ existed, the legendary local botanist and conservator Simpson, now 90, had been concerned about biodiversity.
“The writing’s definitely been on the wall for a very long time,” he says. He and Barb teamed up with the likes of wilding pines activist Peter Willsman, John Wilson and Hans Arnestedt transforming the Simpsons’ Whakatipu Islands Reforestation Trust into the new trust.
With just 5% of the basin’s original beech forests remaining there was work to be done. The trust opened its Jean Malpas Nursery in Jardine Park in 2014, after Simpsons’ seed raising took over their home vegetable garden, and since then it’s “snowballed”.
It’s been tremendously encouraging to see people in their 20s and 30s volunteering to help. “Younger people are more tuned into the environment than many of us older people,” he says. “If we don’t have a healthy environment we can’t survive long. Younger people will be affected the most. I think they’ll have to put up with a lot more than us.”
“It’s such a unique and incredibly precious feeling to look around after a planting session, having been part of that transformation, and seeing the land given back to Mother Nature, all in its rightful place,” O’Donahoo says.
There’s plenty of great work underway with community groups, local business volunteers, even conference delegates, chipping in to help. A collaboration with Mana Tāhuna Charitable Trust will carry out massive planting around the wetlands at the Rutherford Road end of Lake Hayes, where willows have been removed, from 18-22 September. A planting day at Slopehill precedes that, followed by one at Bush Creek to finish the season on 30 September.
“Our work’s becoming so visible – a massive area from Ladies Mile to Lakes Hayes to Whitechapel,” O’Donahoo says. “It’s so different to 10 years ago and people see we’re making a difference.” That’s also translating into hands on experiential learning for local schoolchildren and youth through the trust’s Education For Nature Programme. Kids learn how a wetland should function, propagation, tracking and trapping predators and how to care for native plants.
For information see the trust’s website: www.wrtqt.org.nz
