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Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating A Native Forest

Hugh Wilson purchased degraded farmland in New Zealand in 1987 with a dream to restore the native forest. Through minimal intervention and letting nature take its course, he has regrown over 1500 hectares of forest using the invasive weed gorse as a nurse plant. After 32 years, the forest has fully regenerated and supports abundant wildlife. Though a fire set the project back, it demonstrates how restoring nature can help address issues like biodiversity loss and climate change. Hugh lives simply and advocates addressing technology and consumption to truly change circumstances.

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Parnika Goyal
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118 views3 pages

Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating A Native Forest

Hugh Wilson purchased degraded farmland in New Zealand in 1987 with a dream to restore the native forest. Through minimal intervention and letting nature take its course, he has regrown over 1500 hectares of forest using the invasive weed gorse as a nurse plant. After 32 years, the forest has fully regenerated and supports abundant wildlife. Though a fire set the project back, it demonstrates how restoring nature can help address issues like biodiversity loss and climate change. Hugh lives simply and advocates addressing technology and consumption to truly change circumstances.

Uploaded by

Parnika Goyal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest

A Documentary by HAPPEN FILMS

Introduction

In 1987, a piece of degraded farmland was purchased on the Banks Peninsula, New
Zealand by a botanist. The local community saw him as a green naive from the city
with all these big ideas who within a year or two, would find it all too hard and go
back. But he was no ordinary, he had come with a dream.

This is an incredible story of Hugh Wilson and Maurice White Native forest trust and
their commitment to restoring the native forest. Once considered a fool and
dreamer, Hugh now oversees 1500 hectares of land resplendent in native forest,
where birds and other wildlife live free with many springs in permanent flow and at
least 47 known waterfalls. The land is now known as the Hinewai Nature Reserve
and is open for people to walk and enjoy nature at its most pristine form.

Story of the land

The Banks Peninsula is a beautiful peninsula of volcanic origin located on the east
coast of South Island in New Zealand. Up until 1700, the peninsula was entirely
covered in ancient old-growth forests. Successive waves of human settlements
caused a huge impact on the forest and by the 1900s, less than 1 percent of the old
forest was left. Now, the Peninsula has vast fields of agricultural land both on plain
and hilly terrains.

Hinewai Nature Reserve was originally one such piece of marginal hilly farmland
infested with Gorse. Gorse is a terrible weed that infects most of the farmlands of
New Zealand. A shrub with yellow flowers and thorns, it competes with agricultural
produce and spreads rapidly. To the farmers, Gorse is a nightmare which they are
constantly battling with but Hugh used his knowledge of trees and nature to use
Gorse, the problem itself to regrow 1500 hectares of forest with minimal
intervention.

Hugh Wilson
From a very young age, Hugh Wilson was greatly attracted to the birds and the way
plants grow. Following his interests, he majored in Botany. For several years, he
tramped on a systematic pattern of sampling at the Banks peninsula documenting
in detail the botanical life of the Peninsula. During this process, he realized that the
situation was not that worse as he had imagined it would be. He could see traces of
life coming back which inspired him to take care of that land and let nature assert
its original covering.

From September 1987 to 1991, he collaborated with Maurice White Native Forest
Trust and purchased 1500 hectares of land under the Hinewai Nature Reserve to
begin restoration work.

When people ask Hugh why should you restore forests, he replies by saying that it
is parallel to asking why one should love his/ her mother. We are a part of nature
and greatly depend on the vegetation and biodiversity in so many ways that it is
totally inhumane to not love it back and care for her.

The Regeneration journey

Hugh knew that nature knows best and that’s why he let nature take its course of
restoration and just took away the things that stopped the process.

Since the land was already infested with Gorse, he looked at it as a silver lining and
used Gorse as a succession plant for the regeneration process. Here’s how it works.
Gorse fixes nitrogen in the soil and its shade acts as a nurse canopy to allow other
shade-loving native species to grow under it. If left undisturbed, the native
vegetation outgrows the Gorse and once Gorse comes under their shade, it
automatically dies since it perishes in shade.

The experiment worked far more robustly than anyone could have expected. Gorse
spread rapidly and shaded the entire land allowing native tree species to start
sprouting under it at all places. In 10 years, the native forest had outgrown Gorse
on more than 30 percent of the land, and now after 32 years, the entire forest is
back with many more biodiversity and water bodies.

Hugh says that during these years, his team has worked only on pest control and
keeping away of cattle from the plants - the factors which could have slowed down
the process. They have taken the backseat and let nature do the work.
The project suffered a great loss due to a fire in 2011 caused by an electrical storm.
The forest burned for nearly 27 hours before the fire was put out. Luckily, it was
only Gorse that burnt due to being highly flammable and not native bushes. But,
the incident changed the entire landscape and the project fell behind quite a few
years.

Learnings

Hinewai is an inspirational story of how we can save the biodiversity and ecology of
a place. It has been a great success so far but it is an unending work. Hugh is a
living testimony to the fact that we can achieve anything we want once we set our
minds to it.

Hugh lives a very simple life. He walks or cycles to work which takes about two
hours for one way. He advocates against the use of fossil fuels. He believes in using
technology for the good and not just rolling with the tide. He says that uncritical
acceptance of technology is the reason we are losing a lot of our old skills and
artistic and creative satisfaction.

An inspiring and charismatic personality, Hugh lives his dream with passion and
enthusiasm. He believes that forestry alone can save us from global warming but
he also knows that forests are a part of the solution, not the entire answer. To
really change the circumstances, we have to change our way of living and the way
we consume energy. No one person can solve these massive problems, so the best
we can expect from anyone is to do their best at whatever scale is possible.

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