Welcome to the page for Where Now A Dark Wood Stands. Here you can view the video, find links to stream & download the single, and read more information on plantations and why, I believe, this issue matters so much.

With thanks to all the crowdfund supporters and to Creative Scotland for funding this project.

Plantations - What’s The Problem?

Why are conifer plantations a problem? The companies that plant them tell me that they’re good for wildlife and necessary for timber production. They’re enshrined in government policy and labelled as sustainable. Old ones are continuously being replaced and new ones planted. At a farm near where I live in the North-East Highlands, there was a hill used for ‘rough grazing’. And then one day drainage trenches were dug into the hillside, running down to a bog at the bottom of the hill. Soon after came the familiar sight of sitka spruce saplings, genetically modified to produce the quickest growing tree possible. They were planted in long, perfectly neat rows, and suddenly one hundred acres of semi-wild grassland had been replaced by a dark green monoculture. The farmer was unable to resist the financial incentives for doing this; money paid to him by the Scottish Government, and he had to meekly knock on his neighbour’s door - a piano student of mine - to apologise that his far reaching views of the Moray Firth would soon be blotted out by the plantation.

So what’s happening? The starting point for this story is considered the early 20th century, when the UK, being a relatively small, densely populated island, and having a long industrial history, suddenly realised they had cut down most of their trees. The First World War, which led to a huge increase in pressure on homegrown timber, spurred the government into action. The resulting tree planting effort was entirely about efficient production; they needed to produce timber as quickly as possible.

It was decades later, around the 1980s, that any environmental concern crept into this process. And this is where, perhaps, the problem lies. The timber production companies of today have made improvements to those 20th century plantations. A forester recently told me that new plantations require at least 5% native species, and 10% open land. But when these companies talk today about improvements, they’re talking about improving an entirely flawed process. What was entirely flawed, is, in my opinion (and in the opinion of many others), now simply flawed.

I recently returned to the hillside where I grew up; a windswept moor above Stirling. The grassy hills behind our old house, maybe two or three thousand acres of them, had taken on that ominous shade of sitka green. I was being presented with the ‘new wood’, the improved approach. And one improvement that I noticed was the edges of the wood were blurred; the density of spruce trees thinned into natural looking open areas with groves of spruce. This is an improvement designed to naturalise the look of these forests, as until now they were planted with perfectly straight, artificial looking edges; a painful sight that anyone will recognise when walking through the British uplands.

But beyond this, I was struggling to see how this wood was any better than the ones planted one hundred years ago. It was a sea of dense spruce trees. The creators of this wood will tell me they’re ticking the biodiversity box, but how? I saw no deciduous trees until I walked right down into the gully. And there they were, a few sad looking saplings in their trees guards, and beside them a huge metal bridge crossing the stream I used to paddle in as a child. The feeling of the hillside had changed; it had been industrialised, with an air of blandness, and artificiality, imposed upon it.

It seems to me that this way of producing timber, and of relating to trees, is simply a habit. We don’t need to improve the process, we need to chuck it out altogether. To reduce a forest to simply an economical process does trees a massive disservice. Through our mechanical inventions we’ve been able to reduce the old concept of a forest - with all its associated beauty, depth and mystery - to a crop, with tragic consequences both for humans and nature.

I wonder if any experiments have been done where a person’s brain is monitored while walking through the avenues of sitka spruce, and then compare this to the same person walking through a diverse area of woodland. But even without the science, I feel it’s obvious; humans are stripped of something vital in these plantations, as much as nature is.

Alternatives are possible. They’re demonstrated all over the world, and even in some places within the UK. You only have to walk through Norway to realise that things can be different; the persuasive rhetoric coming from those running our forestry operations suddenly loses its credibility. In the five weeks that I spent walking from Oslo to Trondheim I was able to experience a completely different kind of wood to most found in the UK. In places the forest was ancient, and protected, in others it was managed for timber, but in a way that didn’t strip it of its richness, its depth and its life.

According to the GWM1 (global wood markets info) in 2022 Norway became the largest exporter of softwood logs to the EU. The UK, in contrast, can only supply about 20% of its own timber and imports the rest. So, despite our intensive production approach we still find ourselves falling far short of being self-sustaining.

Norway is a much bigger country with a different rural history, which has left it with much larger tracts of forest. But the point is that alternatives are possible. In the glen where I live there is a forester who works for a company that largely practises an approach to forestry known as Continuous Cover Forestry, also known as Close-to-Nature Forest Management - a more sensitive and holistic approach to producing timber, and which is gathering traction. She was explaining to me that the economic benefits of large scale operations, with its associated clear-felling, is not as ‘clear-cut’ as we are sometimes led to believe.

We are creative, intelligent beings, able to find ways of supplying our needs without impoverishing the earth. It simply takes a strong will to make it happen, and in 2024 I believe the UK is still a long way from achieving the healthy relationship between humans and trees that we all desperately need.

If you’re interested in any further reading, here’s a very recent, and hopefully significant, report by the Royal Society Of Edinburgh. Published in 2024 it follows a two year enquiry, and is calling for a “radical rethink of tree planting in Scotland”: Read The Report

And if you’d like to read more about Continuous Cover Forestry, here’s an interesting page written for Silviculture Research International.