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“It seems quite counterintuitive to wade in with our chainsaws, but we are replicating a natural process that we’re missing,” says National Trust woodland advisor and author, Luke Barley. Whilst one side of the battle for our world’s forests involves protecting trees from destructive deforestation, Luke shares that British woodlands are actually suffering from the opposite problem, being left entirely alone. For thousands of years during what some have called ‘The Wood Age’, humans didn’t just live alongside forests, but actively shaped them, echoing the activities of wooly mammoths and other large animals from prehistoric times. Luke busts the myths of untouched, pristine, dark forests, and reveals why responsible and active forest management is essential to revive Britain’s biodiversity, by reconnecting us to our woodland roots.
National Trust plant a tree campaign: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/support-us/plant-a-tree
Find Luke’s book ‘Ancient’ just won the 2026 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and is available here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/ancient/luke-barley/9781805222231
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben Beheshty: Luke, thank you for joining Climate Curious. It’s, uh, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. First of all, can you start by telling us who you are and what you do?
[00:00:06] Luke Barley: I’m Luke Barley. I am an advisor with the National Trust, uh, on Woodlands and Trees. The National Trust is a big [00:00:15] land owning conservation charity in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as working for the National Trust.
[00:00:21] I’ve just written a book, so I’ve written a book called Ancient Reviving the Woods that Made Britain and Ancient uses my experiences of managing a number of [00:00:30] ancient woods as a ranger. So actually out on the tools to tell the wider story of the past, present, and future of Britain’s ancient woodland.
[00:00:38] Ben Beheshty: Wonderful.
[00:00:38] Humans and the Wood Age
[00:00:38] Ben Beheshty: You say that the forests of, uh, for people, not just nature. Why do you say that?
[00:00:43] Luke Barley: As I started to write [00:00:45] ancient, one of the things I wanted to write about is the need in our ancient woods today in Britain to manage them, to make them as good as they can be for nature. But if thinking about the need to [00:01:00] manage them, what it really got me thinking about is our woodland history, and ultimately the fact that we are a woodland species.
[00:01:08] We evolved in a wooded landscape before we started to farm for hundreds of thousands of [00:01:15] years since homo sapiens came along. You know, our current form, we lived in a wooded landscape, and then about two, uh, about 6,000 years ago, excuse me, we started to manage the woods even more intensively. And in that [00:01:30] period, from the Bronze Age until just a couple of hundred years ago, we were.
[00:01:35] Intimately and completely reliant on Britain’s woodland. We took almost everything we needed from the woods. We built our [00:01:45] buildings from wood. We built ships from wood, we took firewood, we made charcoal, which enabled the development of, um, metals, um, because it burns much more steadily and much more fiercely than would we kept our animals amongst [00:02:00] the trees.
[00:02:01] We took fibre from the woods, we took, you know, literally almost everything. And some people have actually called that period the wood age and say that, you know, calling this the Bronze Age and the Iron Age is missing the point. The whole lot was the wood age, [00:02:15] and it was only with the industrial revolution, you know, just a couple hundred years ago that we lost that connection.
[00:02:21] Because of the development of other materials, um, and because of the development industry and we came outta the woods and we were [00:02:30] put to work, uh, you know, we, we became more urbanised and we got the things we needed from other sources. And obviously lots of those sources are actually, we know now quite carbon intensive, but.
[00:02:43] As well as taking [00:02:45] us out of the woods, which I believe has been bad for us and has contributed significantly to our unique experience of nature disconnection in the uk. It was also bad for the woods because actually by managing [00:03:00] them carefully, but intensively for at least 6,000 years, we actually replicated the conditions of the Prehuman Wildwood.
[00:03:11] So. We now need to [00:03:15] resurrect our relationship with Woodland, both for our own benefit and also for the benefit of all the wildlife that lives in the woods. To understand fully why woodland management is good for [00:03:30] nature as well as good for people.
[00:03:32] Wildwood Before Farming
[00:03:32] Luke Barley: We need to go back. Before the Bronze Age to what we called the Wildwood.
[00:03:37] And obviously that period went on for hundreds of thousands, you know, millions of years really. You know, as, um, the, the British and [00:03:45] European landmass sort of slowly floated around the surface of the earth from the tropics and into our current location, nature drove its own processes and we think that that, uh, as Britain settled [00:04:00] into its current location in the temperate zone.
[00:04:02] Our best understanding is that our landscape was an opened woody landscape. So there were, you know, certainly over the past couple of hundred thousand years, there were all the tree [00:04:15] species and all the other associated species that we know today existed here in Britain. But obviously there were no people defining the landscape.
[00:04:22] It was a self-willed natural landscape and one of the big drivers for that landscape. Was giant herba bores, [00:04:30] nearly all of which we’ve lost from Britain today. So species like the A rocks, which is the prehistoric ancestor of the cow woolley elephants, lived in Britain’s Woodlands, a giant rhinoceros.
[00:04:42] There was a huge range of megafauna [00:04:45] in Britain. Crashing the landscape around and creating this dynamic kaleidoscopic mosaic of habitats, mature trees, scrub open spaces, and it all came and went and [00:05:00] developed and evolved over years with changes in weather and climate or the impact of those herbivores, which was really significant.
[00:05:08] Now we mustn’t forget. We’ve also got the impact of things like beavers creating massive wetlands. The whole landscape would’ve [00:05:15] been wetter than we know today because we’ve played such a huge role in draining it for agriculture. So you’ve got this thriving and ever changing woody landscape, but with all the species we know today, and that was where they all evolved.[00:05:30]
[00:05:30] From well before the Bronze Age, we started to influence it by hunting those megafauna. So we contributed massively to their extinction through hunting and through habitat change, and that’s often considered to be [00:05:45] probably the biggest impact we’ve ever had on the British landscape. Our contribution to the extinction of the megafauna, the next biggest impact was when we started to farm.
[00:05:54] So when we started to farm, we really started to control and define the way the [00:06:00] landscape looks. But as we managed the woods for the things we needed by cutting down trees and allowing them to grow back, we actually replicated those pre agricultural conditions that shifting ever changing [00:06:15] dynamism in the woods with mature trees, young trees, scrub.
[00:06:20] Open habitats all in that constant process of change. So we continue to provide the same conditions that all Woodland Wildlife had evolved to [00:06:30] need. Unwittingly we weren’t managing the woods, you know, in the bronze age for the benefit of Nightingales and um, pill, board of fertility butterflies. We were just doing it to get the things we needed, but it just so happened that in, in [00:06:45] doing so, we continued to provide those conditions.
[00:06:48] So.
[00:06:49] Why Woods Need Managing
[00:06:49] Luke Barley: As we’ve stopped managing the woods a couple hundred years ago with the industrial revolution, they have become dark, shady monocultures typically, and this is a symptom of shifting baseline syndrome that our generation and most people alive today grew up knowing the woods as dark, shady places, and we think that’s how they should be.
[00:07:11] They’re quiet, they’re remote. They’re [00:07:15] beautiful and um, cool on a hot day, and they’re lovely places to be, but they’re not as good for wildlife as they could and should be because we’ve essentially neglected them over the last couple of hundred years. So we need to restore [00:07:30] active management today to contribute to nature recovery, and obviously it brings.
[00:07:36] All these other benefits, like we can find, um, we can take, uh, low carbon materials from the woods. We’ve replaced some of those carbon [00:07:45] intensive materials that came with the industrial revolution with timber products. We get all kinds of wellbeing benefits from being well managed woods. They’re better for carbon sequestration of flood mitigation when they’re in good management.
[00:07:59] So we really [00:08:00] need to resurrect. That human history of active management of woodland, even though it seems quite counterintuitive to wade in with our chainsaws or whatever it is, um, you know, we are replicating a natural process that we’re missing from the [00:08:15] British landscape.
[00:08:15] Ben Beheshty: Okay.
[00:08:16] Medieval Woods and Commons
[00:08:16] Ben Beheshty: So like looking to your book Ancient, um, what can you tell us about the misconceptions we might have about ancient Britain’s land and forests?
[00:08:26] Like what did it actually look like and. Maybe more [00:08:30] importantly, why does that matter today?
[00:08:31] Luke Barley: Today we think of Woodland as being quiet and remote places. But if we go back to the mediaeval period, which is sort of the heyday of Woodland management, our woods would’ve [00:08:45] been alive with people. They were places of industry as well as for wildlife.
[00:08:51] So, and they would’ve been richer in both nature and people, you know, we would’ve seen a lot more people in the woods, you know, they would’ve been alive with the ring of axes. [00:09:00] Um, the sound of horses, hooves moving timber around, um, you know, people talking, shouting to one another, singing maybe. And there would’ve also been more wildlife because of that dynamism, um, because of that structural [00:09:15] diversity that our management drove.
[00:09:17] We would’ve heard more wildlife, so we’d have heard many more woodland birds, like wood warblers, willow warblers, Nightingales that live in the shrubby, growth in the younger areas of woodland, we would’ve seen lots more [00:09:30] butterflies that live in the open areas of well-managed woods or natural wooded landscapes.
[00:09:36] So it would’ve just been richer in all kinds of life, and as well as the woods that we think of as woods today. There was also [00:09:45] an even more important, or potentially even more important, wooded habitat called wood pasture, which we’ve almost lost our connection with today. So vast areas of what we now just think of as farmland would’ve been wood pasture, and that’s where we’ve got a lot more [00:10:00] trees in amongst the fields and with grazing animals around them.
[00:10:04] And we managed those trees as well. And quite often we took fodder from those trees. So we cut them in the summer when the leaves were on. Dried them just like another form of hay. [00:10:15] Um, and these pollards, as we call them, these trees that were often, you know, cut on a cycle in wood pasture, um, were also really important for firewood and for other products.
[00:10:24] And again, wood pasture. By having those grazing animals around [00:10:30] trees also replicated. The pre agricultural landscape in the same way that really well managed, um, woods do. And we’ve almost completely lost that connection with wood pasture today. We’ve got a few very important [00:10:45] remnant historic areas of wood pasture.
[00:10:49] But the really interesting thing about that disconnection with wood pasture is that often those places were common land. So the local people had the right to take the things they needed from wooded [00:11:00] commons and. With the industrial revolution, we also experienced the enclosure movement when lots of wooded commons were privatised, um, and landowners were allowed to develop them [00:11:15] to get the maximum benefit for themselves from the land and remove that connection of local people with the land.
[00:11:22] And I think that that’s another really strong. Contributing factor to our disconnection from nature. We [00:11:30] saw the industrialization of the UK and we also saw this really profound, um, enforced disconnection of people from common rights to land. Um, which again, is almost [00:11:45] unique in the UK in its severity in comparison to the rest of Europe, and I think contributes to our unique experience of nature, uh, disconnection in this country.
[00:11:54] Redwoods to Ranger Life
[00:11:54] Ben Beheshty: Sort of going back a little bit, you, you studied American history and literature before having this epiphany [00:12:00] amongst the California Redwoods. How did that experience, uh, actually lead to you doing the work that you’re doing now? And can you like just describe the, the journey, how you found yourself there?
[00:12:10] Luke Barley: So, when I was a kid, um, I absolutely [00:12:15] loved being out in the woods, but I think my connection to Woodland as a kid was driven by stories rather than. Nature. You know, I was really into Robin Hood, king Arthur, star Wars. Think of Endor and the [00:12:30] Ewok. You know, these were my cultural touchstones and this is what I wanted to go out and play, uh, with my mates.
[00:12:35] And, uh, I grew up just where, uh, south Manchester meets the peak district. We were really lucky to have lots of really great woods nearby. We spent all our time in them, and I absolutely [00:12:45] loved that. And I always liked the idea of being a ranger or something, but I didn’t really know what they did. I had no connection, no way in.
[00:12:52] And I ended up studying American studies at university, which is basically English and history, but I studied the American [00:13:00] modules. Um, and I can trace a sort of a route back to Woodland, I suppose, through my studies and particularly when I spent a year on exchange in California, which was an amazing, very fortunate experience.
[00:13:14] Not only did [00:13:15] I study, um, books, writers that really resurrected that interest with Woodland. So people like Thoreau and Emerson, a brilliant poet who’s less well known in this country, called Gary [00:13:30] Schneider, who writes about, um, woodland work and forestry as well as ecology. Um, and I also got to spend time out amongst the redwoods in California, which I found really.
[00:13:43] Inspirational. And actually [00:13:45] after university I went back to visit an old, um, a friend I’d made in California who was making a documentary about the tree sitters who protest the felling of the old growth redwood forests by building these ewok style [00:14:00] camps in the top of the trees to physically stop the loggers from being able to fail them.
[00:14:05] And I spent a couple of weeks in the company of these protesters, um, with my mate and. That was kind of the final push I needed. [00:14:15] I was already thinking actually, I want to be outside. I want to be, you know, contributing something really meaningful that I care about. I had this vague sense of wanting to save the planet, didn’t really know what conservation actually looked like in reality, [00:14:30] but that was definitely like the, the push, the last inspiration I needed to go and find out and figure it out.
[00:14:35] And so when I came home from that trip. I started volunteering with the National Trust and, um, have never looked back, but I noticed some people, um, [00:14:45] at that point, some people in my life that felt like a massive left turn. You know, I studied this very academic subject to university and now I was knocking a fence post and learning to use a chainsaw.
[00:14:55] But, um, yeah, I think in hindsight there’s a definite path between the two. [00:15:00] Yeah.
[00:15:01] Tree Planting Hype and Reality
[00:15:01] Ben Beheshty: So in recent years, some notable kind of public figures have been involved in like. Various degrees of forestry awareness and not to name and shame too much, but like we’ve got Coldplay, Mr. [00:15:15] Beast, Billy Eilish. These all have varying different partnerships with tree planting campaigns.
[00:15:20] What do people maybe get wrong or like miss about the plant? A tree for climate change phenomenon.
[00:15:27] Luke Barley: I do hear some cynicism [00:15:30] around people planting trees and there’s always some cynicism around just talking about numbers of trees. Stuck in the ground. But the fact of the matter is that trees are the best technology we have to draw down and store [00:15:45] atmospheric carbon.
[00:15:45] So we do need to plant and establish a hell of a lot more of them, and that’s one of our key mechanisms in combating climate change. Thus not. To say that it’s the absolute number [00:16:00] one priority, the number one priority is to reduce emissions. That is our job as humanity, reducing emission. But even after we’ve reduced emissions, we still need to draw down that atmospheric carbon.
[00:16:11] And that’s where new woods are really, really [00:16:15] significant. You know, woodland creation is widely accepted to be the best solution in that respect to drawing down atmospheric carbon. So it’s a really good thing to do, and we mustn’t let the cynics. Standing our way of doing it. [00:16:30] Where some of the cynics do have a point is that we do need to make sure we do it to a really high quality, and I think our sector is still on a journey in making sure we’re doing it to the quality we need to.
[00:16:42] So we do need to make sure that we are [00:16:45] not just nailing little whips, the tidy young saplings in the ground, and then letting them die because we’re not looking after them. We do need to make sure we are not just planted, sewed ranks of trees in plastic tubes that look terrible in the landscape and don’t [00:17:00] create a great habitat quickly.
[00:17:02] We need to think with a lot more sophistication and a lot more innovation to create brilliant habitats that are beautiful places for people to visit and that enhance landscape character [00:17:15] really quickly. And that’s what we are trying to do in the national Trust. Is, um, establish better new woods that deliver for a much wider range of objectives, because if we get that right, our new woods do so much more [00:17:30] than sequestering carbon.
[00:17:31] As important as that is. They also need to be great habitat, be great places for people to visit. Slow water, clean water, clean air, all those other benefits of trees, and that all comes through great. [00:17:45] Uh, design. So we’ve got some work to do to really drive better design, but I do think that that’s where there’s a really interesting link with my book and our understanding of ancient woodland because we can take the lessons [00:18:00] of our long history.
[00:18:02] With trees to inform the design of our new woods to make sure they’re as good as possible. So instead of just thinking about carbon plantations, those rows of plastic tubes that maybe look ugly, we’re not sure [00:18:15] what we’re gonna do with them in 50 or a hundred years. We can think really hard about how are we gonna restore that connection we had since the Bronze Age?
[00:18:23] How are we gonna make our new woods, places where people work and live? And where we take the things we need from them, [00:18:30] like low carbon materials or where they stop flooding in our towns. You know, all those other things that we really need from Woodland. We can use the history of ancient Woodland to think really carefully about how to make our new woods as good as possible.
[00:18:44] Ben Beheshty: [00:18:45] Getting cynical about that stuff I think is a trap in itself. ’cause obviously plants, trees is great. Yeah. And it’s important and necessary.
[00:18:51] Rebuilding Timber Culture
[00:18:51] Ben Beheshty: How do we rebuild like a local timber culture that goes sort of beyond? Swedish pine, or, uh, you know, burning copus as firewoods.
[00:19:02] Luke Barley: I think there’s a huge opportunity to develop a new wood culture, and specifically in terms of the way we use wood.
[00:19:12] There are huge opportunities, but there are [00:19:15] barriers to it. And actually the solutions are gonna come by joining up different disciplines. Woodlands can’t do it alone. We need. Architects, materials, engineers, scientists, [00:19:30] consumers, you know, everyone in the supply chain for materials needs to want to use more wood products because they are so much more sustainable and we need to find ways to link up those supply [00:19:45] chains much better than we are currently doing.
[00:19:47] So in research in ancient, I found some really positive examples. So. Um, even if we could just think about our ancient woods, where we’re more likely to just potentially [00:20:00] produce more conventional timber. So, um, you know, a tree cut into big sticks basically for using buildings. Only 2% of the oak we use in building projects in this country comes from the [00:20:15] UK because we are so bad at producing oak timber.
[00:20:19] And if you compare that to the mediaeval period when we built, um, all our great cathedrals, most of those have got well over a thousand enormous oak [00:20:30] beams holding their roofs up. We would struggle to produce a thousand oak beams from British woods today. Unfortunately, most of them come from France where they’ve still got a real industry around oak production.
[00:20:42] So there is an opportunity for us as [00:20:45] Woodlands to develop. To grow better oak trees and to think about how we can get them into the market in this country. But we also need the sawmills, the architects and the engineers to help us by asking for British Oak and [00:21:00] helping us to grade it and giving us the right specifications so we can grow it right?
[00:21:04] And so that we have the confidence to grow it for use in 5, 10, 50 years time. So that’s just one example. And then with relevance, both to, [00:21:15] um. Ancient woods and other woods, and we do need lots more new plantations growing softwood timber too. We need it all.
[00:21:25] Wood Tech and New Materials
[00:21:25] Luke Barley: I came across some really exciting technological innovations that could help us, um, find more, uh, better uses woodland products.
[00:21:34] So for instance, um, there is now a seven story, um, office building in East London called the Black and White Building. That’s built from a laminated beach. And if [00:21:45] you laminate wood, that means you stick together shorter sections to make the long beams you need. And that means you don’t need each individual tree to grow very big and very tall.
[00:21:57] You can take that smaller and woner wood [00:22:00] and glue it together into the actual construction materials you need. So that makes it much easier to use wood in bigger buildings. And they actually think that the structure of the black and white building is stronger than steel. But it’s got something like, I can’t remember the [00:22:15] actual figure, but it’s orders of magnitude lower in terms of its carbon, um, intensity than it would’ve been if it was concrete and steel.
[00:22:24] So it’s a brilliant, um, example. We’ve also seen [00:22:30] innovations, um, at, uh, the architect. Uh. We’ve also seen, uh, brilliant innovations at the Architecture Association’s Hook Park campus, where they specifically focus on [00:22:45] woodland management and wood products. Um, and one of the big products from mediaeval woods was what they used to call knee timber.
[00:22:52] They used the bent branches. They didn’t always need straight timber. They used those crooked branches on [00:23:00] purpose for, um. The buttocks of ships, which is the curved ribs of wooden ships or for the, um, to hold crook barns, giant grain barns, or, and if you’ve ever been to a mediaeval barn, you’ll have seen those [00:23:15] curved timbers holding the roof walk, and they were harvested specifically for their curves.
[00:23:20] So at Hook Park, the Architectural Association have done some brilliant work on resurrecting the use of knee timber. Um, but using computer design to [00:23:30] match the curves together. So instead of doing it by trial and error, they can scan the crux, um, with a computer and it figures out how to fit them together in the most efficient and effective way.
[00:23:40] So a really exciting new potential use for that old [00:23:45] technology of knee timber, which is really great. And then last but not least, the other thing where I think we’re gonna see huge innovations in the coming years. Where we break wood down into its constituent fibres and it’s got a couple of parti particular, [00:24:00] um, sort of structural components.
[00:24:02] Perhaps the most interesting is cellulose, and that’s the stuff that makes, um, makes wood, uh, flexible and able to bend. But we can break it down and extract the cellulose and turn it into fibres. And you’ve probably already [00:24:15] seen these, you know, we can get bamboo socks and bamboo underwear. Now. It’s the same kind of idea where we could turn.
[00:24:21] British wood products into fibres that we’ve got greater uses for, and I think we’ll see more of that. And the exciting thing for me in that [00:24:30] respect is that if we think about the management of our ancient woods, or even the management of some of our new plantations of woodland that we’re growing, we don’t need the trees.
[00:24:40] To be tall and perfectly straight, like a modern current conventional forestry [00:24:45] plantation. We’re gonna be able to turn much wonkier and smaller trees into really useful products thanks to technological innovations, and I think that’s gonna be really exciting in driving the better management of all woods, while also providing more of the things [00:25:00] we need.
[00:25:00] Ben Beheshty: Talking about computer scanning. Branches and and beams for like, you know, what have we got? What shape here just makes me think of being a kid and tipping out my little bucket of Lego being like, what have we got here? How are we gonna, I’ve not thought about that in a [00:25:15] long time, but that’s, yeah, that’s fun.
[00:25:17] Luke Barley: I think it’s really exciting. ’cause I think, you know, I think with, even during the course of my career, people have dabbled with that, but it literally has been by trial and error and it’s so labour intensive, whereas being [00:25:30] able to stick them on a conveyor belt. Send them under a scanner and you know, CAD to make this work to build a roof is basically on at hog park, you know, um, it’s extraordinary.
[00:25:44] Ben Beheshty: Okay.
[00:25:44] False Autumn and Drought Stress
[00:25:44] Ben Beheshty: So let’s finish up. You write frequently with your sort of ecological assessments of Britain’s woodlands. What can you tell us about the false Orly phenomenon and what the trees are really trying to tell us?
[00:25:58] Luke Barley: So some people might have [00:26:00] noticed this summer. This phenomenon called, uh, false autumn, which is where leaves fall early, say July or August.
[00:26:09] And it’s essentially a symptom of drought. It’s as simple as that. You, there hasn’t been enough rainfall [00:26:15] this summer. We’ve experienced, um, almost unprecedented period of dry weather over the past couple of years. And the trees don’t like it, quite frankly, as individuals. So it’s a drought impact that we’ve seen.
[00:26:29] And [00:26:30] I would say from my experience, this has been the worst year I’ve ever seen in my career for being able to observe the physical, physical impact of drought in trees. Almost everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve seen trees wilting or [00:26:45] that false autumn effect. And they do react differently depending on species.
[00:26:48] So there are some species in particular that really do just sort of drop their leaves almost immediately when they start to experience drought. And I think of a standard poplars near my house in Sheffield. Others that are better [00:27:00] able to tolerate drought or that show the symptoms later. So the overarching story in this respect is slightly depressing.
[00:27:10] Individual trees do not respond well to drought, and they do not respond well [00:27:15] to extremes of weather. And that’s what we’re starting to see with climate change. Rout in the summer, water logging in the winter trees, existing trees at an individual level don’t like. Frank Cle, I’m, I’m really worried about the [00:27:30] impacts that we’re going to see long term on Britain’s tree population.
[00:27:35] And we know that we won’t even see some of those impacts for a number of years. So the, um, the previous sort of very notorious drought was [00:27:45] 1976, um, which was obviously before I was born, hopefully obvious. Um, but lots of my older colleagues, you know, observed the impacts of the 76 drought. Over the subsequent decades, it wasn’t immediate.
[00:27:59] [00:28:00] You know, particularly in beach, there’s a real theory that some of the, um, giant pockets of decay and cavities that we see in our population of mature beach trees were a longer term result of the drought stress in 76. So that makes [00:28:15] me feel worried about the long term impacts we are going to see from these couple of years of drought.
[00:28:20] And the fact that this. These climatic conditions are likely to continue or even worsen over coming years. So that’s depressing. That’s the [00:28:30] depressing bit. Um, and it’s also depressing that it makes it harder for us to establish new woods. So, um, we’re seeing much higher rate of loss in new woodland planting than we would expect because of drought in summer.
[00:28:44] But we are [00:28:45] learning how to respond to that in terms of specific planting techniques, the silver lining.
[00:28:51] Resilience Through Regeneration
[00:28:51] Luke Barley: If I might say, uh, to use that sort of phrase, is that trees at the level of populations are very good at responding to a changing climate. The British climate has changed really significantly over the past few thousand years, and obviously over the evolutionary history of our tree species, the ones we know are love Britain.
[00:29:16] Today, the climate has varied dramatically. Over millennia and longer as those trees have evolved and adapted in this landscape doing what they do today. So British trees are [00:29:30] really good at adapting in terms of reproduction. Most of them reproduce sexually, so we get that mix and that genetic variation.
[00:29:38] And then the saplings that are best adapted to the climate are the ones that succeed. So [00:29:45] beyond the human timescales, our tree populations will. Recover Our job in that respect, I think is to give them the space to do so and to support their processes. And that again comes back to really good woodland management.[00:30:00]
[00:30:00] We need that variation in structure in our woods ’cause we need the open areas where new trees saplings can grow. We don’t want these monocultures staying static. We want to support the natural regeneration of [00:30:15] our woods. That’s what’s met will make them. Resilient to climate change. Likewise, we need to make space in our countryside where more trees can colonise naturally.
[00:30:26] So as well in as well as planting trees, we just need to allow woodland to [00:30:30] develop naturally by keeping livestock off areas of land. And that’s where we will see the adaptation to our changing climate in our tree populations. So we do have a role to play and we should also feel, um, [00:30:45] confident in a. Deep time sense and beyond our sort of narrow human perspective, that our wildlife and our habitats will adapt.
[00:30:55] Really our urgent short term job is to make sure that we [00:31:00] can adapt to climate change.
[00:31:02] Wrap Up and Credits
[00:31:02] Ben Beheshty: Thank you. Thank you so much for, uh, joining us on Climate Curious. I cannot wait to go to, uh, my local park. Have a, have a renewed look at all of the wildlife that’s there. Uh, thank you Luke. I really appreciate it. [00:31:15] Thank you for having me.
[00:31:16] It’s been really great.
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