Enchanted Forest – Explorers’ Garden, Perthshire

Pitlochry from the air

The Enchanted Forest is a 3 week light and sound event showing off the Explorers Woodland Garden in Pitlochry, Perthshire. The show moved this year from Faskally Wood where it had been held since 2004, having inaugurated at The Hermitage in Dunkeld in 2002.

This year the event is called, fittingly, Transitions. It had its genesis in the roots of the Perthshire Big Tree Country and has attracted a number of sponsors while garnering prestigious awards:

Beating off stiff competition from some of Scotland’s finest events, The Enchanted Forest has scooped the Event Management Grand Prix, alongside the awards for Best Cultural Event and a commendation for Best Large Event.

We went to see this light and sound show – neither of us had ever been before. The web site hype is what drove us up to Pitlochry through some of the loveliest country on offer. The River Tay runs alongside the road until Dunkeld and Inver where the River Tummel joins it. Driving north from Inver which houses the River Braan also flowing into the Tay, the Tummel is a visual treat of a river seen winding its way below the hills all the way to Pitlochry.

I really like the forested hills and the smattering of deciduous woodlands that are on the valley floor. Of course sheep and cattle are always in view. I love it. Picturesque treat in the autumn when the trees are turning.

Of course Inver is of interest to me because it is so close to Birnam where Macbeth had to understand why the wood was coming to him.

Birnam Wood in Sepia 1800

And it also has a woodworking group called Burhouse  2.0 Ltd with all manner of tools, woods and machinery. The day we went, Burhouse was hosting a wood turning clinic. Combining a trip through the Enchanted Forest with the hunter gatherer’s penchant for wood and tools was a bonus.

This is the gorgeous view down Pitlochry's main street

Pitlochry itself is a pretty town and is one of those obvious reasonably well off arts and crafts towns. It sports a charming view down its main street.   It also has the Salmon Leap seen from the Pitlochry Fish Ladder

This is the Fish Leap - it looks amazing - I have to see it.

which is built into the Pitlochry Dam and power station. It is definitely a tourist attraction. We travelled through there when I first came to Scotland and my memories of Pitlochry stood the test. It is still a beautiful little town.

The photos we took at the Explorers Woodland Garden that night didn’t come out very well but here are a couple.

This is me touching the seed pod!!

There is a gallery of professional photos on the web site that are a treat and taken by proper photographers. Andy from Stravaiging would have taken excellent photographs. I will aspire to be a better photographer:-)

Of interest in the Garden are the Scots plant explorers who travelled far and wide finding plants. It could be a risky business in countries that hadn’t seen white men. My all time favourite is Robert Fortune.

I am a fervent tea drinker and when I came across a book called For all the Tea in China by Sarah Rose, I just had to have it. I couldn’t put the book down!

Fortune collected a lot more than tea from China; he brought back the Buddleja among other species. He had to disguise himself on occasion because of the hostility westerners could experience in China and elsewhere. His achievement though, was being able to finally (after years of disappointment and plant deaths) bring living tea plants back to India thus laying the foundations for the Indian tea trade. He also risked life and limb to extract the secret of preparing and making tea from the Chinese. He was intrepid. I owe him because I always need tea!!

He wasn’t the only plant hunter from Scotland of course. There was David Douglas who brought back the Douglas-fir from Canada. Then there was George Forrest who also travelled to China and Yunnan. He brought back the Rhododendrons and Primulas among hundreds of other species.

Francis Masson introduced Strelitzia and the Trilliums. One of my neighbours is fascinated by the trillium family. Thomas Drummond came back with the Acers and Phlox. William Forsyth had the Forsythias named after him.

These are a few of the names to be found on the Explorers Woodland Garden website. It is worth a visit. We plant and tea aficionados owe these explorers more than we can really appreciate.

Lights at Faskally

The Hermitage is a place I will visit soon. It sits on the River Braan and has a heritage Douglas fir, supposedly 200 feet high. The photos of the attractions look stunning. And it just over the road from Inver. Dunkeld here we come!!

Stone Steps at the Hermitage

What a walk!

Happy 50th WWF & please pass the elephants

Ah! The beautiful Panda

Spring is in the air and it is the 50^th anniversary of the founding of WWF. An organisation that has overseen a lot of humane treatment to wildlife and is lauded by the likes of David Attenborough who has brought so much footage of wildlife in all its beauty and danger to all of us. So, yes, heartfelt good wishes for the 50th anniversary of the founding of WWF.

The BBC has a TV programme called The Big Question aired on Sundays. Yesterday, the programme broadcast a segment on whether endangered animals need legislated rights. Wildlife is protected under international law but does not have ‘rights’ legislation. This particular Big Question was posed in part to signify the half century of existence of the WWF.

The working introduction from the presenter seemed to be that the pandas are dying, leatherbacks are being eaten and big cats are being hunted/poached, all to extinction.  Elephants are being hunted and killed by big game hunters and poachers alike, so the story goes. These instances are obviously only highlighted against a huge backdrop of current extinctions and habitat destruction.

Lovely thing

Don’t get me wrong, I am a very squishy person when it comes to animals. I can’t help it. They get to me – I hate seeing a big cat catch its dinner – the dinner plate is filled with big, soft brown eyes that – as Attenborough says – make me feel protective. It’s a natural human response. And I love cats too, big and wild and little and domesticated.

It doesn’t make me want to go and kill all the big cats so that all the baby deer and antelope can play. I am able to see and understand the concept of food chains and, critically, where we as humans sit on this chain.

Elegance personified

What it doesn’t make me do is bleed all over a TV production floor and say things like ‘animal rights are essential to protect the ecosystem on which we all depend.’ I mean how ill-thought out is this statement? Let me tell you.

I am prepared to state without fear of contradiction that if we as humans controlled our appetites to breed, to rapaciously grab all available and not so available land and over consume available resources, no animal would need rights or protection and we all would, indeed, be able to depend on our ecosystem(s). Normal extinction and evolution imperatives would operate on life, including us. At the moment, we are propelling ourselves inexorably toward our own extinction without waiting for evolution to work its unconscious manipulation on our species. Not so bright of us really. And every other species will make this journey with us because of our behaviour.

Why is it that people seem to wilfully ignore that Homo sapiens is part of this species’ endangering? The bleeding hearts seem to think that the cute panda doesn’t need to learn (in an evolutionary sense) to eat anything else to survive except its own brand of bamboo. Well, in all probability, the panda won’t have the requisite evolutionary time to adapt to any other food source. Man’s increasing need to reallocate the diminishing bamboo forests for his own use means that humans are destroying the panda’s habitat. So the panda dies out but guess what? Homo sapiens doesn’t, well, not yet.

I know that hunting licences are issued at a cost of tens of thousands of which ever currency. I know that some of that licence fee goes to wildlife care, ranger wages and poacher detainment. Okay, that is attempting to save endangered animals. It can’t be done without money. Not in the big world of human kind.

‘Not sustainable in the long run’ cried someone in the audience and she is right, at least in a sense. No attempt to save endangered species is sustainable while ever humans encroach on wildlife habitat. Homo sapiens will continue to do that until he annihilates himself or severely, yea, punitively limits, curtails or otherwise licences his own population growth.

A woman objected to the use of ‘Wildlife Management Plan’ proposed by an audience participant who had hunted elephants. She said that ‘we are all in this together’. Well, I suppose I agree with her but I want to know what’s wrong with a ‘Management Plan’ for Homo sapiens as well as for elephants.

Numbers are on the rise

We are too tender and precious to apply conscious management to our own breeding and our present global plight is the result of such non management. Something is skewed in the way we seem to view ourselves as distinct from other animals. I hope it isn’t unthinking genetic obeisance or supreme arrogance – could it be religious precepts?

The single common thread running through this whole debate about endangered species and their right to continue to exist is the proliferation of our species and the effect we are having (cumulatively) on our global habitat. This is a finite planet and we seem to be chewing it and everything on it up at a most alarming rate.

The debate devolves into words, words and more words producing the longest talk fest ever (with the possible exception of the climate change debate). These debates should include the realisation that at the heart of species’ existence or extinction is the burgeoning and largely uncontrolled growth of one intelligent, rapacious and ruthless species, Homo sapiens.

TOO MANY PEOPLE! CONFRONTING THE POPULATION DILEMMA

Can this planet sustain the number of people our population is heading for? Almost certainly not, but rarely do we hear calls to reduce our numbers. 2011 Edinburgh Medal recipient Carl Djerassi, co-inventor of the contraceptive pill, Sara Parkin, founding director of Forum for the Future and Aubrey Manning, zoologist and broadcaster, discuss the thorny issues of religion, contraception, economics and women’s right to choose, as they take on the population taboo. Chaired by Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh.

The Edinburgh International Science Festival is chock-a-block full of all sorts of events and one of them was the above described event. I am glad we went.

No answers were forthcoming – as usual. The topic itself has been of interest to thinking people since at least Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population that was published in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he termed ‘misery and vice’.

This is Darfur repeated throughout the world

I first started reading about the impact of global population growth in 1970 in a book called The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler. I have watched this exponential population growth with increasing horror ever since. It is virtually impossible to discuss or otherwise politicise such debate as is necessary if we are not to become the shortest lived species on this planet.

I think all of us would agree that as a species we are disunited individually and nationally, politically and economically. The only thing we do as a species imperative and with gay abandon is reproduce like rabbits.

Yep. Thats us.

Aubrey Manning mentioned that death control has worked extremely well over the past 50 or so years but birth control still has to come to the party. He is absolutely correct. The tracking of global population figures since I have been alive attests this. As David Attenborough said within his address to the Royal Society in March this year:

 Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many – and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants had to themselves.

 The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all – the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.

Logic alone should tell us that the resources and habitable land available to us and all other species (people in their arrogance seem to forget that we only share this sphere not own it outright and to the detriment of everything else) is limited on a finite planet. But developing countries have every right to tell us post industrial nations to pull out heads in if we try to curtail their development by preaching to them whilst we enjoy the over-ripe fruits of our own development.

There is no more water now than there ever was but it gets used with such profligacy that anyone looking at us from afar could be forgiven for thinking that water was being manufactured at an ever faster rate of knots.

Desertification is rampant and rising sea levels encroach more and more on (at this stage) small Pacific islands. The Boxing Day tsunami showed us what would happen to The Maldives and other low lying atolls and shores that Kubla Khan wouldn’t even have dreamt of building on.

Carteret Islands abandoned to rising seas in 2009

Carl Djerassi  peppered his address with figures for abortions both legal and illegal at about 1 million per 24 hour period worldwide. Of course Djerassi was a co-founder of the oral contraceptive pill for women in the 1950s. He hasn’t got an answer either, but he was combative about what he sees as wishy washy talk fests that don’t address the large and looming problem that is likely to have devastating effect around 2050.

Sara Parkin is the founder of Forum for the Future. Her concern is with women’s reproductive health and education. She talked about sustainable population growth. I actually do not think there is any such concept in reality. It sounds good but doesn’t take into account the nature of our species.

We all want more. Maybe not children if you live in poverty and watch at least half of your live births die within a few years. But we always seem to want more for ourselves – more food, clothing, space to live, accoutrements for pleasure and lifestyle. That just isn’t sustainable at the levels we desire. We can’t (or won’t) afford to feed our current refugees let alone try to feed a growing population.

Most of these kids wont make it - 2011

So what to do? Question time after the talk included one from a woman who postulated punitive measures like increased taxation and decreased support availability for families birthing more than two children. It is one of my ideas as well. Djerassi pooh poohed it as virtually useless in a global sense since only developed post-industrial countries could implement such measures. Of course, he is right.

I have mentioned before that Australia’s worst Treasurer (in recent times), Peter Costello, implemented a scheme whereby he gave Australian women a one-off payment of $A5,000 to have a third child ‘for the country’; talk about wilful irresponsibility! He later resigned though not because of that!

Djerassi pointed out that, although Italy has a below replacement population growth, the contraceptive measure in that supposedly most Roman Catholic of countries is by far condom use. The contraceptive pill accounts for only 5% of Italian contraceptive measures. Until recently the most common contraceptive measure in Soviet Russia was multiple abortions!

The problem is still an unmentionable – the elephant in the room. It seems to me we are unlikely to see the end of this century in any sort of good evolutionary shape. We shall be sliding off this rather nice planet that will keep whizzing around in this rather nice galaxy without us.

These are some essentials in this race against time and space:

Contraception of all sorts, including free, safe abortion is essential.

Education of women everywhere in family planning and taking control of their reproductive functions is essential.

The removal of religious and political interference in human reproduction is essential.

Are we up for it? Somehow I don’t think so. Only in our increasingly nightmarish dreams.

Future Food Security

The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”.

World Health Org. logo

So we aren’t there yet. I seriously doubt that anyone would claim that we have overcome the food supply issues that currently face the world.

Syngenta is the product of a merger in 2000 of Novartis and AstraZeneca, themselves having formed from earlier companies, stretching all the way back to Geigy in 1758. It’s quite a pedigree.

Market prices for veges

Anyway, the point is not to talk about Syngenta as such, but that of global agribusiness in general and the burgeoning of companies funding genetic modification, research and  the development of drought resistant, nutrient enhanced staple foods for farming in marginal areas.

I was listening to a Radio National programme on the ABC with regard to Australia’s role in all this. Now Australia exports over half of its agricultural produce (65%) and imports on a seasonal basis. Distribution costs add to the price to the end user of imported foodstuffs.

To maintain those levels in alternatively drying and flooding growing areas means smarter farming. There have been some silly experiments in Australia with regard to rice and cotton farming that have depleted natural resources and are a blight on Australia’s agricultural page.

However, it is not the only country having done stupid things that produce dustbowls and rivers with diminished flow. It is a global phenomenon born of ignorance about how to adapt best

Vertical Garden Melbourne

growing practice to the local place in which such growing is practised.

Desertification is driven by the imbalance between human demand and the supply of benefits by natural systems. Population growth, inappropriate policies, and some aspects of globalisation drive unsustainable pressure on dry lands. Occupying over 40 per cent of the world’s land area, dry lands are home to over two billion people. Half of all people living in poverty are in dry lands. The low water availability in dry lands today drives many of the challenges. The current average annual capacity at 1300 cubic metres per person is already well below the minimum threshold of 2000. United Nations Uni

Desertification in Australia

So what to do? As the global population burgeons, there are mouths to feed. I keep coming back to the definition of food security. I would rather include the ever growing global population and find ways to reduce that. And everything seems to come back to education and the empowering of women in the regulation of their reproduction cycles.

Education based on reality which means teaching science not belief in superstitions; we have enough of that already and it appears we have a propensity to imbibe more.

There are those who say the whole food security debate is a furphy designed to further vested interests. I don’t agree. Food security is a massive problem for governments and they are very aware of this. And it isn’t just poorer countries.

There are those who say that growing more food will not necessarily reduce the unequal distribution of food at all. I think it can change.

Imagine plenty of food

I agree that corporate profits push food prices higher while ensuring that excess food production unaffordable by poorer countries is wasted by dumping. Not to mention the food that is wasted in food rich countries by consumers. Not to mention the stored food that is consumed by other animals while in storage. India apparently loses well over 40% of stored grain to rats and mice.

Future food security is still an ideal, the reality of which is being researched by plant pathologists, such as Pam Ronald as well as the Syngenta type companies in the world.

Rice harvest Phillipines

Rice paddy prep.

When I hear the nay-sayers pontificating about the ‘evils’ of GM foodstuffs, none of which stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and then look at the number of people starving to death every day, I have to admit that my ire gets up.

I came across one Dr.Oz, a wooer of some note, mentioned by Ronald on her blog and was incensed enough to write a very vitriolic email to the said ‘doctor’. He’s an anti-vaxer as well. I will come across him and his ilk again and they will all get the back of my tongue in no small measure.

Apart from the stupidity of emotional arguments based on nothing (sounds like religion to me), none of these wooers have any practical proposal to feeding our growing population. We have to keep those already alive fed and clothed, let alone the ones that keep coming onto the planet.

Barley fodder for animals

So for me, I would far rather put my energy into the Pam Ronalds of the world and not whinge when Syngenta makes a profit. So long as knowledge keeps accruing and we get closer to keep our species alive without too drastic an effect on the world as we know it, we need to embrace the science that will help us all achieve future food security.

GM Food Products

Cloned cattle munching

I noted a couple of days ago now that the ‘campaigners’ are up in arms because cloned meat has been sanctioned for sale and consumption by the Food Standards Agency’s chief scientist, Andrew Wadge. Milk from cloned dairy cows is also on sale on supermarket shelves.

Wadge made his statement based on the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes’ conclusion that cloned food products are safe for human consumption. Actually the decision is based on food products from cloned animals and their offspring.

By and large it would appear that ‘campaigners’ of one sort and/or another tend to be a tad hysterical and are often driven by conspiracy theories that lay blame at the feet of those capitalist companies, individuals and governments that make money.

So nothing has changed. Except the burgeoning number of newspaper articles as journalists scramble to create as much controversy as they possibly can over what is perceived as controversial.

This issue poked its head up during August when some offspring from US cloned cattle embryos that had been imported into the UK ended up on supermarket shelves. No recording traces had been kept on those offspring and the outcry that ensued was loud but short-lived as I would imagine this one will also be.

There are a couple of reality checks that need to be applied here:

Biological and genetic science is fairly easily monitored. Public Health and Food Safety may not be exact sciences but both disciplines have come a mighty long way in the past century.

Cows (and other animals) born from cloned embryos and bananas grown from tissue-cultured stock are products of the same process. Each method – cloned reproduction in the case of animals and vegetative propagation in the case of plants produces exact clones of the parent tissue.

As bananas go, and you buy them every day in the green grocer’s shop, you can’t get a better, more technically perfect piece of fruit (just ask Ray Comfort!!). It has been suggested that I link to Ray Comfort’s video on youtube in case readers haven’t come across this creationist kook before.

Ray Comfort Gods Banana

Meat and milk products from animals produced by cloning represent greater homogeneity and therefore greater control over non-diseased and as clean food that you can reasonably expect.

Tissue culture as a method of propagation in the plant world produces exact clones of parent plants with desirable qualities. Here: have a quick read of good ol’ Wikipedia on tissue culture.

At what point do those of the ‘natural foodstuffs only’ brigade who call vociferously for sustainable agriculture on a realistic grand scale start to realistically address the feeding of the world’s population. A lot of this population lives on the margins of agriculturally viable land and are poorly fed. Malnourishment is rife.

Agriculturalists, governments and world health authorities are trying to provide nutritious food for a burgeoning global population. Some of the most abundant food available is the least nutritious and GM is addressing the rectification of this problem.

They are attempting to produce GM engineered staple food stuffs as intensively as possible because of the subsuming of good agricultural land by that same burgeoning population for residential purposes. Cities and towns tend to grow up around waterways, on coasts and around river deltas into which waterways spill and pollution becomes concentrated. As agriculturally viable land, such areas become less able to produce food.

Let’s rewind a few thousand years before science and GM. What did we eat and how did we determine what to eat? Our evolutionary history gave us the tools whereby we knew what to eat. If it was good, we ate more. If it wasn’t we didn’t eat it or if we did, we didn’t reproduce and we died. Good way to learn.

As the meerkat says: Seemples.

I will be accused of being simplistic. Today, we are arguing about only what minor detrimental effect GM or tissue-cultured foods may have on our short term health. Maybe there will be possibly long term cumulative effects on human health.

Prof. Pam Ronald

Nowadays we have the likes of Pam Ronald (a Plant Pathologist) and her research. Her blog Tomorrow’s Table is a wealth of information.

In the face of ever increasing global population and decreasing resources, long term effects are irrelevant.

The same basic evolutionarily derived rule of taste equalling good and bad taste equalling bad, therefore reject still applies.

Some commenter on one of the newspaper articles linked to snidely tried to tie BSE and Wadge together in an attempt to disparage and discredit him in his professional position. It is a straw man argument. Erecting the straw man of BSE distracts from the discussion (I don’t think there is  a meaningful discussion to be had anyway) and is totally irrelevant to the question.

If disaster befalls us and I am forced to eat a fellow human being, I will be an equal opportunity consumer and not distinguish between anti GM and GM supporters as I am certain they will both taste equally well and perform the function of nourishment thereby keeping me alive at least in the short term which will be all I can expect in an uncertain world.