When I chose to apply for a distance learning Masters in February 2020 I could never have imagined what the next 18 months had in store for the world, and that everyone would be joining me in the realm of remote communications. So my first year has been as I expected: studying online with disembodied voices, remembering to mute, and getting to grips with the academic resources at my disposal. I have beavered away at my desk, regardless of the pandemic raging across the globe, feeling thankful for my situation and deeply saddened by the suffering of so many. My studies have provided a welcome distraction from the news and given a much needed structure to my life. I have never baulked at solitude and slipped comfortably into a routine of working to the next deadline, barely aware of the days of the week. I liked the quiet roads but missed rubbing shoulders with strangers at the bar of our local. Holidays were cancelled, Christmas was cancelled, but from September my new purpose was all I needed and now I await the start of year 2. For some Covid-19 has been a hellish nightmare, wrought with pain, suffering and loss. This stark gulf between my experience and that of so many others has played on my mind. Having just had a short bout of the virus I feel truly indebted to the creators of the vaccine and grateful for my luck - that my life did not thrust me in to the eye of the storm.
As the academic year progressed I became increasingly comfortable with the process of learning, gaining confidence in my ability to understand new ideas, assimilate information and produce coherent written work. Initially I felt overwhelmed by the scale of the subject and the complexities therein. Forestry may be predominantly concerned with trees but to understand the subject I quickly realised that it is necessary to embrace the contexts in which it operates; political, ecological, socio-economic. If you ignore the context the chances of success are reduced....but what is success? Are you planting for timber? Do you you want to increase tree species diversity? Is protecting/improving biodiversity at the top of the list of desired outcomes? Is flood mitigation a priority? Providing social amenity may be the primary goal. The most salient context of all is the current climate change emergency and it is both exciting and sobering to be studying a subject that sits right at the heart of this crisis. Forestry today is at a critical juncture and the multitude of voices clambering to be heard, with their various solutions to the problem, can make for a confusing arena in which to study. You can never read enough, you can never know too much, and there is very rarely a definitive answer!
Two key factors that sit across all these options are time and scale - temporal/spatial considerations. Where, and over what area, do your plans exist? How long will they take to reach fruition? An interesting example of where these matters raise challenges is farming and forestry. Farms operate, primarily, on an annual cycle - they produce food for mass consumption working with the seasons (or not, as the case may be). Trees, on the other hand, take decades to grow and mature, whether you are nurturing them for a timber crop, as shelter for your livestock, or woodland creation for biodiversity. As farm land provides huge potential to increase tree cover across the globe, from the Welsh uplands to Sub-Saharan Africa, the question arises how to implement such a strategy? If we are going to ask farmers to plant and manage forests on their land, at the expense of production, we will have to pay them to do so - the environmental benefits are for all and the time-scales are long. These payments for ecosystem services will be the subject of much discussion here in the UK as new policies come to bear since our exit from Europe. There may well be pluses to the end of CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), which has been criticised for encouraging poor land management, wasteful practices and inequitable use of funds, but we have yet to see how the new schemes will work. I think it is crucial that an integrated approach forms the basis of these reforms if we are to tackle climate change whilst supporting food production and rural communities. In this country we do not have the luxury of large amounts of free space in which to significantly increase our tree cover - compromises will have to be made with cooperation between land managers, land users, and the powers that be. We need to continue growing trees as a crop, but not on deep peat and preferably with greater species diversity. We need a concerted effort to restore neglected woodland. We should embrace urban planting, creating pockets of green wherever possible. A more hands-off approach in certain areas could lead to expanded woodland through natural regeneration. All these approaches are currently in place, but if tree planting targets are to be met as part our national effort to meet carbon emission reductions, then a step change is needed.
Learning how to study, and discovering the methods best suited to my brain, have been mostly very satisfying and occasionally frustrating. An initial shock is the amount of information available and the realisation that you cannot possibly read it all. I learnt quickly to scan academic papers, articles, websites and books to ascertain their usefulness. You need to make a swift decision on whether to invest your time and brain power on any given source in the hope that it will take you where you need to go. Given infinite time it would all be useful - knowledge is knowledge - but within a curriculum structure and weekly topics you need to be discerning. I would build a collection of sources, some provided by the tutors, and put them in to a shiny new 'folder' - good organisation is a must. Working my way through the reading was not always easy and there were days where very little seemed to stick. Some academic papers are beyond dry and some were just beyond my comprehension. Finding a good one brings a little spark of joy in the new part of my brain reserved for such oddities. I think what happens is that you become better and better at absorbing information and creating connections between all the new stuff - connections that form intellectual ideas and new knowledge. What takes longer, for me anyway, is being able to verbally elucidate these ideas, and this is something I hope will improve with time. I am still rather new to forestry and feel somewhat intimidated by the expertise of those in my cohort who have been in the sector for many years. However we all bring our own stories to the table and undoubtedly learn from our varied experience - we may not have met in person but we are slowly becoming acquainted and offer each other much support and encouragement in our endeavours.
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