After another storm, pine slash is in the news again, clogging up rivers and beaches, damaging banks, and leaving a familiar path of destruction.
Pine slash is the waste wood left on the forest floor after harvest.
Although pine trees were originally posed as a solution for erosion, the practice of leaving the wood waste on the forest floor after harvest has awful consequences in a storm.
After most of the native forest was cleared in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and turned into pasture, many places had terrible erosion, and pine trees were posed as a potential solution.
But now, the sand on Akitio Beach north of Castelpoint is invisible underneath tonnes of wood detritus, a sight which has become common in the news, with the absolutely horrific images of covered beaches further up the East Coast.
Earlier this year, a boy died while playing in the logs on Gisborne’s slash-covered Waikanae Beach.
A heavy rain event in 2018 dumped an estimated one million tonnes of slash on the beach at Tolaga Bay.
Cyclone Gabrielle caused thousands of tonnes of rocks, soil, mud, and pine slash to surge down our valleys, damaging land, roads, and bridges, leaving layers of silt and piles of debris all the way out to sea.
The weight of the wood destroyed bridges.
This profitable industry has externalities: It leaves rubbish on the hillside, and when it rains, that rubbish damages and destroys infrastructure, productive land, causes injuries and kills people.
Surely this is not the best way to manage our land.
Forestry is an integral part of our local economy, employing thousands here in Wairarapa, but something needs to be done differently from business as usual.
If pine continues to be clear-felled in erosion-prone areas, we are going to see more and more damage.
We need more stringent regulations which require forestry companies to clean up their mess.
In some of our most erosion-prone areas, we probably need to reconsider whether pine forestry is viable there at all.
One solution for pine slash might be changing the law, so forestry companies must dispose of it after harvesting.
It could be through land use regulation, where pine forestry would not be allowed in places where slash would be washed into a river in a storm.
Maybe alternative tree species, maybe natives, need to be looked into.
Maybe forestry companies would need to look at alternative harvesting methods from clear felling.
None of these would be cheap, but the economic benefits of clear felling are being enjoyed by the forestry companies while society bears the consequences.
It’s not right to privatise the profits and socialise the costs.
Minister of Forestry Stuart Nash said last Thursday that there was no need for a government inquiry, or any sort of inquiry into the pine industry, following Cyclone Gabrielle, but there should be change in the industry.
I just wonder how many more dead people, dead animals, destroyed bridges, buried beaches, and irreparably eroded hillsides we will see before the government decides to make some meaningful regulations to the industry.
