Day 293 - 04 Nov 96 - Page 29


     
     1
     2   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  But he was not saying you had to wait a
     3        hundred years before you could chop down in that area
     4        again.
     5
     6   MR. MORRIS:   No, but the cycle was a hundred years, so you
     7        would have to have a hundred times the area.
     8
     9   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   That is why I wonder.  Why do you say that?
    10        If all you were taking out of it was mature trees, then I
    11        am not sure whether you are right, but I could see what
    12        your argument is.  But what they are doing is thinning this
    13        and taking brush out and everything else, and they are
    14        taking some trees young, and some older.  I should think by
    15        the time they are a hundred years old they are a bit too
    16        thick for telegraph poles, so they probably take those at a
    17        certain age and they lop off the branches and chuck them in
    18        some enormous machine which pulps them up and uses
    19        chemicals, perhaps.
    20
    21        But you cannot do it just once every hundred years so that
    22        you need a hundred times the area, can you?  Explain that
    23        to me.  You are getting some out at 10 years, some at 20,
    24        some at 30, and so on.
    25
    26   MR. MORRIS:   Yes, but they have a cycle, they have a cyclic
    27        programme for how to deal with a plantation forest which is
    28        over a period of -----
    29
    30   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   Yes, but you are taking stuff out and it is
    31        growing again in the meantime.  I mean, this is what
    32        I assume.  If you want the fully mature tree, you do not
    33        take it, let us say, until a hundred years, but you thin a
    34        bit out after a few years.  And then fir trees, being
    35        uncooperative things, they will drop their cones and
    36        something else will grow and you would thin that out and
    37        that sort of thing.  Is that not what is happening all the
    38        time?   So you do not just have -----
    39
    40   MR. MORRIS:   Yes, but I think ----
    41
    42   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   You do not just need a hundred times the
    43        area because the trees are not fully mature for a hundred
    44        years.  You are talking stuff out of it all the time here
    45        and there.  I mean, that is what I would have thought.
    46        Maybe that is wrong but that is what I would have thought.
    47
    48   MR. MORRIS:   Well, my understanding is that they work out the
    49        cyclic programme based on what they can take per year based
    50        upon a calculated generation of how long the forest will 
    51        take to regenerate or be regenerated, and therefore it is a 
    52        planned -- the whole point of a plantation forest is it is 
    53        a planned operation where we can take this out this year,
    54        we can take this out next year, and that is what we can do
    55        with this forest over the next hundred years until all the
    56        trees that were planted at the beginning are mature and
    57        cropped.  So they work on the basis of this is the area of
    58        forest ----
    59
    60   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   I see the way you are putting it.  I am just

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