I have a Sunday walk that takes me from the Newlands Forest Station up on to the contour path, and then toward Kirstenbosch. Mostly it is a pristine and shaded route.
Last Sunday a chance encounter with another hiker led me to take a different route: eastward on the contour path toward the blockhouse. I asked him what the route would be like.
“Sunnier, a little more rugged, with great forest trees, except for the bark stripping,” he replied. The route was different, and beautiful for the reasons he had mentioned, but I was not prepared for the extent of bark stripping that we encountered.
In a distance of about 2km along the path about 40 trees (all of them indigenous, mature) showed obvious signs of having been harvested for their bark.
Looking closer I could see that remnant bark had been scored by a tool that had probably been an axe.
Typically the stripped area was from just above the ground to about as high as one can reach unaided by ladder. The stripped area was mostly about half of the girth of a tree. Of the trees that had been harvested, about a quarter of them were already dead: it is a heart wrenching thing to look high up into the canopy and to see, not green, but the brown of lifeless branches and leaves.
Bark is made up of dead carbon cells that provide a waterproof covering to the living inner tissue. On the outside it protects the trunk against the elements, disease, animals and fire.
Inside, just below the bark lies the layer called the phloem whose function it is to transport sap, containing the sugars made by photosynthesis, to other parts of the tree.
Underneath that, the sapwood, transports water and minerals from the roots to the upper parts of the tree. If these layers are substantially breached the tree is unable to nourish itself and is bound to die.
It was evident that conservation authorities, probably SANParks, were aware of this harvesting because stripped areas had been painted with a tar-like substance, presumably to try to protect these layers. Where stripping had been too extensive, the trees had died.
One has an emotional response to the death of these beautiful giants: imagine all the investment – rain, sunlight, nutrients, all recorded in its growth rings – that had gone into each tree.
Think of the habitats of birds and other living things that they supported, from the leaf litter on the ground to the canopy in the sky. The ecosystem services performed by trees is accepted science. They store carbon, remove air pollution, ameliorate extreme temperatures, and hold rainwater by intercepting it on their leaves, and in the soil between their roots.
It has been estimated that in order to immediately replicate its benefits, one felled mature tree must be replaced by 30 saplings. The USDA Forest Service has shown that large, healthy trees remove exponentially more air pollution than small ones.
In an enlightening paper, titled “Cape Town’s trade in wild medicines: ecological threat or essential livelihood resource”, Leif Petersen of the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation wrote perspicaciously in January 2014 that “current trends in the use of resources and in the growth of the population of the City suggest that unsustainable rates of collecting natural resources in protected areas are likely in the future.
This presents a considerable challenge for conservation officials. Policymakers need to balance the priorities of social economic development (in a largely informal economy), the cultural requirements of large sections of the local population and limited control and influence over thousands of wild resource harvesters, while maintaining ecosystem integrity in key natural habitat areas”.
Petersen’s researches show that herbal medicines are used by herbalists such as Rastafarians, and dispensed to patients by amaxhwele and amagqhira. His paper does not say who is actually responsible for the harvesting practices.
Based on the foundation’s estimates, there are some 51 000 full-time practising traditional healers operating within the City’s township settlements.
Cape healers trade an estimated 1 300 tons of biological plant material per year, of which approximately 260 tons are harvested within the City’s boundaries.
These facts make it apparent that harvesting for medicinal purposes is an entrenched part of cultural life in the city. Although it is illegal, law enforcement is unlikely to make any difference.
Yet I feel sure that if the healers and the end users of these medicines were properly apprised of the facts – that current harvesting practices are killing mature trees for a small harvest of bark – they would not want these practices to continue.
There must be many solutions that could come out of an indaba of interested parties: healers; conservationists; botanists; ecologists; educators. Licensing harvesters; setting aside portions of the forest for harvesting purposes; growing the trees that yield the bark; mutual education; more efficient harvesting practices; better tools, or methods of harvesting that do not damage the vascular tissue of the trees, all come to mind.
After all, the sustainable harvesting of bark is not new. Think only of cork; tannin; quinine; and before it was synthesized, aspirin. The problem is not intractable, we just have to start somewhere. We look to our conservation authorities to embrace this challenge.
Edmunds is a practising advocate and maintains a keen interest in ecology and conservation.