John MacDonald: Pine re-planter says some will think it's madness. He's right - Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

I’m going to start by quoting someone I’ve quoted before - Dr Nicola Day, who is a plant ecologist at Victoria University in Wellington.

Knowing a thing or two about plants means she knows a thing or two about pine trees. And here’s how she describes them: “Pines are one of the most flammable plants on the planet."

I referred to the same quote last year when the Government turned down a request to change the forestry rules, so that pine forests couldn’t be re-planted after the big Port Hills fire in February last year. The second big fire within seven years.

And I thought of those comments again at the weekend when it was confirmed that the Christchurch Adventure Park is going to be re-planted in pine trees on land near a new housing development, which will eventually have 430 homes on it.

Which I think is nuts.

The owner of the adventure park land, John McVicar - who re-planted pines there after the first fire - knows some people will think it’s madness planting them again But he says arson is the problem - not the highly-flammable trees themselves. 

Credit where credit’s due - from what I’ve seen reported, it seems he has looked into the idea of re-planting in natives which, of course, are less flammable than pine trees.

But he’s saying that natives wouldn’t have worked and, what’s more, he’s saying that the highly-flammable pines themselves aren’t the problem - it’s people lighting fires who are the problem.

In 2017, there were two simultaneous fires and one of them is thought to have been deliberately lit. And there are strong suspicions that last year’s fire was deliberately lit too.  

I appreciate that the adventure park is on private land and John McVicar can do what he wants with it.

But when I heard about the pines going back in and then heard about sections in this new housing development near the bike park selling like hot cakes, and how eventually there’ll be 430 new homes there, I wondered whether we've learned anything from those two big fires.

John McVicar is the forest owner and he’s saying that, yes, he gets it that some people will think it’s madness that he’s planting pines again - especially after he re-planted them after the first fire in 2017, only to lose them after the second fire seven years later.

But he’s comfortable that he’s done enough looking into alternatives and he’s pressing-on with planting the pines this winter.

He says he’s had experts look into the idea of planting native trees - which don’t go up in flames at the rate pine trees do - but they found that the site was dry and windswept with rabbits and  goats and, for native trees to survive, they would need years of intensive care.

He says leaving the land as it is isn’t an option, either. Because weeds would take off and the experience of mountain biking in a forest would be gone.

All of that said - have not we not learnt anything from those fires? Especially the first one. Have we forgotten about the site of those trees going up in smoke?

I haven’t.

Just like the Christchurch City Council, the Selwyn District Council and ECAN haven’t forgotten. Because, last year, they went to the Government wanting help to stop pines being re-planted in the areas where the fires were.

Because the forestry rules, as they stand, allow anyone who has existing rights to have a forestry plantation to replace it like-for-like if it’s damaged or destroyed by fire.

The adventure park is a case in point. After 2017, the pines were re-planted there because the landowner had an existing right to plant them. There was nothing that could be done to stop that. This is what these local councils wanted to change.

And, because the Government didn’t want to change the rules, we’re stuck with the laws as they stand. Which means the pines are going back. 

In my view, what makes this worse than the