FE6.5 - The Method - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
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Introduction Voiceover (00:01):
You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.

Adam Huggins (00:07):
Hello?

Mendel Skulski (00:08):
Hey, Adam.

Oh, hey, Mendel, what's up? Actually, I'm at work
right now. Do you think wecould-

No, no, that's perfect. Listen. Can I make you
a pitch? I think I've gotsomething you might really like.

Okay, make it quick.

Adam, are you tired of trying to restore
ecosystems, only to have them beovertaken by weeds?

I mean, story of my life.

Do you gaze in despair at the dry, crusty soil,
desperately hoping it will comeback to life?

I mean, that's, that's embellishing a bit, but
sure, why not?

Do you watch helplessly as the trees you've
planted succumb one by one todrought, disease and the hungry
mouths of ravenous insects?

I mean, occasionally, but that's,
that's, that's not the norm.

Well, do I have an offer for you. What if I told
you that there's a revolutionarynew way of planting, not just
trees-

Social Media medley 1 (01:10):
But creating these tiny, dense,
thriving forests, this tinyforest behind me here grows 10
times faster, 30 times denser,and will be 100 times more
biodiverse than conventionalways of planting trees.

The forest is designed to rapidly
become a climax forest, anecosystem that, in nature, could

[
take hundreds of years to form

This barren land went from this to
this in less than a year, thanksto a special afforestation
method started by a Japanesebotanist decades ago, the so
called Miyawaki method...

The Miyawaki method.

The Miyawaki method! These tiny forests are
popping up everywhere. Just afew weeks ago, a new one
appeared in my neighborhood,actually, like, literally a five
minute walk outside my frontdoor.

Okay?

And what if I told you that using the Miyawaki
method, you can create forestswhich grow at 10 times the
speed, 30 times the density andwith 100 times the biodiversity
compared to conventionalplantations.

What if you told me all of that? Okay, sure. What
if you told me that I couldplant my very own tiny forest
and say farewell to all of mytroubles?

Yeah, exactly.

Sounds great. It really does, Mendel. But there's
just one problem.

What is that?

I mean, other than I have to get back to work...
the problem, Mendel, is that Iam already familiar with the
Miyawaki method. I have read DrMiyawaki's papers. I've read his
book, and I have witnessed someof his so called tiny forests,
and let's just say I have mydoubts about whether his

(03:06):
approach to afforestation ismethod or just madness.

Well, let's find out, shall we? From Future
Ecologies, this is The Method.

Introduction Voiceover (03:23):
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of theMusqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is FutureEcologies – exploring the shape
of our world through ecology,design, and sound.

So any introduction to the Miyawaki
method first begins with anintroduction to its namesake,
Akira Miyawaki.

Yué Bizenjima-Chrea (04:13):
Okay, are you buckled up?

And helping us along, we have Yué Bizenjima.

Bizanjima is a very, very unusual name. I
was born in Japan, grew up in aBuddhist temple.

And after living and studying in Japan, Yué moved
to BC, where she began her PhDat Simon Fraser University.

Hey, I went there. I mean, I dropped out.

I have a wonderful friend and mentor,
someone I call my Canadianmother, Janet Amsden. And one
day I was over at her place fordinner. She asked me, Yue, do
you know what the Japanese miniforest is? And at that time, I
was like, oh, Japanese miniforest. You mean bonsai?

Janet handed Yué a book – Mini Forest Revolution,
which told the story of Dr AkiraMiyawaki and the many forests he
created around the world andwithin Japan, including where he
taught at Yokohama NationalUniversity.

That photo in that book struck me. I have
it here because I went touniversity in Yokohama, so I
used to walk this path so manytimes as a student. And I had no
idea that was actually a manmade forest. I thought it was a

(05:35):
natural forest that's been thereon that mountain. And I thought
the walking path was thesecondary created thing.

So she went on to immerse herself in Miyawaki's
prolific writing, much of whichhas actually never been
translated into English — aproject which Yueé has now taken
on as part of her PhD.

Dr Miyawaki's original Japanese
writing really absorbs me intomy heart very easily, because of
maybe my Buddhist background,but also we've been reading lots
of Indigenous way of knowing andlearning and teaching in my PhD
course as well. And I see aprofound alignment within all

(06:19):
those even though he's abotanist, he's very
philosophical in his writings,in these books.

So Adam, you said you'd read one of his
books?

Yeah, actually one of only two of his books
translated into English, as faras I can tell. It's called
Forests for the Future, and itwas published in 2013.

And what was your impression? How did his
writing hit you?

I mean, it definitely drew me in. He's a
fascinating character. He wasborn in 1928 in a farming
village called Nakano. Hedescribes himself in the book as
a frail small child, not popularwith girls. So you know,
relatable guy. He studied atseveral Japanese universities,

(07:04):
including Yokohama, as you said,and his focus was the ecology of
weeds. And he was reallydedicated to this! Over a six
year period, he writes that helogged 240 days each year
surveying roadsides and farmsand old fields for weeds,
traveling all across Japan andsleeping, you know, in train

(07:26):
cars and out in the field andwith anyone who would take him
in, basically.

Wow, living rough!

Exactly. And his writing is very honest. I would
say, at one point he writes, Ifthere was a contest to decide
the man who doesn't care abouthis family, I would be the
runaway winner.

Oh, my God!

I was neither a good husband nor a good
father... And you know, I thinkhe writes that just to
demonstrate that he was reallyconsumed by his studies, and
eventually that paid off. Hemanaged to achieve one of his
dreams, which was to go abroadand study in Germany under the
botanist Reinhold Tüxen, who washimself a student of Dr Josias

(08:09):
Braun-Blanquet. And stay with mehere, I know that these aren't
household names now, but thisguy was the father of a
discipline calledPhytosociology.

So Phytosociology studies plant
communities, their composition,structure, distribution,
interactions with theenvironment they're in.

Don't we just call that ecology?

Yeah. Dr Miyawaki also talks about the
etymology of ecology. So theword ecology came from the Greek
word oikos, and that actuallydistribute into ecology and
economy. So he talks about therelationality and forest as a
community.

Mendel, I had never heard of phytosociology
before. I guess it's somethingthat I would have studied if I
had known it had existed,because it sounds awesome to me,
but basically it classifiesplants into associations and
communities based on climate,soils and other fundamental
characteristics. Like you said,ecology. Miyawaki wrote about

(09:17):
his time in Germany.

Dr. Akira Miyawaki (09:18):
Professor Tüxen was especially obsessed
with soil profiles. We dug holesall day long to ascertain soil
profiles without respite. Ilearned that a soil profile can
tell us what the potentialnatural vegetation would be.

So basically, you can observe a site, dig a soil
pit, you know, characterize themicroclimate or whatever, and
then be able to say what theplant community for that site
should be, assuming that peopleleft it alone.

So, like the climax conditions, right?

Yeah, kind of like that. And I looked at this
system, and I thought to myself,this seems really familiar.
Isn't this how ourbiogeoclimatic ecosystem
classification system works herein British Columbia? And sure
enough, the system that Iregularly use as a biologist was
created by this remarkable Czechbotanist named Vladimir Krajina,

(10:14):
who was heavily influenced byphytosociology. Sidebar, he was
also a hero of the Czechunderground resistance to Nazism
during World War Two.

Right on.

And then became the General Secretary of their
Democratic Socialist partybefore being forced to emigrate
to Canada when the Communistscame to power.

Sounds like a righteous dude.

Yeah, apparently he's a household name in that
part of the world. Anyway, hebrought the concept of
phytosociology with him fromEurope and adapted it for us
here, which is exactly whatMiyawaki ends up doing in Japan.
He was deeply influenced byphytosociology at a scientific
level, of course, but also, Ithink, at a spiritual level.

(10:53):
There's this amazing lesson thathe recounts when Dr Tüxen told
him

it's too soon for you to listen to what
others have to say. Youshouldn't read books yet. What
you find there could be just acopy of what someone else wrote.
You'll have time for listeningto others. You'll have time for
reading books.

Instead, he continued,

Look at the Earth, look at nature. The drama
of real life is unfolding beforeour eyes.

And this philosophy of direct and careful
observation of nature, of seeingthat which is hidden, permeates
Miyawaki's writing.

He also quoted the word als Ganzheit.
It's a German word. By viewingthe nature as an interconnected
wholeness, its true form comesinto view.

So when Miyawaki finally returns to Japan in the
1960s, he immediately sets outto discover the true form of
Japan's ecosystems — whatphytosociologists like to call
the potential naturalvegetation. And instead, of
course, he found farms andfields and sprawling plantations
of non-native conifers, which hereferred to as fake forests.

Sounds familiar.

Definitely. He realized that most of the
landscape in Japan had alreadybeen transformed, and he was
actually afraid that he would beunable to reconstruct the
potential natural vegetation,for lack of examples of it. But
then he recalls this forest lessthan, you know, a couple 100
meters from the farmhouse wherehe grew up, surrounding a

(12:36):
shrine. And he remembered in hischildhood how every year in that
forest, there would be an autumnfestival where, long past
midnight, the traditional Kaguradance would be performed. And he
wrote,

One year, after the Kagura was over, I was
lying under a large tree on thegrounds of the shrine and
looking up at the sky. The thickbranches floated in the inky
blackness against the still dimsky and the biting cold air was
striking. I felt my young bodywould be engulfed by it.

With this memory, he realized he knew where to
look to study the primordialforests of Japan. They had been
preserved in sacred groves allaround the country that are
known as Chinju no Mori.

Wow. Adam, you've been learning lots of
Japanese. Yeah, so Chinju noMori. Chin means healing. Ju
means protect. No is of, theparticle of. And then Mori is
Forest. So direct interpretationwould be healing guardian

(13:48):
forest, or sacred guardianforest. And he also talks about
the ancient Japanese wisdomcreated these forests
surrounding these shrines andtemples to create the sense of
reverence for people not toeasily modify it or cut it.

Miyawaki spent many years studying these
forests, and he eventually wasthe lead author of a 10 volume,
6000 page tome called thevegetation of Japan, which is
still used today. But he wasn'tsatisfied with simply studying
Japan's native forests.

Heather Schibli (14:29):
He started to explore ways of emulating those
forests, so he went to theShinto temples and started
collecting seed from there andtried out this method of
planting that has turned intothe Miyawaki method — and it is
incredibly dense! And I thinkthat's where a lot of people
scratch their heads, becauseit's quite different from
conventional ways of planting,both in restoration and

(14:51):
ornamental.

This is Heather Schibli.

And I am a landscape architect, a
terrestrial ecologist and aconsulting arborist.

Starting in the 1970s, Miyawaki began a series
of unlikely partnerships withJapanese corporations like
Nippon steel, Toyota, andMitsubishi, to plant what he
called Furusato no Mori, orhometown forests on industrially
degraded sites.

He wanted to restore some of the native
Japanese forests in a landscapethat was predominantly
agricultural and plantation, andto do it in a way that you could
plant in urban spaces as well asrural.

And he was wildly successful. Before long,
Miyawaki was being asked totravel throughout Japan and then
outside of Japan, around theworld, eventually establishing
over 1500 forests and plantingmillions of trees, mostly as a
part of these re greeningefforts by large corporations

(15:54):
looking for ways to give back.

And one of those was in India, and I'm sure
you've heard of Shubendu Sharmawith his TED talk. He was an
engineer in India who was one ofthe volunteers at these
plantings, and he was so takenby it that he started to plant
them himself, and then was askedto present a TED talk. He was
saying that he needed to reallysimplify the methodology and the

(16:20):
message to be able to conveythat message internationally,
and that worked.

Shubhendu Sharma [TED Talk] (16:34):
I'm an industrial engineer. The goal
in my life has always been tomake more and more products in
least amount of time andresources. While working at
Toyota, all I knew was how tomake cars, until I met Dr Akira
Miyawaki, who came to ourfactory to make a forest in it.
I was so moved by these resultsthat I wanted to make these

(16:55):
forests with the same acumenwith which we make cars or write
software or do any mainstreambusiness. So I formed a company
which is an end to end serviceprovider to create these native
natural forest. But to makeafforestation as a mainstream
business or an industry, we hadto standardize the process of
forest-making. This forest growsas a collective. If the same

(17:19):
trees, same species would havebeen planted independently, it
won't grow so fast. And this ishow we create 100 year old
forest in just 10 years. Thankyou very much.

A 100 year old forest in just 10 years, that is
a real engineering breakthrough,I would say

No kidding

Thanks in large part to Shubendu's TED Talks,
the Miyawaki method has nowbasically gone viral, traveling
from its origins in thesalt-contaminated reclaimed
soils of Nippon Steel's Oitasteelworks...

To my neighborhood in Vancouver, 50
ish years later. You know, it'sout with the standard street
trees and in with a Miyawakimicro forest.

I mean, I find this approach super exciting,
because it challenges so manythings and it opens up
possibilities of trying toengage the landscape
differently. Most people, whenthey plant a tree, they're
planting an object, right? It'snot a subject. And they're like,
planting it based on its color,its form. I mean, I was trained

(18:34):
in landscape architecture.That's like, what we do. We
treat plants like objects,right? They're furniture for
outside. This is planting acommunity! This is like mind
blowing for most people, becausethey don't even begin to
understand that species have coevolved with other species in
similar conditions. Some specieslove hanging out together.
Others are never seen together.We're starting to expand the

(18:58):
understanding of plants fromobjects to plants as subjects,
as part of communities. Sothat's what I find super
exciting.

Okay, so at this point you might be asking, but
what is the Miyawaki method?

Let's break it down. There are regional
variations, but if you lookacross the internet, this is
kind of the core recipe. First,you choose a site, preferably
one that would benefit from sometrees.

And then excavate down a meter deep, one
meter. Pull up all thatmaterial, put it in a pile.
There's three amendments thatyou need to add to this,
nutrients, water retention, andthe other one's kind of like to
fluff it up so that you've gotsome air in there, and then you
mix it all together and you dumpit back in so you get this big

(19:51):
like mound.

So step one, heavily amend the soil. Step
two,

Plant three to five woody plants per square
meter, and these must representfour layers of like a forest
structure. So you have canopy,sub canopy, understory and
ground cover — all woody plants.And you try to do it randomly,
both in terms of height and alsowith the layout.

Step two, based on the potential natural natural
vegetation for your region,establish a variety of native
plants from potted nursery stock— Miyawaki was a stickler about
that — at sub-meter density. Andjust to put that in perspective,
there are 10,000 meters in ahectare. So that translates to a
density of about 30 to 50,000stems per hectare. And you know,

(20:42):
for those of you who listened toour episode earlier this season
on plantation forests, we weretalking about how forests at
1000 stems per hectare arepretty dense and would benefit
from thinning. The initialplanting density for Miyawaki
forests is an order of magnitudemore and then some

Right. And, like, the proponents for the
method argue that it's exactlybecause of that intense
competition for light that thewoody plants grow super tall,
super fast, faster than theyotherwise would.

10 times faster!

Right, yeah. With a canopy, you know,
reaching up to 10 feet in justthe first year, and that's while
the shrub layer and the groundcover are keeping the soil moist
and cool and weed free.

And I'm trying to think if there's anything
else... Oh yes, of course, youhave to mulch it, and you're
done, you're golden.

So presto, just add water, sit back, and watch
your forest grow. You know,maybe weed occasionally. Don't
be too worried if some of yournew plants new plants die, the
forest is so dense they'll justduke it out until they take up
all the available space.

Can I just say Mendel, I see a lot of upsides
to this approach. If I wanted togrow a lot of native vegetation
very quickly and leave no spaceat all for weeds, this is
exactly what I would do. I mean,if I had a boatload of money to
do it anyway.

And a boatload of plants!

Yeah, exactly. But Mendel, is this really ecosystem
restoration? What happened tophytosociology, and to Dr
Miyawaki's careful attention tothe unique characteristics of
his sites? The soils? Themicroclimate? The water?

No, no, no. Whatever's happening underground
doesn't matter. You're going toadd all sorts of amendments.
You're basically going to mix upa giant batch of, you know,
potting soil. And, you know, Ithink it's no surprise that some
plants will take really well toit. But okay, I'll admit maybe

(22:43):
some of the ecologists out thereare wondering, isn't this a
little decontextualized?

You have to, like, actually look at your
site. What are your soils? Whatis the hydrology like? And then
you need to scan the largerlandscape and try to find a
match and then mimic it andreflect back what you're seeing,
and Miyawaki would actually goand collect the seeds from those
reference sites. So you'reactually bringing the genetics
in too. Because my reasoning is,if you have clay soils, you use

(23:12):
plants that love clay soils.That's what you do. Not, well,
you need to amend these to makethem more like loamy, because
you're creating kind of like alittle ice cube tray of a
different soil in this largercontext.

You might have detected that Heather is a fan
of some parts of the Miyawakimethod, but not necessarily all
of it. She and her colleaguesstill design and implement these
high density urban plantings,but she says they sometimes
catch some heat from Miyawakipurists.

We started calling them mini forests
because we weren't following themethod, right? So that's why
we're, like, we were not goingto call them Miyawaki forests
because I'm really opposed tothe excavation in particular.

So we have folks like Heather who are harnessing
the potential of the Miyawakimethod, excuse me, the mini
forest method to inspirepositive change, but they
recognize the need to adapt itto local conditions. And then we
have folks like Fazal.

Fazal Rashid (24:12):
See the whole thing with the Miyawaki system
is that the public knows nobetter.

This is Fazal Rashid. We spoke to him and his
friend and colleague and coauthor, Somil Daga.

Somil, do you want to go?

Somil Daga (24:26):
Sure. So hello, I'm Somil. I'm based out of the
northwestern state of Rajasthanin India. And I started out as
an engineer. I'm trained as anengineer, but eventually, a
long, winding path led me downto giving that up totally and
getting into plants.

Mendel, we've finally found your people!
Recovering engineers. Thisepisode is full of recovering
engineers.

Yeah, that's true. I guess this is like a
classic career trajectory...from white collar to playing in
the dirt. Dear listener, itcould happen to you.

Here's hoping. But in India where Miyawaki forestry
has become extremely popular,Somil and Fazal, themselves once
practitioners of the method, arenow some of its most outspoken
critics.

We wanted to just intervene in the discourse,
because we had seen all thisstuff so closely, and we felt we
really knew it from the inside.And we felt, in a sense, that
someone had to whistle blow thisthing. And there were people who
had criticized the Miyawakisystem, asked questions about it
from the outside, but what wesaw was that serious ecologists

(25:44):
weren't really writing on it,because they just dismissed it
as so obviously wrong that itdidn't need to be written about.

I mean, for what it's worth, I can second this. I
only learned about the Miyawakimethod when I stumbled upon a
tiny forest in a park I waswalking in, and most of my
colleagues have no idea what I'mtalking about when I bring it
But in hundreds of videos on theinternet, and explainers, and
even feature articles in majorpublications like The New York

(26:15):
Times and the CBC, the Miyawakimethod is capturing hearts and
headlines.

10 times faster! 30 times denser! 100 times more
biodiverse! (than conventionalmethods)

But what is that hiding behind the hype?

Our story continues after the break.

(26:57):
And we're back! Today on FutureFcologies, we're talking about
the Miyawaki method — a recipefor creating tiny forests
anywhere.

And everywhere.

So we have these so called news sort of platforms
in India with names like, oh,The Better India. And they
really try to tell feel goodstories. And so in one of these,
you kept hearing these articlesof this sort of miraculous
system that was saving theEarth, greening urban spaces.

Once again, this is Fazal Rashid. He and his
colleague, Somil Daga are selfdescribed plant people.

My kind of people.

Seven years back, they'd bonded over
permaculture, heard about theMiyawaki method, and saw an
opportunity. They set out tobuild their very own native
plant nursery.

Once we started our nursery, there was, at that
time — I'm talking 2018 — therewas such a dearth of actual
native species plant materialavailability. Very rapidly the
kind of Miyawaki pioneers andMiyawaki leaders, Shubhendu's
team got in touch with us andcame and saw our nursery. And

(28:11):
essentially for the next threeyears, all our plants were
bought by Miyawakipractitioners, pretty much. We
were producing probably between10 to 15,000 plants a year.

Shubhendu Sharma, perhaps the most widely known
disciple of Dr Akira Miyawaki,evangelized the method in a
couple of TED talks, garneringmillions of views. He and his
company, Afforestt, went on tocreate an open source version of
the Miyawaki method — explicitlystandardized for mass adoption.

They released all these sort of Excel sheet files
that had formulas where you justhad to enter the area, the soil
type, a few other variables, andthen they'd give you all these
numbers of, oh, so you need somany kgs of soil amendment, or
you need this much percentage ofcanopy layer of plants, and
basically made a formula of theentire thing. So it seems

(29:01):
something you could just dositting on your computer.

Besides the spreadsheets, Afforestt
published a series of YouTubevideos, going step by step
through the entire process ofcreating a Miyawaki forest.

Which Mendel watched in its entirety.

Yeah.

We each did our own kind of research. I read a
book and a bunch of academicpapers, and Mendel watched some
videos.

And it took me so long. The episode on plant
procurement was actually filmedat Fazal and Somil's nursery.

Shubhendu Sharma [Afforestt tutorial] (29:33):
Hi, we are at Edible Roots
Foundation in New Delhi. This isa nursery run by our friends,
Somil and Fazal. They are alsoone of our biggest suppliers in
northern India. This nurseryspecializes in producing the
seedlings of native trees. Somiland Fazal with their team, go to

(29:54):
different places in northernIndia. They wander around, find
the old mother trees, collectseeds from them, and develop
seedlings out of these seeds.

Somil Daga (30:04):
We were happy. We were like, Oh, wow, we suddenly
have a market for our plants.Let's just put in more energy,
sell all our plants to thesepeople. Only to slowly realize
that when we visited one oftheir plantation sites and we
saw actually what was happeningto our plants... I clearly
remember seeing a Capparis bushthat was planted — a Capparis

(30:28):
decidua, which is like this,really slow growing very bush
that, if given the rightconditions, becomes a tree, but
only very slowly. It was, youknow, hiding inside the Miyawaki
plantation somewhere and tryingto peek out and look at the sun.
And you're like, oh my god, wecollected the seeds from afar.

(30:50):
We took so much time and effortto grow this. And here's this
little plant that we planted,that these guys have done in the
Miyawaki plantation, and it'sreally suffering. And that's
when we started feeling a littlethat this is something that we
should not be doing. But we havethis nursery, and it was a kind
of confounding state for usthat, okay, we've started

(31:11):
offering these plants. No oneelse is growing them, and the
only way that our nursery isbeing supported is by Miyawaki
forests. And the parallel wedraw in our article is to how a
local person who's breedingchickens would feel like if they
were to sell all their chicks toKFC, to be in an inchoate mush,

(31:32):
which is what we think aMiyawaki plantation is.

What you get from planting the way Miyawaki people
plant is a dense thicket, whatwe call a khichri. So a khichri
is basically when you cook daland rice together. And we also
use it as a term in Hindi referto something being a mashup, or
it's just something overly mixedin. You turn it into a khichri,

(31:58):
essentially, of no doubt nativeelements, but a very
artificially created thicket,where you also really amend the
soil, as in the Miyawakiprescription is to add a lot of
biomass, add a lot of compost,and use an earth mover to

(32:18):
completely mix up that soil thatyou're working in and water it
every day for one to threeyears, depending on which
organization is prescribingthis.

Somil Daga (32:30):
It shoves all these different species of plants
together without really gettingto know the ecological niche of
each plant, and therefore mostlythe plants that tend to
dominate, plants that lovewater, love a lot of humus rich
soil, and they just shoot upfaster than all other plants and

(32:52):
take over.

And all the other plants, which are most of the
plants, actually are very onlyadapted to growing in open
situations or in extremely drysituations. So they don't
actually like those conditions,or they're used to going in very
skeletal, shallow soils.

Now I should note that these critiques are
recognized by some practitionersof micro forestry, like Heather,

The Miyawaki method states like, you have to
have a lot of diversity, right?So people end up mashing in,
like, a whole bunch of differentspecies, and it doesn't really
represent any one forestcommunity, because not many
forest communities have thatmany species, unless we're in
the tropics, right?

They're not thinking about habitat
specificity, putting in theseplants that are native to a very
broad, general region. I mean,we're thinking about aspect, and
we're thinking about soil depth,and we're thinking about many
more criteria by which to decidewhat to plant where. Whereas
here it's just a one size fitsall formula. I mean, what we've

(33:52):
observed in the Miyawakiplantations we've seen, and this
has been primarily in the Delhiarea, is 700 mm of rain for the
year. Most of that rain comes injust three months, so there's a
long drought period. It's a dryland, and the large parts of
that landscape are openecosystems, so grasslands, so
the woody species are all spreadout. You don't have many areas

(34:15):
with a completely closed canopy.

You have to remember that the Miyawaki
method was developed in Japan,where the potential natural
vegetation is mostly temperatebroadleaf evergreen forests,
very different than what youmight find elsewhere in the
world, where these mini forestsare now being planted.

I mean, we were having the same issue in
Calgary, because it's not allforested landscape, and maybe
you shouldn't be plantingforests in Prairie.

Okay, so we have these common critiques of the
recipe version of Miyawakimethod. It ignores soil
conditions. It is a wasteful useof precious native plants. It's
really expensive and it cramsway too many species and
individuals into too small of aspace, which creates not an

(35:06):
ecosystem so much as justanother kind of plantation — one
with native species.

Yeah, and what Fazal and Heather just raised is
the risk that we start plantingthese tiny forests in places
that would naturally support allkinds of other ecosystems.

Yeah, I definitely share that concern. And
incidentally, Shubhendu, whosecompany is called Afforestt, and
I don't know if this was theirintention, but the word
afforestation, literally, likethe dictionary definition, just
means planting a forest,regardless of whether there was
ever one there in the firstplace. That would be like
reforestation, right? When youknow that there was a forest,

(35:45):
and then you're gonna try tobring it back. Somil is
especially concerned about theway that forests are given an
implicit, sometimes an overtpriority over other types of
ecosystems. He's now working asa restoration ecologist in the
great Indian Thar desert, anopen grassland unique to India.

Somil Daga (36:04):
There are hardly any trees. There are some lovely
bushes like Leptadenia. We haveCrotalaria, we have some Aervas.
And there's a whole range ofanimals that live in these
landscapes, like the nowcritically endangered Great
Indian Bustard, the Black Buck,Chinkaras, and a lot of

(36:27):
basically grassland ungulates.So it's a very special ecosystem
in India, one that's oftenoverlooked. We think that the
desert is a Wasteland. That's anofficial kind of government
policy towards them, but theseare some of the most endangered
habitats in the country. So thegovernment of India releases

(36:48):
something called as theWasteland Atlas of India. So
this is a colonial hangover,basically. When the British were
ruling India, they designatedcertain landscapes where they
couldn't extract revenue fromtaxes as wastelands, and we
continue that 'til date.

In the eyes of the Indian government, a
productive landscape is simplybetter than an unproductive one,
a waste of land. If it can't belogged or mined or farmed, then
its highest and best use is forsolar energy or wind or palm
oil, with little considerationfor the fragility of these open

(37:30):
grassland ecosystems. And it'sexactly this kind of
bureaucratic priority thatworries Somil and Fazal

Somil Daga (37:39):
After we gave up Miyawaki completely, which was
quite immediate after werealized that, you know, it's a
system that is making forestswhere forests shouldn't be, we
started seeing in the last 2, 3,4, years that the government has
lapped up the system. I mean,there are reports of the Bombay
Municipal Corporation, basicallygovernment agencies that look

(38:02):
after urban areas. They havemade it a mandate saying that
any real estate project above10,000 square meters should have
5% land allocated for Miyawakiforest plantations. And it's
across the board. It's not justin one city, but if you come to
Chennai, which is on the eastcoast, or if you come up north

(38:23):
to Delhi, if you go further eastto the city of what's called now
Prayagraj, where the Maha KumbhMela is happening right now, the
largest gathering religiousgathering on Earth. They have
planted multiple acres ofMiyawaki forests. And this is
all government done. Governmentrun projects.

Looking back, the Miyawaki method has kind of
always been embraced by peoplewith power, you know, industry,
then international corporations,and now governments and NGOs,
right? You've got a whole bunchof entities that want to burnish
their reputations and provide,you know, community services

(39:06):
feel good experiences to thepeople that they serve, mostly
by creating green spaces in anuncontroversial way.

Yeah, and Miyawaki knew this going in. He actually
writes about how he putstringent requirements on his
participation with those inpower. He was actually surprised
that Nippon steel accepted hisinitial conditions. He demanded
that the forests were going tobe planted properly and that
they weren't going to do it justat one steelworks. They were
going to do it at all of theirsteelworks, according to his

(39:36):
instructions, with the rightspecies. He wanted his partners
to make a real commitment toreforesting their lands in a
meaningful way. He wastremendously successful at this,
but now that the method hastaken on a life of its own
around the world, I think it'sfair to say that there are some
fairly large unintendedconsequences to that. Forests

(39:58):
are almost certainly gettingplanted where they don't belong.
Hard to grow native species aredefinitely going to be lost in
the shade of dense plantations.Heck, in a country like Canada,
where we have made a bignational commitment to planting
2 billion trees as part of ourcommitment to addressing the
climate crisis, some of thatfunding has already gone towards

(40:20):
funding these mini forests—Which, on paper, looks great.
It's a way to plant a lot oftrees in a small area. 50,000
per hectare!

You gotta pump those numbers up. But maybe we
should take a deep breath,because, you know, we both know
that it's pretty hard to reachthe general population with an
ecological message, but thereare just like, tons of people
who are super excited to get outthere and plant Miyawaki

(40:52):
forests, right? Like they loveit, and literally, like every
single mini forest plantingproject will require a big group
of volunteers on the big day—people who may or may not know
anything about plants.

Yeah, for some reason, of all things, this
method has broken through andinspired a lot of folks. So I
take your point. Should wereally be so quick to tear it

A lot of these people are there because they
down?
deeply care for the health ofthis planet, and they see what's
happening, and they want to dosomething in light of climate
change and like this massextinction event that's
unfolding in front of us. Butthey're not all ecologists, and
in fact, I think very few are.They all come from so many

(41:37):
different backgrounds, and Iguess this method, because it's
so prescriptive is kind ofaccessible to people who haven't
been trained in ecology, right?Because you're told you need to
plant so many species, and youneed to plant them at this
density, and you have to preparethe soil this way. So it's kind
of like a recipe book, which wedon't really have in
restoration.

You know, there's a joke about how ecologists
answer every question with itdepends.

I mean, it does depend. It depends!

It does depend. Yeah, yeah, the Future Ecologies
method — it depends. Everythingin ecology is complex, but that
is a hard sell for the averageperson. And I say that based on
experience, having a recipe, analgorithm, a silver bullet...

This one weird trick that makes a tiny forest!

Exactly. I mean, should we embrace it, or should
we be approaching it withserious caution?

Okay, so Adam, putting your biologist hat on,
what is the academic position?What does science have to say
about the Miyawaki method?

To be honest, not a whole lot. Not enough
researchers have given itserious consideration, at least
in the English languageliterature that I was able to
access. I did read a number ofreports, mostly written by NGOs
or municipalities, so grayliterature, and they confirm
that the Miyawaki method is aneffective way to establish
native cover, especially on, youknow, a disturbed urban site.

(43:08):
And the metrics for plantsurvival look pretty good in the
short term. In one study, around80% of plants were still alive
after two years. But in the longterm, as you might expect, the
die off rate for plantings ispretty high. In the only peer
reviewed study, I could find,only 20 to 40% of the original
plants were still alive after adecade.

Whoa... makes sense, given the density.
there's not a lot of room.

Yeah, so you get great cover, but there's a lot
of loss on the way there. Still,pretty much every study I
reviewed showed positiveresults. The folks that planted
the forest were happy with howthey performed, and I think that
Miyawaki practitioners reallyare onto something here in terms
of perhaps the underappreciatedbenefits of density. But I would

(43:57):
be remiss if I did not note thatmost media articles which
feature those headlinefigures...

10 times faster! 30 times denser! 100 times more
biodiverse!

Most folks aren't citing a source for those
claims. So 30 times denser... II believe it — that's in the
recipe. 10 times faster... Tothe best of my ability, I was
not able to find an empiricalsource for that figure. There
are reports that demonstratebetter growth in Miyawaki
forests when compared withconventional tree planting,

(44:30):
meaning like what you see whenyour local neighborhood
municipal foresters are plantingthose like big bare root street
trees at wide spacing and thenlike propping them up with giant
stakes, right? So that's thecomparison, and it's kind of a
similar story with thebiodiversity claims more
biodiverse than what you mightask. As far as I can tell, the

(44:52):
answer to that question, Mendelis more biodiverse than a lawn.

Yeah, the counterfactual is a lawn.

Yes.

And like, generously, I think we could say
that's probably the actual casefor most of the places where
tiny forests are beingestablished, right? The one in
my neighborhood, that was grassbefore. Now it's trees.

A ton of very small trees anyway. I mean, I
think that most of us couldagree that a Miyawaki forest is
probably better and morebiodiverse than a lawn. But I
also think that there is a realopportunity cost to these
forests, right? If it's put on asite where later on we're like,

(45:32):
oh my god, we actually couldhave done a more holistic
restoration of this site, like,it's going to be really hard to
change that space. You had allof these like wonderful, smiling
children planting trees likeyou're not going to want to just
rip them out and do somethingbetter, because you realize that
there's something better to do.Because there's been a lot of
investment, both, you know,financial and emotional, into

(45:55):
the mini forest and on othersites that would naturally be
open grassland or wetlands, atiny forest would be totally out
of place... counterproductive.

So now that we've fact checked the claims,
how about a gut check? What doyou think Miyawaki, the man
himself, would have thought ofthe method as it's being
practiced now?

I am not sure. He passed away in 2021. And on the
one hand, I think, given hisincredible background, right, he
was a real scholar. The level ofknowledge and care that he put
into the forests that he plantedwas very high. And, you know,
based on a serious examinationof the sites and ecosystems he
was working in the before andafter photos of his forests, you

(46:41):
know, 30, 50, years later, arereally strong evidence that he
was onto something. You can seeit with your eyes. I think,
personally, though, he mighthave been a bit alarmed at the
kind of cookie cutter approachthat many of the groups planting
these tiny forests seem to betaking. It doesn't quite track
with the values of phytosociology.

Yeah, maybe we should mention Yué has actually
spent some time with Dr Nishino,one of Dr Miyawaki direct
proteges, and he shares some ofyour concerns

That some of the practices seems to be
missing or slightly dismissingthe point of carefully viewing
the potential natural vegetationassessment, he puts the emphasis
on that the most.

On the other hand, Miyawaki put a lot of work into
disseminating his approach allaround the world. He must, at
some level, have known thatsomething like this could
happen. There is this strikingsection of his book called
Confessions of an Egotist, wherehe writes,

I'm not a romantic nature lover.
Researchers are extremelyegotistic about their research,
and I too, am an egotist ifthere are sites on steep slopes,
wind swept ridges, or coastalareas where forests are said to
be impossible, I will try andmake the Miyawaki method work

(48:12):
under such severe conditions.Why? Because I want to be
successful and givepresentations at international
conferences.

So I think it's fair to say that he was as
invested in popularizing hismethod as he was in ensuring its
integrity.

Well, I guess there's only one thing left to
do.

Oh, yeah. What would that be?

Let's have a chat with Afforestt.

Do you mean like we should go mic up some trees
or Or what did you have in mind?

Could you please introduce yourself — Who are
you? What do you do?

Gaurav Gurjar (48:50):
So hi everyone. My name is Gaurav, and it's a
difficult question. It couldrange from like being
philosophical or being justsaying, Okay, I am Gaurav, and I
grow jungles. But that's thedilemma when someone asks, who
exactly are you?

This is Gaurav Gurjar, the ecology lead for
Afforestt — the company thatkicked off the Miyawaki craze in
India and arguably around theworld. Like Somil, Gaurav left
engineering behind afterfinishing school.

That's when I decided to take a break. Wasn't
sure what I wanted to do, but Iwas sure what I don't want to
do, so I set out on a journey tofigure out what I wanted to do.
I did not want it to be aspecialist. I was more of a
generalist. Like to get a knowhow of how to build my own house

(49:43):
or a shelter if I'm left alonein the forest, to survive in the
forest among wild animals, tofind my own food.

And three years in on this self directed general
education, Gaurav got the chanceto compete on reality TV.

It was called Godrej Green Champion. So it was
India's first environment basedtravel reality TV show. So there
are other shows which peoplecompeting. This was the only one
which was focusing onenvironment. They were trying to
find out who's India's greenchampion. So there were 15
contestants. There wereeliminations every week.

Godrej Green Champion clips (50:22):
Today, you will be installing
affordable and appropriate dripirrigation.
Let the fight begin to claim thetitle of first ever Godrej Green
Champion.
So on behalf of the entireGoderich green champion family,
I'm proud to say that the winnerof the first Godrej Green

(50:45):
champion is... Gaurav Gurjar!

But the thought of following a career on TV
interested him about as much asengineering. So he took his
winnings and stuck... with hisroots.

I was planting urban forests, like permaculture
forests, and I knew aboutAfforestt. I had seen
Shubhendu's TED talk andeverything. Suddenly Afforestt
had floated a small vacancywhere they said they wanted an
ecologist, but they don't wanthim or her to have formal

(51:21):
education in ecology — thatshould be experiential. He
should know to survive in thejungle. He should know to drive
all kinds of vehicles, rightfrom truck, bus, cycle, car.
These were the few criterias. SoI was the only one who fitted
all these categories, and I wasthe only one who applied. So

(51:43):
that's how I joined Afforestt.

Like many of the people we spoke to for this
episode, Gaurav was quick tonote parallels between the
Miyawaki method andpermaculture.

If you do a very deep, deep dive of the Fifth
Zone setup of permaculture, itwill boil down to Miyawaki
method. What I realized, keypeople who are into
permaculture, 95% were notreading designers manual, which
is like the main text of that.Similarly, people who are

(52:18):
talking about Miyawaki method,they still haven't read what Dr
Miyawaki exactly said. It's justlike the whatever small, crucial
information is there, eitherthey'll follow or either they'll
criticize people take them aspostulates. So okay, this is the
step one, this step two. Butthese were not the steps one and
steps two. These were theguidelines which you have to

(52:40):
follow and develop your ownsteps. Nobody is willing to do
the hard work of creating theirown steps,

Which is to say that for Gaurav and Afforestt,
the Miyawaki method isn't set instone

Right now. What we are implementing, it's not
something that we would havebeen doing five years ago or
even last year, what we wouldhave done, it has changed
massively, because a lot ofthings we keep on making
observations. It's a very, verydynamic process. It's not a
fixed formula, okay, this is themethod. You dig it, you mix it.
This is a Miyawaki forest.That's not how it is.

Which raises the question, what about Afforestt's
open source methodology?

So the method that is out right now, that
method is for a very standardkind of areas which are there,
in the urban areas, which arevery toxic, very degraded — life
has gone out of them; very heavyearth movers moved on them. So
it's compacted, or there was alot of concrete, and concrete is

(53:44):
now removed, but there is nolife in the soil. When we went
open source, this method becamequite viral. We had given
documents or the videotutorials, so there would be
long text. What people will readout of it is the one last page
in which there is some mixing,digging, that is the easiest

(54:04):
part, but the four pages that wehave written about how to find
an analog site which is similarto your site in which you will
do a survey and try to replicatewhat is growing there that all
part is skipped. For largerecosystems, there is much more
natural ways that you canapproach it. So sometimes you
need all of these surgicalapproach as well as the longer,

(54:29):
slow healing kind of approach.So we we do both of these.
Because you can't make astandard document accounting for
all kinds of places or all kindsof ecologies, but it was there
to let people feel empoweredthat it's not a big job. You try
this method. You plant a smallforest. Now, if you like it,

(54:50):
come deep dive with us to go inthe forest. Learn from the
forest how to read the soil, howto approach bigger landscapes.
If you come to us. we'll talkall kind of plant pheromones, or
how root nutrition istransferred, what this bacteria
is called, how does the termitesinteract, what is the
nomenclature of it, what are theguilds, what is the flora

(55:12):
association, fauna associationof it. But we can't talk all of
it to everybody, and it's noteven necessary. You're not doing
any miracle. You're just lettingnature work. But for that, you
see the natural patterns, andthen you can plant it.

That said, Fazal remain skeptical.

What they're claiming is not what they're
giving what they're doing, assuch, in an urban space,
creating these green thickets. Idon't, per se, have a problem
with it, but the way they'redoing it and the stuff they're
claiming is quite inaccurate. Idon't have a problem with
planting trees densely in urbanareas, but plant the right

(55:56):
trees. I mean, this is not somenew thing they've come up with.
Hedgerows and shelter belts havebeen planted forever,
essentially. It's just athicket. They've rebranded a
thicket with Japanesetechnology.

So one way of looking at the Miyawaki method
is that it's like we'rewitnessing the rapid dispersal
and evolution of a new species,right? Like it came from a
particular place, Japan, andevolved under a unique set of
conditions, you know, temperatebroadleaf evergreen forests. And

(56:31):
then this, this chance event, aTED talk, sent it spiraling out
into the broader world, whereit's now taking root in all
sorts of different places. Andof course, at first, it's not
necessarily going to be adaptedto the local conditions, but
it's kind of a generalist. Itseizes opportunities to
propagate itself. And maybe insome places it could be

(56:55):
considered invasive. It actuallydoes more harm than good. But in
others, maybe it can evolve andadapt, become naturalized.

If there are different approaches to putting
trees in the ground across thelandscape, that's probably not a
bad thing, because biodiversitythrives on diversity. I would
like to see Miyawaki forests forfuture landscapes as potential
seed dispersers. Urban spacescan actually be stepping stones
for assisted migration becauseof the heat island effect. So

(57:29):
you can start to plant speciesthat are adapted to slightly
warmer or wetter or whatever theconditions are in an urban
space. And then as thesurrounding landscape starts to
heat up, and maybe we see a dieoff of certain species, maybe
those at some point, can startto disperse out into the broader
landscape. So when I dorestoration, I'm thinking of the

(57:51):
historic landscape looking backto what was there. I'm looking
at the context of what's theretoday, and then I'm also looking
at predictive modeling to figureout what we see as potentially
being there in the future.

So instead of writing off this method because
it's one-size-fits-all, maybe wecould treat it as an opportunity
to invite people in. To, youknow, get into the weeds and
share the amazing nuance ofplants.

So to encourage and to prop up these folks who
are doing this fantastic work,and to help them refine their
method so that it's a betterreflection of the space.

In other words, we could see the Miyawaki method
as a kind of gateway drug toecology,

People are planting forest for their
birthdays, for marriageanniversaries, in their
backyards or in their farmyards, because there is so much
guilt just by existing incities. So suddenly, when there
is a method or a solution thatcomes, they don't care if, out
of maybe 100 plants, they haveplanted, 80 are the wrong

(59:04):
species, but 20 are right. Sosuppose out of like 100 such
forests were created, 80 forestswere bad forests, but 20 forests
would not have been created. Ofcourse, in evolution, there will
be some mistakes. They will findout the right solution. They
will figure out what mistakesthey have made. They will learn.

(59:25):
So you don't need to take astick and beat every pebble that
comes under your foot. It's abeautiful world, and you can
plant a tiny forest in yourbackyard. Don't worry about
anything.

So, Adam, what do you think?

I think that's a fair perspective. On the flip
side, before we embrace thismethod as a kind of gateway
drug, should we maybe be askingwhether we want to get folks
hooked in the first place?Nature is complex and people
want simple solutions. If thefundamental problem that we have

(01:00:02):
is that same kind of short term,instant gratification type of
thinking, then can we reallyaddress that by taking a
shortcut? At the end of the day,we are being sold something,
right? The Miyawaki method. Andwe can take it, and we can use
it in our own environment, andbetter yet, we can hire
somebody, right? Hire a Miyawakipractitioner, hire a company

(01:00:26):
that does Miyawaki plantings tomake a mini forest for us. It is
a sales pitch, and the sameclaims that you and I have been
discussing this whole episodeare still being thrown around.
They're still right there on thehomepage of Afforestt's website.
And so I do think we have to bea little bit critical of what

(01:00:46):
we're being sold. And when we dogo out there to do this work
together and to feel good and tomake a difference in the world,
we want to make sure that we'reactually doing a good thing in
the world together and not justfeeling like we are.

Somil Daga (01:01:03):
Look a bit deeper, observe things around you.
Consider the idea of ecologicalniche. Think of a landscape as a
mosaic. There are hills, thereare rivers, there are streams,
and each of them have their ownecology. A site has many micro
sites, so not to treat arestoration project as one blank

(01:01:26):
slate which needs to be plantedup with the same kind of
habitat.

Adam Huggins (01:01:32):
In other words, consider taking a page from
Miyawaki's book and look alittle bit closer beneath the
surface.

Dr. Akira Miyawaki (01:01:40):
Go out into the field and listen for the
subtle signs of nature, and youwill see the entirety that is
unseen.

Mendel Skulski (01:02:18):
This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by
me, Mendel Skulski

And me Adam Huggins. If you appreciate the
existence of independent, adfree podcasting, you can support
us atpatreon.com/futureecologies

Where you'll get exclusive bonus content, early
access to new episodes, ourcommunity Discord hangout,
stickers, patches and more.

In this episode, you heard the voices of Yue
Bizenjima, Heather Schibli,Fazal Rashid, Somil Daga, and
Gaurav Gurjar

and Tomohiro Kikuchi as the voice of Dr Akira
Miyawaki, plus music by Thumbug,Bushido, Modern Biology, Adrian
Avendañ, and Sunfish Moon Light.Special thanks to Riti Chrea,
Nori Akagi, and Alcvin RyuzenRamos

and to Alé Silva for the lovely cover art. As
always, you can find photos,citations and transcript of this
episode on our website,futureeccologies.net.

Okay, time to play in the dirt. We'll see you

(01:03:48):
next time.

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FE6.5 - The Method

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