In spring 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, Axel and Sophie Steenberg decided to make an active, positive step for the environment. As Axel said to Sophie at the time, 'Everything in the world is terrible, let's do something for the future.'
We found 52 acres of woodland at the edge of the Brecon Beacons and bought it in summer 2020. Planted on abandoned sheep farmland, two-thirds had been recently planted with native trees for carbon capture and one-third was established woodland.
We knew next to nothing about trees or woodland at the time, and are still very much novices. Here, we describe where we have got to, how it is good for the planet, especially biodiversity and climate change, and describe our journey of discovery.
Jane Goodall challenges us all: "What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what difference you want to make." Sophie & Axel Steenberg hope to be able to create a new space for nature as their personal actions on climate change and biodiversity. Whether we succeed or not is unimportant, it is the trying that matters.
Going back hundreds of years, the farmland was originally two small mixed farms that were joined together in the 1980s for dairy. Old footpaths and a holloway crisscross the fields. Set in the South Wales Coal Field, it, also, has an industrial heritage with surface and underground mining on the land, a railway cutting across the north, a tramway going down the centre of the land, and a nuclear bunker in one of the fields.
Following the foot & mouth outbreak in 2001, the dairy herd was culled and the land rented out for sheep farming. This became uncommercial and the land was sold in 2015. A plan was put in place to plant the former farmland with native trees for carbon capture in the fight against climate change and also to make space for nature, pushing back on species loss, something which is especially acute in Britain.
The world will go through its 1.5C global warming limit possibly in the next couple of years. This is a political failure. Truthfully, though, tackling climate change needs to be solved by folk themselves, by changing our behaviour. There are not many positive actions we can do but planting trees and nurturing plants is one of them. At Olaf's Wood, over 30,000 native trees have been planted. This will soak up over 14,500 tonnes of carbon.
Species loss in Britain is really high, because we have industrialised our farming, put sheep on our hills, and built on the remaining land. Genuine wild space is limited, especially as the British like to garden our wilder spaces. Having planted trees to give the land a structure, our plan is for minimal interference on the wood to allow nature to develop as it chooses, and we will watch how it develops. The pity is that we do not have more space.
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