Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.
Hello?
Hey, Adam.
Oh, hey, Mendel, what's up? Actually, I'm at work right now. Do you think we could-
No, no, that's perfect. Listen. Can I make you a pitch? I think I've got something you might really like.
Okay, make it quick.
Adam, are you tired of trying to restore ecosystems, only to have them be overtaken by weeds?
I mean, story of my life.
Do you gaze in despair at the dry, crusty soil, desperately hoping it will come back 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 to drought, 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 revolutionary new way of planting, not just trees- Social Media medley 1: But creating these tiny, dense, thriving forests, this tiny forest behind me here grows 10 times faster, 30 times denser, and will be 100 times more biodiverse than conventional ways of planting trees.
Social Media medley 2: The forest is designed to rapidly become a climax forest, an ecosystem that, in nature, could Social Media medley 3: [ take hundreds of years to form Social Media medley 4: This barren land went from this to this in less than a year, thanks to a special afforestation method started by a Japanese botanist decades ago, the so called Miyawaki method...
The Miyawaki method.
The Miyawaki method! These tiny forests are popping up everywhere. Just a few weeks ago, a new one appeared in my neighborhood, actually, like, literally a five minute walk outside my front door.
Okay?
And what if I told you that using the Miyawaki method, you can create forests which grow at 10 times the speed, 30 times the density and with 100 times the biodiversity compared to conventional plantations.
What if you told me all of that? Okay, sure. What if you told me that I could plant my very own tiny forest and say farewell to all of my troubles?
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 I am already familiar with the Miyawaki method. I have read Dr Miyawaki's papers. I've read his book, and I have witnessed some of his so called tiny forests, and let's just say I have my doubts about whether his approach to afforestation is method or just madness.
Well, let's find out, shall we? From Future Ecologies, this is The Method. Introduction Voiceover: Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound. So any introduction to the Miyawaki method first begins with an introduction to its namesake, Akira Miyawaki. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: Okay, are you buckled up?
And helping us along, we have Yué Bizenjima. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: Bizanjima is a very, very unusual name. I was born in Japan, grew up in a Buddhist temple. And after living and studying in Japan, Yué moved to BC, where she began her PhD at Simon Fraser University.
Hey, I went there. I mean, I dropped out. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: I have a wonderful friend and mentor, someone I call my Canadian mother, Janet Amsden. And one day I was over at her place for dinner. She asked me, Yue, do you know what the Japanese mini forest is? And at that time, I was like, oh, Japanese mini forest. You mean bonsai?
Janet handed Yué a book – Mini Forest Revolution, which told the story of Dr Akira Miyawaki and the many forests he created around the world and within Japan, including where he taught at Yokohama National University. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: That photo in that book struck me. I have it here because I went to university in Yokohama, so I used to walk this path so many times as a student. And I had no idea that was actually a man made forest. I thought it was a
natural forest that's been there on that mountain. And I thought the walking path was the secondary created thing.
So she went on to immerse herself in Miyawaki's prolific writing, much of which has actually never been translated into English — a project which Yueé has now taken on as part of her PhD. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: Dr Miyawaki's original Japanese writing really absorbs me into my heart very easily, because of maybe my Buddhist background, but also we've been reading lots of Indigenous way of knowing and learning and teaching in my PhD
course as well. And I see a profound alignment within all those even though he's a botanist, 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 far as I can tell. It's called Forests for the Future, and it was 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 was born in 1928 in a farming village called Nakano. He describes himself in the book as a frail small child, not popular with girls. So you know, relatable guy. He studied at several Japanese universities, including Yokohama, as you said, and his focus was the ecology of
weeds. And he was really dedicated to this! Over a six year period, he writes that he logged 240 days each year surveying roadsides and farms and old fields for weeds, traveling all across Japan and sleeping, you know, in train cars and out in the field and with 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, If there was a contest to decide the man who doesn't care about his family, I would be the runaway winner.
Oh, my God!
I was neither a good husband nor a good father... And you know, I think he writes that just to demonstrate that he was really consumed by his studies, and eventually that paid off. He managed to achieve one of his dreams, which was to go abroad and study in Germany under the botanist Reinhold Tüxen, who was himself a student of Dr Josias Braun-Blanquet. And stay with me here, I know that these aren't household names now, but this guy was the father of a discipline called Phytosociology.
Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: So Phytosociology studies plant communities, their composition, structure, distribution, interactions with the environment they're in.
Don't we just call that ecology? Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: Yeah. Dr Miyawaki also talks about the etymology of ecology. So the word ecology came from the Greek word oikos, and that actually distribute into ecology and economy. So he talks about the relationality and forest as a community.
Mendel, I had never heard of phytosociology before. I guess it's something that I would have studied if I had known it had existed, because it sounds awesome to me, but basically it classifies plants into associations and communities based on climate, soils and other fundamental characteristics. Like you said, ecology. Miyawaki wrote about his time in Germany. Dr. Akira Miyawaki: Professor Tüxen was especially obsessed with soil profiles. We dug holes all day long to ascertain soil
profiles without respite. I learned that a soil profile can tell us what the potential natural vegetation would be. So basically, you can observe a site, dig a soil pit, you know, characterize the microclimate or whatever, and then be able to say what the plant community for that site should be, assuming that people left 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 our biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification system works here in British Columbia? And sure enough, the system that I regularly use as a biologist was created by this remarkable Czech botanist named Vladimir Krajina, who was heavily influenced by phytosociology. Sidebar, he was also a hero of the Czech underground resistance to Nazism during World War Two.
Right on.
And then became the General Secretary of their Democratic Socialist party before being forced to emigrate to Canada when the Communists came to power.
Sounds like a righteous dude.
Yeah, apparently he's a household name in that part of the world. Anyway, he brought the concept of phytosociology with him from Europe and adapted it for us here, which is exactly what Miyawaki ends up doing in Japan. He was deeply influenced by phytosociology at a scientific level, of course, but also, I think, at a spiritual level. There's this amazing lesson that he recounts when Dr Tüxen told him Dr. Akira Miyawaki: it's too soon for you to listen to what
others have to say. You shouldn't read books yet. What you find there could be just a copy of what someone else wrote. You'll have time for listening to others. You'll have time for reading books. Instead, he continued, Dr. Akira Miyawaki: Look at the Earth, look at nature. The drama of real life is unfolding before our eyes. And this philosophy of direct and careful observation of nature, of seeing that which is hidden, permeates Miyawaki's writing.
Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: He also quoted the word als Ganzheit. It's a German word. By viewing the nature as an interconnected wholeness, its true form comes into view. So when Miyawaki finally returns to Japan in the 1960s, he immediately sets out to discover the true form of Japan's ecosystems — what phytosociologists like to call
the potential natural vegetation. And instead, of course, he found farms and fields and sprawling plantations of non-native conifers, which he referred to as fake forests.
Sounds familiar.
Definitely. He realized that most of the landscape in Japan had already been transformed, and he was actually afraid that he would be unable to reconstruct the potential natural vegetation, for lack of examples of it. But then he recalls this forest less than, you know, a couple 100 meters from the farmhouse where he grew up, surrounding a shrine. And he remembered in his childhood how every year in that forest, there would be an autumn festival where, long past
midnight, the traditional Kagura dance would be performed. And he wrote, Dr. Akira Miyawaki: One year, after the Kagura was over, I was lying under a large tree on the grounds of the shrine and looking up at the sky. The thick branches floated in the inky blackness against the still dim sky and the biting cold air was striking. I felt my young body would be engulfed by it. With this memory, he realized he knew where to
look to study the primordial forests of Japan. They had been preserved in sacred groves all around the country that are known as Chinju no Mori. Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: Wow. Adam, you've been learning lots of Japanese. Yeah, so Chinju no Mori. Chin means healing. Ju means protect. No is of, the particle of. And then Mori is Forest. So direct interpretation would be healing guardian
forest, or sacred guardian forest. And he also talks about the ancient Japanese wisdom created these forests surrounding these shrines and temples to create the sense of reverence for people not to easily modify it or cut it. Miyawaki spent many years studying these forests, and he eventually was the lead author of a 10 volume, 6000 page tome called the vegetation of Japan, which is still used today. But he wasn't satisfied with simply studying Japan's native forests.
He started to explore ways of emulating those forests, so he went to the Shinto temples and started collecting seed from there and tried out this method of planting that has turned into the Miyawaki method — and it is incredibly dense! And I think that's where a lot of people scratch their heads, because it's quite different from conventional ways of planting, both in restoration and ornamental.
This is Heather Schibli.
And I am a landscape architect, a terrestrial ecologist and a consulting arborist.
Starting in the 1970s, Miyawaki began a series of unlikely partnerships with Japanese corporations like Nippon steel, Toyota, and Mitsubishi, to plant what he called Furusato no Mori, or hometown forests on industrially degraded sites.
He wanted to restore some of the native Japanese forests in a landscape that was predominantly agricultural and plantation, and to do it in a way that you could plant in urban spaces as well as rural.
And he was wildly successful. Before long, Miyawaki was being asked to travel throughout Japan and then outside of Japan, around the world, eventually establishing over 1500 forests and planting millions of trees, mostly as a part of these re greening efforts by large corporations looking for ways to give back.
And one of those was in India, and I'm sure you've heard of Shubendu Sharma with his TED talk. He was an engineer in India who was one of the volunteers at these plantings, and he was so taken by it that he started to plant them himself, and then was asked to present a TED talk. He was saying that he needed to really simplify the methodology and the message to be able to convey that message internationally, and that worked.
Shubhendu Sharma [TED Talk]: I'm an industrial engineer. The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in least amount of time and resources. While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars, until I met Dr Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it. I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write
software or do any mainstream business. So I formed a company which is an end to end service provider to create these native natural forest. But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry, we had to standardize the process of forest-making. This forest grows as a collective. If the same trees, same species would have been planted independently, it won't grow so fast. And this is how we create 100 year old forest in just 10 years. Thank you 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 now basically gone viral, traveling from its origins in the salt-contaminated reclaimed soils of Nippon Steel's Oita steelworks...
To my neighborhood in Vancouver, 50 ish years later. You know, it's out with the standard street trees and in with a Miyawaki micro forest.
I mean, I find this approach super exciting, because it challenges so many things and it opens up possibilities of trying to engage the landscape differently. Most people, when they plant a tree, they're planting an object, right? It's not a subject. And they're like, planting it based on its color, its form. I mean, I was trained in landscape architecture. That's like, what we do. We treat plants like objects, right? They're furniture for
outside. This is planting a community! This is like mind blowing for most people, because they don't even begin to understand that species have co evolved with other species in similar conditions. Some species love hanging out together. Others are never seen together. We're starting to expand the understanding of plants from objects to plants as subjects, as part of communities. So that'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 look across the internet, this is kind of the core recipe. First, you choose a site, preferably one that would benefit from some trees.
And then excavate down a meter deep, one meter. Pull up all that material, put it in a pile. There's three amendments that you need to add to this, nutrients, water retention, and the other one's kind of like to fluff it up so that you've got some air in there, and then you mix it all together and you dump it back in so you get this big like mound.
So step one, heavily amend the soil. Step two,
Plant three to five woody plants per square meter, and these must represent four 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 also with 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. And just to put that in perspective, there are 10,000 meters in a hectare. So that translates to a
density of about 30 to 50,000 stems per hectare. And you know, for those of you who listened to our episode earlier this season on plantation forests, we were talking about how forests at 1000 stems per hectare are pretty dense and would benefit from thinning. The initial planting density for Miyawaki forests is an order of magnitude more and then some
Right. And, like, the proponents for the method argue that it's exactly because of that intense competition for light that the woody plants grow super tall, super fast, faster than they otherwise would.
10 times faster!
Right, yeah. With a canopy, you know, reaching up to 10 feet in just the first year, and that's while the shrub layer and the ground cover 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, you have 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 your new plants new plants die, the forest is so dense they'll just duke 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 to grow a lot of native vegetation very quickly and leave no space at 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 to phytosociology, and to Dr Miyawaki's careful attention to the unique characteristics of his sites? The soils? The microclimate? The water?
No, no, no. Whatever's happening underground doesn't matter. You're going to add all sorts of amendments. You're basically going to mix up a giant batch of, you know, potting soil. And, you know, I think it's no surprise that some plants will take really well to it. But okay, I'll admit maybe some of the ecologists out there are wondering, isn't this a little decontextualized?
You have to, like, actually look at your site. What are your soils? What is the hydrology like? And then you need to scan the larger landscape and try to find a match and then mimic it and reflect back what you're seeing, and Miyawaki would actually go and collect the seeds from those reference sites. So you're actually bringing the genetics in too. Because my reasoning is, if you have clay soils, you use
plants that love clay soils. That's what you do. Not, well, you need to amend these to make them more like loamy, because you're creating kind of like a little ice cube tray of a different soil in this larger context.
You might have detected that Heather is a fan of some parts of the Miyawaki method, but not necessarily all of it. She and her colleagues still design and implement these high density urban plantings, but she says they sometimes catch some heat from Miyawaki purists.
We started calling them mini forests because we weren't following the method, right? So that's why we're, like, we were not going to call them Miyawaki forests because I'm really opposed to the excavation in particular.
So we have folks like Heather who are harnessing the potential of the Miyawaki method, excuse me, the mini forest method to inspire positive change, but they recognize the need to adapt it to local conditions. And then we have folks like Fazal.
See the whole thing with the Miyawaki system is that the public knows no better.
This is Fazal Rashid. We spoke to him and his friend and colleague and co author, Somil Daga.
Somil, do you want to go?
Sure. So hello, I'm Somil. I'm based out of the northwestern state of Rajasthan in India. And I started out as an engineer. I'm trained as an engineer, but eventually, a long, winding path led me down to giving that up totally and getting into plants.
Mendel, we've finally found your people! Recovering engineers. This episode 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, it could 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, are now some of its most outspoken critics.
We wanted to just intervene in the discourse, because we had seen all this stuff so closely, and we felt we really knew it from the inside. And we felt, in a sense, that someone had to whistle blow this thing. And there were people who had criticized the Miyawaki system, asked questions about it from the outside, but what we saw was that serious ecologists weren't really writing on it, because they just dismissed it as so obviously wrong that it didn't need to be written about.
I mean, for what it's worth, I can second this. I only learned about the Miyawaki method when I stumbled upon a tiny forest in a park I was walking in, and most of my colleagues have no idea what I'm talking about when I bring it But in hundreds of videos on the internet, and explainers, and even feature articles in major publications like The New York Times and the CBC, the Miyawaki method is capturing hearts and headlines.
10 times faster! 30 times denser! 100 times more biodiverse! (than conventional methods)
But what is that hiding behind the hype?
Our story continues after the break. And we're back! Today on Future Fcologies, we're talking about the Miyawaki method — a recipe for 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 good stories. And so in one of these, you kept hearing these articles of this sort of miraculous system that was saving the Earth, greening urban spaces.
Once again, this is Fazal Rashid. He and his colleague, Somil Daga are self described plant people.
My kind of people.
Seven years back, they'd bonded over permaculture, heard about the Miyawaki method, and saw an opportunity. They set out to build their very own native plant nursery.
Once we started our nursery, there was, at that time — I'm talking 2018 — there was such a dearth of actual native species plant material availability. Very rapidly the kind of Miyawaki pioneers and Miyawaki leaders, Shubhendu's team got in touch with us and came and saw our nursery. And essentially for the next three years, all our plants were bought by Miyawaki practitioners, pretty much. We were producing probably between 10 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, garnering millions of views. He and his company, Afforestt, went on to create an open source version of the Miyawaki method — explicitly standardized for mass adoption.
They released all these sort of Excel sheet files that had formulas where you just had to enter the area, the soil type, a few other variables, and then they'd give you all these numbers of, oh, so you need so many kgs of soil amendment, or you need this much percentage of canopy layer of plants, and basically made a formula of the entire thing. So it seems something you could just do sitting on your computer.
Besides the spreadsheets, Afforestt published a series of YouTube videos, going step by step through the entire process of creating 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 academic papers, and Mendel watched some videos.
And it took me so long. The episode on plant procurement was actually filmed at Fazal and Somil's nursery. Shubhendu Sharma [Afforestt tutorial]: Hi, we are at Edible Roots Foundation in New Delhi. This is a nursery run by our friends, Somil and Fazal. They are also one of our biggest suppliers in northern India. This nursery specializes in producing the seedlings of native trees. Somil and Fazal with their team, go to
different places in northern India. They wander around, find the old mother trees, collect seeds from them, and develop seedlings out of these seeds.
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 these people. Only to slowly realize that when we visited one of their plantation sites and we saw actually what was happening to our plants... I clearly remember seeing a Capparis bush that was planted — a Capparis decidua, which is like this, really slow growing very bush that, if given the right conditions, becomes a tree, but
only very slowly. It was, you know, hiding inside the Miyawaki plantation somewhere and trying to peek out and look at the sun. And you're like, oh my god, we collected the seeds from afar. We took so much time and effort to grow this. And here's this little plant that we planted, that these guys have done in the Miyawaki plantation, and it's really suffering. And that's when we started feeling a little that this is something that we
should not be doing. But we have this nursery, and it was a kind of confounding state for us that, okay, we've started offering these plants. No one else is growing them, and the only way that our nursery is being supported is by Miyawaki forests. And the parallel we draw in our article is to how a local person who's breeding chickens would feel like if they were to sell all their chicks to KFC, to be in an inchoate mush, which is what we think a Miyawaki plantation is.
What you get from planting the way Miyawaki people plant is a dense thicket, what we call a khichri. So a khichri is basically when you cook dal and rice together. And we also use it as a term in Hindi refer to something being a mashup, or
it's just something overly mixed in. You turn it into a khichri, essentially, of no doubt native elements, but a very artificially created thicket, where you also really amend the soil, as in the Miyawaki prescription is to add a lot of biomass, add a lot of compost, and use an earth mover to completely mix up that soil that you're working in and water it every day for one to three years, depending on which organization is prescribing this.
It shoves all these different species of plants together without really getting to know the ecological niche of each plant, and therefore mostly the plants that tend to dominate, plants that love water, love a lot of humus rich soil, and they just shoot up faster than all other plants and take over.
And all the other plants, which are most of the plants, actually are very only adapted to growing in open situations or in extremely dry situations. 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 practitioners of 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 different species, and it doesn't really represent any one forest community, because not many forest communities have that many species, unless we're in the tropics, right?
They're not thinking about habitat specificity, putting in these plants 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 decide what to plant where. Whereas here it's just a one size fits all formula. I mean, what we've observed in the Miyawaki plantations we've seen, and this has been primarily in the Delhi area, is 700 mm of rain for the
year. Most of that rain comes in just three months, so there's a long drought period. It's a dry land, and the large parts of that landscape are open ecosystems, so grasslands, so the woody species are all spread out. You don't have many areas with a completely closed canopy.
You have to remember that the Miyawaki method was developed in Japan, where the potential natural vegetation is mostly temperate broadleaf evergreen forests, very different than what you might find elsewhere in the world, where these mini forests are now being planted.
I mean, we were having the same issue in Calgary, because it's not all forested landscape, and maybe you shouldn't be planting forests in Prairie.
Okay, so we have these common critiques of the recipe version of Miyawaki method. It ignores soil conditions. It is a wasteful use of precious native plants. It's really expensive and it crams way too many species and individuals into too small of a space, which creates not an ecosystem so much as just another kind of plantation — one with native species.
Yeah, and what Fazal and Heather just raised is the risk that we start planting these tiny forests in places that would naturally support all kinds of other ecosystems.
Yeah, I definitely share that concern. And incidentally, Shubhendu, whose company is called Afforestt, and I don't know if this was their intention, but the word afforestation, literally, like the dictionary definition, just means planting a forest, regardless of whether there was ever one there in the first place. That would be like reforestation, right? When you know that there was a forest,
and then you're gonna try to bring it back. Somil is especially concerned about the way that forests are given an implicit, sometimes an overt priority over other types of ecosystems. He's now working as a restoration ecologist in the great Indian Thar desert, an open grassland unique to India.
There are hardly any trees. There are some lovely bushes like Leptadenia. We have Crotalaria, we have some Aervas. And there's a whole range of animals that live in these landscapes, like the now critically endangered Great Indian Bustard, the Black Buck, Chinkaras, and a lot of basically grassland ungulates. So it's a very special ecosystem in India, one that's often overlooked. We think that the
desert is a Wasteland. That's an official kind of government policy towards them, but these are some of the most endangered habitats in the country. So the government of India releases something called as the Wasteland Atlas of India. So this is a colonial hangover, basically. When the British were ruling India, they designated certain landscapes where they couldn't extract revenue from taxes as wastelands, and we continue that 'til date.
In the eyes of the Indian government, a productive landscape is simply better than an unproductive one, a waste of land. If it can't be logged or mined or farmed, then its highest and best use is for solar energy or wind or palm oil, with little consideration for the fragility of these open grassland ecosystems. And it's exactly this kind of bureaucratic priority that worries Somil and Fazal
After we gave up Miyawaki completely, which was quite immediate after we realized that, you know, it's a system that is making forests where 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, basically government agencies that look after urban areas. They have made it a mandate saying that any real estate project above 10,000 square meters should have
5% land allocated for Miyawaki forest plantations. And it's across the board. It's not just in one city, but if you come to Chennai, which is on the east coast, or if you come up north to Delhi, if you go further east to the city of what's called now Prayagraj, where the Maha Kumbh Mela is happening right now, the largest gathering religious gathering on Earth. They have planted multiple acres of Miyawaki forests. And this is all government done. Government run projects.
Looking back, the Miyawaki method has kind of always been embraced by people with power, you know, industry, then international corporations, and now governments and NGOs, right? You've got a whole bunch of entities that want to burnish their reputations and provide, you know, community services feel good experiences to the people that they serve, mostly by creating green spaces in an uncontroversial way.
Yeah, and Miyawaki knew this going in. He actually writes about how he put stringent requirements on his participation with those in power. He was actually surprised that Nippon steel accepted his initial conditions. He demanded that the forests were going to be planted properly and that they weren't going to do it just at one steelworks. They were going to do it at all of their steelworks, according to his
instructions, with the right species. He wanted his partners to make a real commitment to reforesting their lands in a meaningful way. He was tremendously successful at this, but now that the method has taken on a life of its own around the world, I think it's fair to say that there are some fairly large unintended consequences to that. Forests are almost certainly getting planted where they don't belong. Hard to grow native species are definitely going to be lost in
the shade of dense plantations. Heck, in a country like Canada, where we have made a big national commitment to planting 2 billion trees as part of our commitment to addressing the climate crisis, some of that funding has already gone towards funding these mini forests— Which, on paper, looks great. It's a way to plant a lot of trees 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 reach the general population with an ecological message, but there are just like, tons of people who are super excited to get out there and plant Miyawaki forests, right? Like they love it, and literally, like every single mini forest planting project 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 and inspired a lot of folks. So I take your point. Should we really be so quick to tear it
A lot of these people are there because they down? deeply care for the health of this planet, and they see what's happening, and they want to do something in light of climate change and like this mass extinction event that's unfolding in front of us. But they're not all ecologists, and in fact, I think very few are. They all come from so many different backgrounds, and I guess this method, because it's so prescriptive is kind of accessible to people who haven't
been trained in ecology, right? Because you're told you need to plant so many species, and you need to plant them at this density, and you have to prepare the soil this way. So it's kind of like a recipe book, which we don't really have in restoration.
You know, there's a joke about how ecologists answer every question with it depends.
I mean, it does depend. It depends!
It does depend. Yeah, yeah, the Future Ecologies method — it depends. Everything in ecology is complex, but that is a hard sell for the average person. And I say that based on experience, having a recipe, an algorithm, 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 with serious 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 it serious consideration, at least in the English language literature that I was able to access. I did read a number of reports, mostly written by NGOs or municipalities, so gray literature, and they confirm that the Miyawaki method is an effective way to establish native cover, especially on, you know, a disturbed urban site. And the metrics for plant survival look pretty good in the
short term. In one study, around 80% of plants were still alive after two years. But in the long term, as you might expect, the die off rate for plantings is pretty high. In the only peer reviewed study, I could find, only 20 to 40% of the original plants were still alive after a decade.
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 positive results. The folks that planted the forest were happy with how they performed, and I think that Miyawaki practitioners really are onto something here in terms of perhaps the underappreciated benefits of density. But I would be remiss if I did not note that most media articles which feature those headline figures...
10 times faster! 30 times denser! 100 times more biodiverse!
Most folks aren't citing a source for those claims. So 30 times denser... I I believe it — that's in the recipe. 10 times faster... To the best of my ability, I was
not able to find an empirical source for that figure. There are reports that demonstrate better growth in Miyawaki forests when compared with conventional tree planting, meaning like what you see when your local neighborhood municipal foresters are planting those like big bare root street trees at wide spacing and then like propping them up with giant stakes, right? So that's the comparison, and it's kind of a similar story with the biodiversity claims more
biodiverse than what you might ask. As far as I can tell, the answer to that question, Mendel is 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 case for most of the places where tiny forests are being established, right? The one in my neighborhood, that was grass before. Now it's trees.
A ton of very small trees anyway. I mean, I think that most of us could agree that a Miyawaki forest is probably better and more biodiverse than a lawn. But I also think that there is a real opportunity cost to these forests, right? If it's put on a site where later on we're like, oh my god, we actually could have done a more holistic restoration of this site, like, it's going to be really hard to
change that space. You had all of these like wonderful, smiling children planting trees like you're not going to want to just rip them out and do something better, 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 the mini forest and on other sites that would naturally be open grassland or wetlands, a tiny forest would be totally out of place... counterproductive.
So now that we've fact checked the claims, how about a gut check? What do you think Miyawaki, the man himself, would have thought of the method as it's being practiced now?
I am not sure. He passed away in 2021. And on the one hand, I think, given his incredible background, right, he was a real scholar. The level of knowledge and care that he put into the forests that he planted was very high. And, you know, based on a serious examination of the sites and ecosystems he was working in the before and after photos of his forests, you know, 30, 50, years later, are really strong evidence that he
was onto something. You can see it with your eyes. I think, personally, though, he might have been a bit alarmed at the kind of cookie cutter approach that many of the groups planting these tiny forests seem to be taking. 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 of your concerns Yué Bizenjima-Chrea: That some of the practices seems to be missing or slightly dismissing the point of carefully viewing the potential natural vegetation assessment, he puts the emphasis on that the most.
On the other hand, Miyawaki put a lot of work into disseminating his approach all around the world. He must, at some level, have known that something like this could happen. There is this striking section of his book called Confessions of an Egotist, where he writes, Dr. Akira Miyawaki: I'm not a romantic nature lover.
Researchers are extremely egotistic about their research, and I too, am an egotist if there are sites on steep slopes, wind swept ridges, or coastal areas where forests are said to be impossible, I will try and make the Miyawaki method work under such severe conditions. Why? Because I want to be successful and give presentations at international conferences. So I think it's fair to say that he was as invested in popularizing his method 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?
So hi everyone. My name is Gaurav, and it's a difficult question. It could range from like being philosophical or being just saying, Okay, I am Gaurav, and I grow jungles. But that's the dilemma when someone asks, who exactly are you?
This is Gaurav Gurjar, the ecology lead for Afforestt — the company that kicked off the Miyawaki craze in India and arguably around the world. Like Somil, Gaurav left engineering behind after finishing school.
That's when I decided to take a break. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I was sure what I don't want to do, so I set out on a journey to figure out what I wanted to do. I did not want it to be a specialist. I was more of a generalist. Like to get a know how of how to build my own house or a shelter if I'm left alone in the forest, to survive in the forest among wild animals, to find my own food.
And three years in on this self directed general education, Gaurav got the chance to compete on reality TV.
It was called Godrej Green Champion. So it was India's first environment based travel reality TV show. So there are other shows which people competing. This was the only one which was focusing on environment. They were trying to find out who's India's green champion. So there were 15 contestants. There were eliminations every week. Godrej Green Champion clips: Today, you will be installing affordable and appropriate drip irrigation.
Let the fight begin to claim the title of first ever Godrej Green Champion. So on behalf of the entire Goderich green champion family, I'm proud to say that the winner of the first Godrej Green champion is... Gaurav Gurjar!
But the thought of following a career on TV interested him about as much as engineering. So he took his winnings and stuck... with his roots.
I was planting urban forests, like permaculture forests, and I knew about Afforestt. I had seen Shubhendu's TED talk and everything. Suddenly Afforestt had floated a small vacancy where they said they wanted an ecologist, but they don't want him or her to have formal education in ecology — that should be experiential. He should know to survive in the jungle. He should know to drive all kinds of vehicles, right from truck, bus, cycle, car.
These were the few criterias. So I was the only one who fitted all these categories, and I was the only one who applied. So that's how I joined Afforestt.
Like many of the people we spoke to for this episode, Gaurav was quick to note parallels between the Miyawaki method and permaculture.
If you do a very deep, deep dive of the Fifth Zone setup of permaculture, it will boil down to Miyawaki method. What I realized, key people who are into permaculture, 95% were not reading designers manual, which is like the main text of that. Similarly, people who are talking about Miyawaki method, they still haven't read what Dr Miyawaki exactly said. It's just like the whatever small, crucial information is there, either they'll follow or either they'll
criticize people take them as postulates. So okay, this is the step one, this step two. But these were not the steps one and steps two. These were the guidelines which you have to follow and develop your own steps. Nobody is willing to do the hard work of creating their own steps,
Which is to say that for Gaurav and Afforestt, the Miyawaki method isn't set in stone
Right now. What we are implementing, it's not something that we would have been doing five years ago or even last year, what we would have done, it has changed massively, because a lot of things we keep on making observations. It's a very, very dynamic process. It's not a fixed formula, okay, this is the method. 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 standard kind of areas which are there, in the urban areas, which are very toxic, very degraded — life has gone out of them; very heavy earth movers moved on them. So it's compacted, or there was a lot of concrete, and concrete is now removed, but there is no life in the soil. When we went open source, this method became quite viral. We had given documents or the video tutorials, so there would be
long text. What people will read out of it is the one last page in which there is some mixing, digging, that is the easiest part, but the four pages that we have written about how to find an analog site which is similar to your site in which you will do a survey and try to replicate what is growing there that all part is skipped. For larger ecosystems, there is much more natural ways that you can approach it. So sometimes you need all of these surgical approach as well as the longer,
slow healing kind of approach. So we we do both of these. Because you can't make a standard document accounting for all kinds of places or all kinds of ecologies, but it was there to let people feel empowered that it's not a big job. You try this method. You plant a small forest. Now, if you like it, come deep dive with us to go in the forest. Learn from the forest how to read the soil, how to approach bigger landscapes.
If you come to us. we'll talk all kind of plant pheromones, or how root nutrition is transferred, what this bacteria is called, how does the termites interact, what is the nomenclature of it, what are the guilds, what is the flora association, fauna association of it. But we can't talk all of it to everybody, and it's not even necessary. You're not doing any miracle. You're just letting nature work. But for that, you see the natural patterns, and then you can plant it.
That said, Fazal remain skeptical.
What they're claiming is not what they're giving what they're doing, as such, in an urban space, creating these green thickets. I don't, per se, have a problem with it, but the way they're doing it and the stuff they're claiming is quite inaccurate. I don't have a problem with planting trees densely in urban areas, but plant the right trees. I mean, this is not some new thing they've come up with. Hedgerows and shelter belts have been planted forever,
essentially. It's just a thicket. They've rebranded a thicket with Japanese technology.
So one way of looking at the Miyawaki method is that it's like we're witnessing the rapid dispersal and evolution of a new species, right? Like it came from a particular place, Japan, and evolved under a unique set of conditions, you know, temperate broadleaf evergreen forests. And then this, this chance event, a TED talk, sent it spiraling out into the broader world, where it's now taking root in all
sorts of different places. And of course, at first, it's not necessarily going to be adapted to the local conditions, but it's kind of a generalist. It seizes opportunities to propagate itself. And maybe in some places it could be considered invasive. It actually does more harm than good. But in others, maybe it can evolve and adapt, become naturalized.
If there are different approaches to putting trees in the ground across the landscape, that's probably not a bad thing, because biodiversity thrives on diversity. I would like to see Miyawaki forests for future landscapes as potential seed dispersers. Urban spaces can actually be stepping stones for assisted migration because of the heat island effect. So you can start to plant species that are adapted to slightly warmer or wetter or whatever the conditions are in an urban
space. And then as the surrounding landscape starts to heat up, and maybe we see a die off of certain species, maybe those at some point, can start to disperse out into the broader landscape. So when I do restoration, I'm thinking of the historic landscape looking back to what was there. I'm looking at the context of what's there today, and then I'm also looking at predictive modeling to figure out 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 we could treat it as an opportunity to invite people in. To, you know, get into the weeds and share the amazing nuance of plants.
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 better reflection of the space.
In other words, we could see the Miyawaki method as a kind of gateway drug to ecology,
People are planting forest for their birthdays, for marriage anniversaries, in their backyards or in their farm yards, because there is so much guilt just by existing in cities. So suddenly, when there is a method or a solution that comes, they don't care if, out of maybe 100 plants, they have planted, 80 are the wrong species, but 20 are right. So suppose out of like 100 such forests were created, 80 forests were bad forests, but 20 forests
would not have been created. Of course, in evolution, there will be some mistakes. They will find out the right solution. They will figure out what mistakes they have made. They will learn. So you don't need to take a stick and beat every pebble that comes under your foot. It's a beautiful world, and you can plant a tiny forest in your backyard. 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 this method as a kind of gateway drug, should we maybe be asking whether we want to get folks hooked in the first place? Nature is complex and people want simple solutions. If the fundamental problem that we have is that same kind of short term, instant gratification type of thinking, then can we really address that by taking a shortcut? At the end of the day, we are being sold something,
right? The Miyawaki method. And we can take it, and we can use it in our own environment, and better yet, we can hire somebody, right? Hire a Miyawaki practitioner, hire a company that does Miyawaki plantings to make a mini forest for us. It is a sales pitch, and the same claims that you and I have been discussing this whole episode are still being thrown around. They're still right there on the homepage of Afforestt's website. And so I do think we have to be a little bit critical of what
we're being sold. And when we do go out there to do this work together and to feel good and to make a difference in the world, we want to make sure that we're actually doing a good thing in the world together and not just feeling like we are.
Look a bit deeper, observe things around you. Consider the idea of ecological niche. Think of a landscape as a mosaic. There are hills, there are rivers, there are streams, and each of them have their own ecology. A site has many micro sites, so not to treat a restoration project as one blank slate which needs to be planted up with the same kind of habitat.
In other words, consider taking a page from Miyawaki's book and look a little bit closer beneath the surface. Dr. Akira Miyawaki: Go out into the field and listen for the subtle signs of nature, and you will see the entirety that is unseen.
This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by me, Mendel Skulski
And me Adam Huggins. If you appreciate the existence of independent, ad free podcasting, you can support us at patreon.com/futureecologies
Where you'll get exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes, our community 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 Ryuzen Ramos
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 next time.