Reviving Urban Ecosystems: Dr. Grey Coupland on Miyawaki Forests, Soil Health, and Community Empowerment
Reviving Urban Ecosystems: Dr. Grey Coupland on Miyawaki Forests, Soil Health, and Community Empowerment
Empowering Communities with Tiny Forests
The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Grey Coupland from Murdoch University in southwestern Australia. Grey started her ecological career working with seagrasses and moved into habitat restoration on land through reforestation projects. Now she works to bring Miyawaki forests into urban environments, to increase urban biodiversity, and to rewild urban landscapes. If you're unfamiliar with Miyawaki forests, please check out our piece here, where we dive into the science and history of these unique forests. Grey's work is incredibly inspiring and you can see it on Instagram at @miyiwakiforestwa.
Andy:
Thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
I'm an ecologist by profession. I have a background in seagrass mangroves ecological restoration. I completed my PhD in mangrove systems up in the far north of Australia, so watching my back for crocodiles I did my seagrass research in shark-infested waters down the south coast down here. So a knife strapped to my side, more for my own peace of mind than for any real protection it offered. Also the mother of two, a huge Jane Austen fan, and K-drama addict.
Andy:
Australia is just a continent that wants to kill you. Interestingly, you went from seagrass to getting into this concept of tiny forests or pocket forests. Several different terms tend to get thrown around, usually in like I don't know, like social media format, where it's like look at this tiny forest that they put in 100 square meters or whatever it might be. It's an interesting concept and I'm curious about how you went from what you were saying working mostly in the ocean, and ocean side areas and then getting into this type of work.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, Well, there are a few similarities and a few crossovers.
For the seagrass work, it's all about preparation beforehand in terms of choosing a good site, similar to the Miyawaki methods, a lot of preparation before you get to the forest and the ground.
You do a lot of work on species selection, site remediation for the Miyawaki method, and then to come, you know, from seagrass, transplanting. There's no preparation for the site, but there's a lot of preparation and choosing the correct donor meadow, making sure you're selecting sprigs from the leading edge to make sure that you're collecting the growing part of the rhizome. And then you know once you've got your donor material, transferring them over to the donor site, madly tying on the sprigs as you're going, because it's all action-packed on the day. And then, of course, there's the logistics of working underwater as well. Where you've got to, you know make sure you don't run over. You know, carry all your crates of seagrass and then put them in the ground, Make sure you're pairing up the right people with the right job. It's pretty intensive. I do a bit of working with meadows and things like that.
Andy:
And it's very similar to when I was reading the Miyawaki method that you could be. You're doing the same thing but with an older growth system. But basically, it's the same concept where it's dense, planting things that have relationships with one another, some commonalities, and kind of just plugging them in and recognizing that there's well, with meadows there's a lot of filler that people don't think about, like the native grasses. We tend to focus on flowers, but native grasses usually make up the bulk of a meadow and I think the same thing kind of plays out within the forest setting, of the old-growth forest setting that you're trying to recreate with the Miyawaki method. So, as somebody that's working in this space, that is predominantly based in Japan basically, and some other parts of Asia, how accessible has this become, and kind of what has been the feedback or what are your experiences in trying to bring this into the Anglo world?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
It's very different from an Australian perspective because, in the area where I'm working, we have old-growth forests right down south. The area where I'm working we have, yeah, we have old-growth forests right down south, but the region I'm working in is mostly bushland, so we have a lot of sort of medium-sized trees which, you know, maybe don't grow more than 15 20 meters. But, we have a huge amount of understory species and in the southwest of Western Australia we're in a hot spot for biodiversity, so we've got over 8,000 different species within this region and so when you're selecting your species for times you know, putting into your forest, your species selection changes within a matter of five kilometers. So you know you've got to do a species survey every single time you put a forest in here because everything changes. For example, in the UK, when you're putting a forest in, you usually use a very similar suite of species, but for biodiversity hotspots, it's completely different.
Each time you put something in, yeah, there'll be a few carryover species, but the rest of it's, you know, new. So that's pretty challenging and, of course, the species composition that you're putting in is very different from what you'd experience in where you've got an old growth forest, like in Japan where you've got huge history, you know, the Miyawaki method. You're broken down into canopy tree, sub-tree, and shrub layers, where for me there are only a few canopy species that I'm putting in and the vast bulk is a shrub layer. So the proportions change hugely for us in Japan compared to the bushland that I'm planting here. Adaptation is key.
Andy:
Yeah, and that's the challenging part, and it sounds like you might not have as much of a challenge as we do here. Where I live on the northeast coast of New England, we've been clear-cut for the last 400 years. Nothing has survived. The amount of trees that exist that are over 125 years old is pretty minimal, even though previously there had been trees probably four or 500 years old as the norm.
So you know, where I live is kind of we're right on the edge of what's called the Pine Barrens and it’s a unique ecosystem, and then you get into the oak-hickory ecosystem and trying to find models of that old-growth forest that makes sense for this particular region is difficult. I'm interested to know if you found some kind of I don't want to call them workarounds, but more how do you address those issues when you say there's nowhere that I can get a replica of what I'm trying to do or what should be here?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah Well, it's very different here because we've got a lot of remnant bushland that's been preserved where it sounds like it's quite different in your area. So my advice for people wanting to make a Miyawaki forest over there would be basically to do a literature search on the web so you can use historical documents. You can go to the grey literature and find government documents, and groups that have done surveys of remnant vegetation elsewhere, so you can match it up to try and work out and just do a research project if you like to try and find what would be appropriate for your area.
And, of course, indigenous owners or First Nation people. They are a goldmine of information. The local Wujia Nongwa people have been in this area for 40,000 years, so their knowledge of the systems here is incredible and it'll be the same anywhere in the world. If you contact the First Nation people, they'll have a detailed account of what would be there and what has been handed down. So that would be a really good point of call as well.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah, that's some great points. To kind of go on the inverse of that, what has been the feedback on this type of work from the academic community? I feel like and this might be because this doesn't originate in Anglo-speaking regions, but in doing research and trying to show evidence of the successes of the Miyawaki Forest model, there doesn't seem to be a lot out there, at least from a cursory search, so I'm interested to know what kind of feedback you've gotten in that space.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, well, it was interesting. As I was saying earlier, I was at a symposium in Adelaide recently with Adelaide University and there were academics from Japan presenting their research. Most of the work that was presented there was from a social point of view. There wasn't very much in terms of a scientific, you know data, rich sort of empirical evidence type of stuff. So the work I'm doing is probably a little bit different from what's going on out there at the moment.
From my university's point of view, I'm from Merdick University and they're very supportive of my research efforts I think we just need to build on the empirical data that we already have. Akira Miyawaki published an awful lot of information that's out there, but there's still so much that we need to learn about these forests and how they function, particularly from a soil microbial sort of aspect. The soil microbial profiles inside and outside the forest are very, very different.
So part of my research is looking at microbial activity, looking at respiration rates of the soil to get an idea of soil activity, and then using eDNA as well to assess the biodiversity of the organisms that are in the soil. So that's a very sort of hard science approach and will give me some sound empirical data and I think that's quite welcome and necessary in the Miyawaki Forest sort of community because there's not very much information on the soil profile out there.
Andy:
Absolutely.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
And there's probably not a huge amount of information on growth rates either. There is some data out there, but that also is fairly limited.
Andy:
Yeah, again, you see a lot of these infographics on social media. That'll you know when it's spouting the benefits of these projects. But when you try to actually trace the information it kind of comes to a dead end pretty quickly.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah.
Andy:
That can be a bit challenging when you want some actual evidence to back up what you're saying, especially when you're trying to get people to spend money and invest in projects that you think are valuable. There's just no data suggesting that.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
There is a really good citizen science project you probably read about that one that's been published by one of the universities in Europe that's pretty data rich and they've got some really interesting data that they've collected over several years and the final report's coming out soon. They have looked at diversity in comparison with an adjacent natural system and I think their results are about 18 times the biodiversity of a natural system which is right next door to the forest. And growth rates.
Growth rates are often spouted, but when Professor Miyawaki was talking about the forest, everyone said oh, it's 10 times the growth rate and all this stuff. It's 10 times faster to reach maturity. I know that's a subtle difference, but it's quite an important one because you're not talking about plants growing 10 times as fast as traditional methods. You're talking about reaching maturity faster and I think that's quite a critical bit of information to make sure that people understand.
Andy:
Yeah, you're talking about skipping the early-stage growth periods. While there are individual tree increases, it's primarily because of the competition of the super dense forest and getting access to that light, versus like anything particularly unique about the process itself, or at least that's the way I've understood it.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, and the intensive soil remediation as well, and you know the root network that forms, you know, underneath that we can't, you know, see.
Andy:
So I think those are all fundamental factors that increase the growth; I shouldn't say growth is the rate of maturity of the forest. It's really interesting to me that this process or practice came out of a region where you also have a lot of other really unique agricultural concepts also coming in around the same time period, some of it a little bit later, but things as simple as like Fukuoka's natural farming.
I haven't really quite figured out why it's happened. I think it's because a lot of the indigenous traditional practices haven't been completely well, I don't want to say completely erased but haven't been marginalized so much as they have in places like where I live and where you live.
So there are some hopeful resources for the future, where you know we're trying to figure out what to do with climate change and the idea of, like, reforestation, desertification, all these things that we're trying to wrap our heads around, and the places we're getting. I think, in my opinion, some of the best or the most optimism comes from these practices that came about because of these traditional methods, which haven't been completely marginalized because of these traditional methods. For example, a really important part of the Miyawaki method is making the compost tea.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Now, I never encountered that before. I started doing my research into the Miyawaki method and I was quite intrigued by it. But that involves, you know, collecting soil samples from remnant vegetation and key species, using them and you know, and then inoculating the soils and before planting, and I think that's a fascinating way of doing things, boosting the soil before you get the plants in. I think that's an incredible approach to getting forests to reach maturity quickly and establishing healthy soils.
Andy:
I was aware of the idea of inoculating the soil, but I'd never seen any data on exactly how he had suggested it, even in his own book. I don't think I read anything about that.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
So this is from Shibendu Sharma, from Afforest. He talks quite a lot about making compost tea and they have a very specific way of making it and part of theirs is to use cow manure to activate [similar to what we described in Vrikshayurveda], and they collect the soil samples from key species within the donor area, if you will. But for me here, of course, I have to adapt that method because I can't go anywhere near any cow manure because it's way too rich for the soils that we have here. After all, we've got very phosphorus-intolerant plants here who are used to low nutrient levels and they're very specifically adapted to those sorts of conditions.
If you add any excess phosphorus to some of these plants, they'll just basically die. So we have to be quite careful about what we do with our compost tea here. But the very idea of, you know, harvesting some soil samples from a healthy system and then putting them into the awful soils that we have in our urban systems, you know, to enhance the soil here, I think that's a novel approach.
Andy:
So what exactly are you guys using as your base? I guess you could say for that compost tea.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
So the compost tea, the recipe that I've got from one of my other forest makers, Adib, who has the other forest I don't know if you've heard about him, he's done quite a few forests, we put very ripe fruit in molasses uh soil from the healthy system and then rainwater, because obviously that we don't we can't use tap water here, because our tap water is full of chlorine, kill all the microbes immediately, and then you just leave that, you put, you aerate that and you leave that to sit for two days and then you dilute it and then you can put your plants in it. I don't do that here because that could be problematic for my plants, but we pour it on over the forest soil before we do the planting.
Andy:
So it's basically, if you're familiar with JADAM, it's JMS, the Jadam Microbial Solution. It sounds like it's pretty much the same or pretty similar process. Again, it's all these things from the same region just kind of overlapping and creating like even better systems.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
It's really cool to add an Australian tinge to the compost tea because a forest in India uses cow manure, I use kangaroo poo.
Andy:
Is it pelletized? Like I don't know much about kangaroos, obviously about the size of a.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
I don't know how big a dime is, but it's about the size of a 10-cent piece here, but it's pelletized.
Andy:
Is it like rabbit poop, where you can use it directly as a manure, or is it something that you need to like age?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
I use it fresh because I want to get the microbes out of it. So I don't want it to be dry, so I bung it fresh into the compost tea to let all the microbes come out and do their thing. So, yeah, fresh, fresh is best.
Andy:
I think for a lot of people, myself included, this concept of like a tiny forest is versus you see on the internet, like these, like videos from like Now This and whatever, where it's like oh, in China, they planted 100,000 trees over like two miles or whatever. And you're like, yeah, I can't do that, I have no place. Like I can plant a couple hundred trees, but I can't do that.
I think with the tiny forest it's like okay, I have a strip near me, near the highway, near the road between me and my neighbor's yard, that just kind of grass, I could do something like this and I think that's really empowering and also, I think, helps us see our local ecology in a lot different light, and that's really important for somebody that's not an ecologist but wants to do something, even if it was.
I know there have been sites that have been as small as four or 500 square feet I think the smallest I've ever seen was 300 square feet being capable of actually sustaining some kind of life that would like, benefit, and create that habitat. So folks who are not ecologists they're not they don't have access to those old-growth forests and they want to do something like this how can they find some? I know you've talked a little bit about, like indigenous resources and some textbooks. Is there more that people can do to try to fill some of these gaps?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
In terms of their species selection, you mean, or just in terms-?
Andy:
Yeah, in terms of like just finding some of this basic information without having to go down, I guess, like into too much research, like are there any really easy ways to do these types of things?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
It's tricky for the Miyawaki method because you do need specific species information to make sure you're planting. What was there, what would have been there if the land hadn't been cleared. I'm just thinking of local organizations, local conservation groups, because they would have information that would be useful to the average person and they wouldn't just necessarily use the species names, they'd have more common names as well, which is more, it makes things more accessible for people. So that'll be my first sort of, maybe a port of call, along with some sort of basic internet searches to see you know what you can find in government documents, historical stuff. Yeah, it is. It is tricky if you're living in an area that's been built up, and built up for hundreds of years, because there's the information will be, you know, hard to come by.
Andy:
So like I, I'll pick on myself a little bit. So if I go into an old growth forest or even like an older forest, maybe not necessarily old growth and you start looking and we're looking for these clusters, right, this, this uh canopy understory, and trying to figure out how, what patterns emerge in these sites, now when we talk about patterns, are we talking about trees that are 20 feet apart from each other, or 100 feet apart from each other, or just general feelings of like? I feel like I see these trees clustering in these general regions.
How do you think about that when you're starting to, I guess, extrapolate that data in a way that can be difficult, because forests aren't these very evident and very clear-cut resources, that these patterns distinctly emerge?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
I don't know what that equates to an empirical 20 by 20 meter-like a quadrant, if you will a really big section of an area and go through and just look at the species that are within that, and then you can determine your species composition for your forest. And if you do, if you do one or two or three of those, you can get an idea of which species are in there, how many of each type, and how they relate to each other. That sort of basic sort of stuff will give you the composition that you'd need for your forest.
Andy:
In all the projects you've done, has there been anything, in particular, that's kind of come out as I didn't really expect to see this, or maybe this works a little bit better than what the traditional method might suggest? Like anything, just from that hands-on experience, that is a little bit different.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Well, from a hands-on perspective, what I was surprised by was the speed at which the soil composition changed, the microbial composition. So I collected some soil samples before I put the forest in the ground just to get a baseline of what was there and the structure was very bacterial-dominated, as you'd expect for a really poor urban soil. Within days of planting the forest with the compost tea and the soil remediation adding the compost into the soil, the microbial balance had shifted towards the fungal loading and I thought that was quite impressive.
Nine months later I did a comparison between the soil microbial composition in the forest and some in the adjacent bushland where I conducted my surveys, and it was almost identical in terms of the fungal ratio and that blew me away. Then I did a comparison inside the forest and outside the forest and you could see this the bacterial loading outside the forest was high compared to inside the forest. So yeah, that was quite surprising to me and also from a social perspective. You know I was. I thought I was going to be more blown away by the biological sciences side of things, but the social side of things was actually really impressive as well.
The capacity of Miyawaki Forest to engage the community in environmental action is quite profound. So I'm taking these forests mainly into schools. I have done one community-based forest, but the feeling out there is that children often feel disempowered by the enormity of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, and these forests actually give them the capacity for hands-on action, so they get very excited about planting their forest.
They have a very strong sense of ownership over the forest and the really powerful thing about this is that the children, you know, get to grow with their forests and you can sit back and you can watch them. And because these forests do tend to grow very quickly, you know, like the forest I planted last year with the children of one of the local schools, some of the plants in the forest are already taller than the children and they are absolutely fascinated by that and I'm just hoping that it inspires them to take more environmental action. They can make a difference on a local scale, so the social side of this is impressive, I think.
Andy:
Yeah, that's awesome. I'd imagine that some of the parents are probably also maybe not equally, but also interested in the process because it's engaged their kids in that way, and that fungal information is incredible. That's amazing that it could take over and create such a similar climate so quickly. I think it's really inspiring and hopeful.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, I was actually quite blown away by that. I said when I got the results, like what? Yeah, very impressed. Just on the community side of things, in the program I run the children actually create the compost ready for their forest, because I try and use a sort of circular economy approach to the whole forest, making the children actually put in their lunchbox scraps and then that contributes to the compost.
But then we also go out into the wider community and we collect fruit and vegetable scraps from the local supermarkets, coffee grounds, and the local coffee shops, and by doing that the community becomes interested in what's going on as well and they are asking oh, how's the compost going? Have you put it in the forest yet? What's happening with the forest? So yeah, that's another way. So it's not just the school community that sort of gets involved, it's kind of the wider community as well, and it sort of echoes outwards. I think that's an awesome part of these for us too.
Andy:
You're owning the process through the community and that requires some community buy-in or at least knowledge of it existing. And I think that's really important because, while I think there's a very good case to be made that changing adults' habits and visions and all of those things can be really difficult, kids are fairly easily easy and you can, you know, imprint on them with these types of projects. Then we can hopefully make the next generation a little bit more conscientious about their decision-making around how it impacts bigger systems, and I think that's important to do. Now. I know you've been primarily working around elementary schools, I believe mostly elementary schools. Now, with the experience you've had now, are you looking to do any bigger projects? Do you have anything really exciting that you think folks are going to be interested in hearing about?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Well, I can't think of anything extra. I will be doing a high school next year.
Andy:
Okay, so you're growing up.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
I'm growing up. I'm going up. Yeah, I'm working with some cadets. They're kind of like bush ranger cadets who don't do any sort of environmental action. So they're actually part of the upper school community and so they're going to be planting their own forest, actually in their school, but they're the ones who are going to be maintaining and organizing it. So that's kind of nice. Get some bigger kids involved.
The cool thing is that the program I do also engages children with STEM. So one of the schools I was working at we were getting the compost ready and we were taking some temperature readings of the compost to see how hot it was getting and if it was cooking or not, and one of the kids went oh wow, so this is science. And I was like, oh cool, maybe I've engaged someone.
Andy:
One of the things I've been thinking about and I think has been one of the criticisms of the Miyawaki concept, I guess you could say is that because we're planting primarily the trees and bush species, the understory doesn't get the attention, and doesn't really fill in as much as a natural old growth forest might. I'm curious if you've seen any evidence of that or the contrary, that those native understory species start to move in at some point.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Well, the thing is, with the forest that I'm planting, I plant the understory species so they're part of it, because they're an essential part of the Australian bushland because our bushland is quite open. It's not like the old-growth forest where you have an extensive canopy that covers. It's more an open system where you have a lot of understory species and then some trees you know within that. So I think with some of the older forests, I know that in some of the forests in Europe, the understory is filling in from the experience of some of my Sugi fellow Miyawaki forest makers. So I think there is evidence that you do have colonization of grasses and things afterward, because obviously, you don't plant grasses as part of the Miyawaki method, although the new system that's coming out now through a forest says you don't plant ground covers, you don't plant grasses, but you can plant grasses after one year, so after the other trees have started to take off.
Andy:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, a little bit more work.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
But makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Andy:
In terms of the invasives that you're dealing with, has it been successful in keeping them out with the mantle and all of those practices? Have you had a lot of success with that?
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, we have something called cooch grass here, which I think is called something else in other parts of the world, but that's like a horrible invasive grass. It's rhizomatous and it's just really difficult to remove. With the thick layer of mulch that you put on the Miyawaki forest, it does keep it down to some extent, but I know that in the first six months of having one of our forests in, that was a real problem. You had to go in and weed it. But now it's not so much a problem at all because, I think through extensive weeding we've just managed to nip it in the bud and the mulching is good at keeping it in check. So I haven't had anything coming up except some tomato plants from the compost, which was kind of cool, and they had some fruit on them, so we ate that.
But yeah, apart from that, we've been pretty good with the invasives so far. We have had some invasive insects in some introduced insects coming in, which is interesting, but they're common throughout the region where I am anyway. So like the ordinary garden snail which is introduced and one species of leaf miner that's introduced as well, but they're pretty much widespread across our urban areas anyway.
Andy:
What you're talking about the invasive species kind of reminds me of a lot of arguments around regenerative agriculture and grazing. Is the practice itself the reason why you're not having you're able to control these species, or is it because you're paying attention? I think it's a little bit of both like, now that you're managing this site, you're taking the time to mulch, you're taking the time to weed, and in reality, when we talk about invasive species, that's all we have to do is take the time to manage them.
And there's a lot of reasons why we don't, because it's a lot of work and like nobody's paying you to go on the side of the highway and pull up some invasive species you know no one's going there to pick up garlic mustard but it should and probably needs to be done, and on these sites at least we're able to do that until they're unable to compete with those, those old-growth forest species.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
So the good thing about the Miyawaki method is the forests are tended with love and care by the people who plant them, generally speaking. So yeah, if invasive species do rear up, you know we can usually knit them in the bud fairly quickly. We love our forests.
Andy:
Yeah, there's ownership of it. Ownership is really important, not just for the species themselves to be successful in those forests, but also for the community to have that ownership of the process, as opposed to an organization coming in and doing a project and walking away and nobody feels attached to it other than, yeah, it looks nice, and then, when it starts to fall apart, nobody feels the need to own it and try to fix it. Engaging with the community in that way is not just good for people to have that ownership as well, but also for people to have a common space and a common cause that I think is very much lost in the modern world.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, the children are invested in their forest. They do have a strong sense of ownership over it. The forest I planted last year, had its first birthday party a couple of weeks ago and it actually had a cake and the children made it. They sang happy birthday and they were so excited. It was really awesome that's awesome.
Andy:
That would be a ton of fun. I would love to get a birthday party for a forest going. That seems like something we should be doing more of yeah, it's pretty special.
Yeah, so for people who have been enjoying your thoughts on the Miyawaki Forest and want to see some of your work, I know you guys have an Instagram handle. Anywhere else that they can if you want to share that and if there's anywhere else to either find your research or where you'd definitely like to direct people that want to learn more about this stuff.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Okay, so my Instagram handle is @miyawakiforestwa. I've also got a website that's just about to be launched. It's called pocketforestswa.org, and I've got a Facebook; dreaded Facebook. Yeah, @pocketforestwa. And you can also find my work on Murdoch University's website. That's in Western Australia.
Andy:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been interesting. I appreciate your time and I definitely am looking forward to seeing some more of your forest come to life.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
Yeah, me too. It's super fun and I'll hopefully have some scientific publications out pretty shortly that people can look at and read and get some nice empirical data.
Andy:
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Dr. Grey Coupland:
No, thanks so much for having me, it's been fun.
To. hear this interview, tune into episode 133 of the Poor Proles Almanac.