The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry is a viral sensation: sprouting tiny, dense, native tree cover in neighbourhoods all around the world. With the promise of afforestation at a revolutionary speed, this planting technique has become the darling of green-space enthusiasts, industry, and governments alike — yet few professional or academic ecologists have commented on its efficacy, or even seem to have heard of it!

In this episode, we debate the legacy of Dr. Akira Miyawaki: the man, the myth, and the method.

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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.

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.