In our webinar on Wednesday 14 June at 7pm, attendees had the opportunity to hear Molly Melhuish speaking of her experience working with urban marae and local councils to set up Tiny Forests using the Miyawaki method.

In the Carboniferous Era, trees turned a Hothouse Earth into an Ice Age in just a few hundred million years. That created the coal measures that sparked the industrial revolution.

Trees could again convert today’s cities and suburbs into vibrant healthy resource-rich ecosystems.

Supported by the Gift Economy of Nature, which was practised by indigenous people around the world for hundreds of thousands of years, city forests could create islands of healthy living within our sterile intensified housing systems.

This presentation describes how one urban marae plans to utilise the little known Miyawaki Method to create a playground for its kohanga reo, and to create an economy of abundance within today’s market economy of scarcity.

Molly’s talk and slides

About Molly

Molly Melhuish moved to New Zealand in 1963 with a physical chemistry MSc and curiosity about the bioecology and climate change she’d learnt at university. She is best known for her advocacy of consumer-centred electricity policy, having been on advisory groups from 1986 through 2015.  This was and still is an uphill battle in the neoliberal industry-self-regulation era, and she has since focused on the fascinating topic of using ecology to heal the planet.

Conversations around the King Dick statue at Parliament, where Molly supported the climate hunger strikers in 2019, led her to research the role of trees in regulating the water and carbon content of the atmosphere.  She now recognises that native forest restoration is highly effective not only in converting pasture into native forest, but even more so in the city itself.  She is now working with urban maraes to create tiny forests to reconnect their young people with Nature. She is also weed-busting for a swamp restoration project and working in a native plant nursery.