Yes, Trees Matter
“On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree”
W.S. Merwin
There’s been a lot of talk this past year about how the many world-wide unprecedented weather patterns and extreme occurrences may finally be getting through to even some ardent climate change doubters. Unrelenting droughts, destructive storms, wide-spread floods where previously there’d been none, sustained high temperatures shattering records across the planet, the further melting of the polar ice cap – denial becomes challenging when the signs are everywhere.
And now there’s increasing evidence that our trees are trying to tell us something, too. As Jim Robbins, author of The Man Who Planted Trees, notes in his recent New York Times opinion piece, “Why Trees Matter,” trees are on the front line of our changing climate, and when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, “it’s time,” Robbins says, “to pay attention.”
No, these aren’t trees far removed from our shores, but North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone pines, the latest species to succumb in the American West, in mountains extending from Alaska to northern New Mexico and home now to the greatest number of dying trees in the U.S. It might be easier to link the loss of trees in Texas to weather and climate change. There, a prolonged drought has killed more than five million urban shade trees and a half billion more trees in parks and forests. (Likewise and somewhat unthinkably, it’s estimated that two severe droughts have killed billions of trees in parts of the Amazon, better known, I have to believe, for their rainforests.) But, say experts, climate change is also behind the potential demise of bristlecones and is similar to what has already killed up to 95% of some pine forests in states like Montana.
Gnarled and wind-whipped and found high atop mountains, bristlecone pines long ago adapted to harsh terrain where little else can survive, including their enemies. Until now. As the planet warms, mountain tops are where things heat up fastest. So fast that the hotter and dryer winter temperatures are allowing for the unprecedented survival of voracious bark beetles as well as an exotic Asian fungus. Combined, they’re assaulting bristlecones at so alarming a rate, scientists fear they will all die in the not too distant future – a loss of the world’s oldest trees, including a 4,800 year old specimen known to researchers as Methuselah.
True, we’re not strangers to tree death. All over the Maine island I call home half the year is widespread evidence of dead and dying white spruce trees, our most prevalent species thanks to substantial clearing done by early island setters who eventually turned their back on subsistence farming and their faces to the bountiful sea, leaving white spruce in their unmanaged, willy-nilly growth to crowd out other species, including the longer-lived hardwoods. Many of our fallen spruce are blowdowns – the result of thin top soil and shallow roots, poor partners when howling winds demand a robust sway in order to survive. Other spruce trees have succumbed to the infestation and weakening stress, several years back, of a beetle invasion in a summer with little rain. Many have gone beyond maturity and senescence and are simply reaching the end of their relatively short life spans. I also remember quite vividly the Dutch Elm disease that in the 1960s ravaged parks and suburban streets like the Midwestern one I grew up on. One summer day, shade-gifting elms were chainsawed and trucked away by city workers indifferent to how our neighborhood suddenly looked stricken, painfully bare, every flaw blazing beneath the unrelenting sun. For weeks after, in the altered light and temperature and an absence of shadow on my bedroom walls, I awoke confused, convinced in those first few moments that I’d fallen asleep the night before in someone else’s house.
It’s easy to take trees for granted, to overlook their importance. But trees are, in fact, as Robbins claims, a “near miracle.” Through photosynthesis, they transform sunlight into food – for them, for insects and birds, for us. And trees do other vital work. By way of dense microbes in their intricate root systems, they filter water and help clean up toxins, including explosives and solvents. Their leaves help sweep pollutants from the air. A recent study shows that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with lower incidents of asthma. And it’s widely known that trees absorb the atmosphere’s carbon, the greenhouse gas culprit behind global warming.
Given the amount of clear-cutting that still exists, the ease with which trees are mown down to improve a view or make way for another parking lot, it would appear that we no longer possess the kind of reverence we once had for trees. Maybe it’s a bit extreme, but consider nevertheless the ancient German law described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. For anyone who as much dared to remove a bit of bark, “the culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk.” Okay, maybe more than extreme.
Certainly more benign and offering some sage advice is the old proverb that goes: “When is the best time to plant a tree?” “Twenty years ago.” “The second best time?” “Today.”
As though we can wait, too little of our current political discourse addresses the imminent threats of climate change – or what already and hard to ignore is upon us. From time to time, we do hear mumblings about our nation’s “critical infrastructure,” meaning mostly our electrical grid and our transportation system and its various elements, all for which, I must add, trees have long been readily sacrificed. But Robbins argues that trees are part of our “critical ecological infrastructure.” As the planet warms, we need trees as heat shields, with their water-vapor-emitting way of cooling the air. (I bet those sweltering Texans miss their shade trees.) We need trees that do stuff many of us know nothing about. The way willows and poplars, for example, can be used to clean up toxic wastes, as they do in a town in Sweden where sewage sludge is cleaned by spreading it over a willow plantation grown for that purpose.
Imagine, as Robbins proposes, if we were to recruit more “working trees” to help absorb some of the phosphorous and nitrogen run-off from farm fields. Or help heal the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Decades ago, a Japanese marine chemist discovered how decomposed leaves leach acids into the ocean, helping plankton thrive and thus the entire food chain. Since, in a Forests Are Lovers Of The Sea campaign, replanted trees on some Japanese coasts have helped bring back fish and oyster stocks.
Consider, too, in the words of a celebrated redwoods researcher, “It’s embarrassing how little we know.” About aerosols, for example, those clouds of chemicals emitted by trees, some of which it’s believed are anti-bacterial and anti-viral. Imagine if more purposes were found in them, as with taxane from Pacific yew trees, a proven treatment for breast cancer. And how many of us realize that the active ingredient in aspirin comes from willows?
Truth is, I don’t need to know all this to value trees. I’m already grateful in ways big and small. For, say, the elm tree that seemed miraculously spared in our side parkway, beneath which, on weekend summer afternoons, I washed and waxed my first car, a used, two-tone Nash Rambler.
I’m still giving thanks for the scrappy crab apple tree in my childhood’s yard adjacent to the alley, home to my cobbled-together treehouse where I first experienced the joys and necessities of an unshared space, and, in solitude, escaped chores and a crowded house, explored an inexplicable loneliness, a late summer’s boredom and the worry over whether boys are ever attracted to a plainish girl with bad bangs and eyeglasses. And now, daily, on the island, I’m thankful for our massive 100-year-old red oak just steps from our door. In its broad-armed reach, it seems not only to shade our house but shelter it, and, generously, with wind-tossed branch, paint the walls with dapple and shadow, serenade with acorns boinking the roof each autumn, be home to bark-scrabbling red squirrels and the guttural, cawing chatter of resident crows.
Trees are our allies. I’m grateful for what with all their nearly miraculous complexities they do, and all we’ve yet to discover about them – if they, and we, are given time. And right now, they’re trying to tell us something. Shouldn't we listen?