May 18, 2016
When I was young, trees defined my universe. Whether it was the stately black walnut across the driveway providing shade in the summer and delicious nut meats in the fall, or the small grove of older maples keeping watch outside my bedroom windows every night, trees pervaded my life. I was beyond fortunate to be raised in a rural setting, especially when I think of the unkempt orchard of heritage apple trees, where I played and gathered wild black raspberries, and the sprawling crabapple under which my sandbox was built. Trees were friends, animate beings — I talked to them, read to them, hugged them and hid among them. This theme grew exponentially when, in sixth grade, I discovered Tolkien’s Middle Earth and began looking for Ents, tree herders, wherever I went in the woods.
One very clear memory from that distant time is of two beautiful country roads, both dirt, running almost parallel to one another. One road was seasonal, with no houses along its entire length, while the other was dotted with perhaps nine residences. Both were lined with a magnificent variety of tall trees — beech, oak, hickory, maple, walnut — all rising upward and meeting to form the apex of a canopy over the roads. In summer they were lush green tunnels of coolness and autumn brought on the scintillating reds, yellows and golds, so it seemed one traveled down the nave of a cathedral with the sun blazing through stained glass. To the young person I was, these roads were magical.
Then town road crews decided that the inhabited road needed to be widened to ensure better maintenance for its residents. Thus ended one of my magical tunnels. In my youthful naiveté, I pleaded with my parents to stop this horrible destruction, but of course, there was nothing they could do, so the trees fell. The second road managed to survive intact for another few years before several people began to build homes along its length — then those trees came down. I often wondered if people chose to build on those roads because of the fantastic quality of the arboreal tunnels. If so, it was a sad irony that their desire to live within that beauty caused its destruction.
In my studies at university and beyond, I’ve come to appreciate how incredibly vital trees are to the entire biosphere. Trees have adapted to nearly every environment on the planet. Certain trees represent some of the oldest living organisms on earth — second only to certain species of fungi. The fact that trees — and plants in general — have been so successful colonizing and flourishing on land and in so many varied environments is because of a special symbiotic relationship established in the very distant geologic past with a certain group of fungi. These fungi live in the roots of members of plant kingdom and biochemically alter atmospheric nitrogen to render it metabolically accessible.
Then there’s photosynthesis. Admittedly, it’s far from the most efficient biochemical reaction, but it is what evolved and enabled plants to harness the photon energy in sunlight to produce carbohydrate food energy for use as food or other needed metabolic functions. Plants — trees — can feed themselves by making their own food within their own bodies. That’s pretty astounding. That means that the tallest tree that ever lived, a Mountain Ash or Eucalyptus tree (Eucalyptus regnans) in Tasmania, called the Robinson Tree, which reputedly grew to the height of 470 feet, was able to do so purely through the products of photosynthesis. Not only that, water, being essential to photosynthesis, was transported up these vast heights by two simple mechanisms, both of which rely on the special properties of the water molecule known as cohesion and adhesion: capillary effect and transpiration pull.
We, and all other living organisms, would be in sorry shape without photosynthesis, given that it’s the source for nearly all the oxygen we breathe. And it is also the reason there has not been an over-abundance of carbon dioxide (until recently) in the atmosphere, because photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide to make glucose molecules from which plants synthesize all the other compounds they need. Thus it’s apparent that trees are doubly important due to their photosynthetic property: they provide oxygen to the environment and remove carbon dioxide from the air.
Unfortunately, not all trees are created equal in terms of effective carbon dioxide absorption, nor are all of them as beneficial when it comes to mitigating climate change. Mature, even old growth, trees absorb more carbon dioxide than do young trees, and lighter, broad-leafed trees are more beneficial in reducing warming than are dark-needled conifers. Conifers absorb more ultraviolet radiation than deciduous trees, trapping heat near the earth’s surface. Because they do not shed their needles, this happens year round. Deciduous trees, on the other hand, shed their leaves in the fall, leaving the ground open to the sunlight, which will be reflected back into the atmosphere when the ground is snow covered.
Which brings me to a question I have no clear answer for: If trees are of such critical importance to the health of the biosphere, why do they continue to be harvested, cut down, clear-cut (pick your own terms) in such vast numbers with seemingly no regard for the consequences? Of course, that is not the only threat leveled against the forests of the world. Global commerce has brought with it unwelcome, aggressive, non-native, invasive species that can destroy forests just as easily as a chainsaw. How do we balance our genuine need for wood and wood products — need, not want — with the valuable ecosystem and climate adaptation services trees provide? The answer to this question requires a paradigm shift.
One way not to answer the question is to continue allowing corporations to define what sources of energy we can and can’t use. Nor should we continue to allow federal agencies to occupy and take our land by force to destroy trees for a pipeline that may never be permitted to be built or a well pad to drill for climate- destroying methane. We must tear away the fabric of manipulation and deceit to take back decision-making power for ourselves, our children and our planet.
Recently, I suffered a real, vivid flashback to the desecration of those two roads from my childhood, only this time it wasn’t a road, it was a stand of sugar maples — a sugar bush — on a family farm in Pennsylvania. This time there was no public safety rationale to validate the felling of 90% of the active sugar bush, just a filing with FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) of a “Certificate of Public Need and Necessity” to build a pipeline to connect to another pipeline to take fracked gas from Pennsylvania either to Canada or to Massachusetts for export. The need and necessity was that of the corporation’s stockholders. To make the situation even more darkly ludicrous, the pipeline would run through both Pennsylvania and New York, but the company had yet to receive all the necessary permits in New York. The trees may have been cut for no reason.
Members of the family-owned maple syrup business refused to sign a lease and so the property was taken by eminent domain. Activists gathered at the site hoping their presence would stop the cutting, but a federal judge put the fear of heavy fines and jail time into the equation. Accompanied by automatic assault rifle-toting federal marshals, the chainsaw crew arrived during the week of March first, and within two days had felled the entire lot of young, vibrant sugar maples — trees that had begun offering their sap for syrup several weeks before.
The sight of the armed federal marshals terrified a bus of school children as it drove past, though one brave young soul found the courage to yell out the window, “Stop cutting our trees!” We need thousands more just like him if the forests, the trees, are to prevail. The answer all boils down to: Who decides? Do we allow some faceless corporate bureaucrat or political appointee to make decisions about our forests, our trees? Or do we, ourselves, take back that authority to regulate the woods and paths and glens that we know and love? I believe this is perhaps the only way to prevent further forest devastation and even more harmful impacts to the biosphere. There are no Ents in our world to be guardians of the forest. It’s up to us.