A Green Thought in a Green Shade
One key way to save the planet: plant trees — a lot of them
What is it about a copse in the wild that bends the mind toward contemplation? Moss, wood, leaves, dew, the wind moving among it all. Perhaps it is because the soul responds to a truth that the mind refuses to embrace: there is power in those trees, a slow, patient, breathing power that predates us and will outlive us. In the cold language of scientists, we are constantly learning that that impression is correct, and further, that if we let them, trees will be our redemption.
The Gestalt of Trees
Trees “talk” to each other, and they do it using arboreal versions of at least four of our five senses. As German forester Peter Wohlleben tells us in his idiosyncratic (and controversial) short book The Hidden Life of Trees, they warn each other of danger using scents that waft through the air; they use taste to detect the saliva of specific insects (trees then produce specific chemicals to drive the insects away); their roots form complex interlocking networks that use physical contact to transmit electrical impulses across a whole area of forest; and their roots even crackle at a specific frequency, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand. (Flowering trees also use color to appeal to the visual sense of bees and people and animals. They may not see colors themselves, but they know that we do.)
Trees act collectively, recognizing that, as Wohlleben puts it, “[T]here are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest.” The fall of any individual tree opens a gap in the forest canopy, allowing storm winds to more easily topple other trees. And the additional sunlight dries out the forest floor, robbing the remaining trees of essential moisture. For a tree to live to a tree-like old age (say, 400 years or so), it must work cooperatively with its neighbors.
The human parallels are easily drawn.
Tear it All Down
The rainforests of Brazil, one of nature’s great miracles, in 2010 covered approximately 3 million square kilometers, or 60% of the entire country. In May of this year, under Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro, 739 of those square kilometers were scraped of trees. Logged and strip-mined and denuded of anything resembling a forest. That was just one month’s loss.
Bolsonaro took office in January of this year. Since then, he has effectively opened the door to illegal logging and mining, appointed a minister of the environment who was convicted just last December of rigging environmental data to benefit mining companies, and, when one of his government’s own agencies posted satellite data demonstrating the extent of recent deforestation, his government suggested privatizing the very same monitoring systems. “I am convinced the data is a lie,” Bolsonaro said in a recent interview.
Build it All Up
Compare and contrast…
On July 4th of this year, the journal Science posted a study declaring that the best existing way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is to plant trees, millions of trees, across the world, in an area that would collectively be the equivalent of a United States’ worth of trees. According to the researchers , much of the carbon in the atmosphere could be reclaimed and sequestered simply by planting more trees. “Our study,” said lead researcher Tom Crowther, “shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today.” As most schoolchildren know, plants — and trees in particular, due to their great size — take carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and then release oxygen back into the air. In other words, they capture the carbon molecule and give back the oxygen molecules. And they do it far more efficiently than any technology known to man.
So the researchers looked at temperature zones and plantable land worldwide, and determined that there is already enough open space in just six countries to support the massive numbers of trees we need, in order to significantly reduce atmospheric carbon. (Enough to “erase” 100 years of carbon pollutants, according to the article.) Ironically, one of the six countries identified is Brazil — precisely because they’ve already stripped away so much of their existing forests. “This is a rope that nature is throwing us,” wrote Peter Ellis of The Nature Conservancy.
Imagine it: no fancy technology, no mad geoengineering experiments in the atmosphere, just trees. The planting of millions of trees, and a century of our profligate carbon pollution is gone. Recaptured, stored away, safely sequestered. It would be a leafy miracle.
But Not the One Without the Other
But there’s a danger in that thought, too. The magic bullet is magic because there’s no such thing. You cannot simply go out and plant trees, any trees anywhere, and hope to save the world. They have to be the right trees, in the right places; trees in the wrong places don’t help at all. (Too many places like the Everglades have already seen what happens when an invasive tree, the melaleuca in this case, takes over an area that was never meant for such a plant.) Also, it might take decades before newly-planted trees are mature enough to capture carbon in a meaningful way, and we just don’t have that long.
And planting trees won’t be enough if we continue to pour carbon into the atmosphere. Even with the Paris Agreement fueling efforts worldwide; even with a 2017 world record in which 66 million trees were planted in India in just 12 hours; even in places like California that have stringent environmental protections, 2018 was still a bad year for carbon emissions: a 3.4% increase in the U.S. alone, the largest in two decades. Performing a few acts of contrition while continuing to commit the sin does not fool the eye above.
The Garlands of Repose
Fortunately, organizations exist to help facilitate the planting of trees. Organizations that already have the expertise and the ability to know which trees should go where to optimize their life-breathing power. In California there is TreePeople (I was just at their beautiful canyon headquarters this past weekend), and globally there is One Tree Planted.
When there is so much to do, perhaps it is enough for any individual to pick one thing, one item on the ever-lengthening list, and make it their own. The constellation of problems that need tackling can seem daunting: cap-and-trade, or the switch to renewable energy, or zero-waste, or fracking, or the bleaching of coral, or. . . . And if you’re drawn to one or more of those things, by all means, go and do those, your efforts will be welcome. But it may be enough for you to just embrace one idea, to hold it close and make it your own. Plant a tree.
To plant a tree is to seed a life. And unlike many of the other problems listed above, this act of creation yields an ever-growing presence. You can visit a tree, you can watch it lift and leaf and spread, you can take children yet-unborn and say “I planted this,” knowing that it will very likely outlive you and flourish for centuries to come. You can even plant a few trees, the right kind in the right place at the right time, and create a little copse of your own. A place of stillness and quiet, where the mind can wander and consider the eternal.
Embrace the mighty now, and the mighty to-come. Plant a tree.
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