Outrage at the Death of a Tree
The cycle of life and death.
Dear readers,
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During a recent family visit to St Louis in the US Midwestern state of Missouri, I witnessed first-hand the lasting damage from a severe tornado that had swept through the city just a couple weeks earlier. More than 4000 buildings had been damaged, between $1-2 billion of directly countable damage had occurred, a few thousand trees had been uprooted, some roads remained impassable and power lines downed. Many were injured, and some tragically even paid the ultimate price.
This wasn’t the worst-ever tornado for Missourians – that distinction belonged to the great one in 1859 – but it was comparable to other disastrous ones in 1959 and 2011. In any case, the 24 minutes the 20-mile wide tornado was on the ground brought parts of the city to its knees, with the most vulnerable suffering the most. After all, their homes were the ones least able to withstand the winds.
But by far, it was the trees that arrested my attention. Giant trees – cucumber magnolias and red buckeyes among others – were strewn like toothpicks, by major thoroughfares, and this was two weeks after the damage. Uprooted root stocks pointed skywards from felled tree trunks, in a reversal of their natural orientation. Amidst that messiness, tree trunks had been neatly sawn off, presumably in an effort to move parts of the trees off the roads and houses that had been crushed. It was a scene from a dystopian movie.
On the ground, two weeks after the tragedy, I still think about the trees, realizing that there is much more damage than the city’s accounting reckoning suggests. There is a sense of loss when something as permanent as a tree falls – some decades old, some centuries. I expect the stocky life forms to last long after we’re all gone. Yet, they’re sometimes gone in an instance of speedy violence.
My friend Graham Arader – a celebrated New York City collector who has helped me build an antique map collection over the past decade – happened to have recently written to several of us of his outrage at a unique crime – two vandals had just been convicted for callously sawing down the famed 150-year old Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, England, one of the United Kingdom’s renowned natural landmarks. Graham was moved to observe that his home in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, was home to a sycamore that was 350 years old and five times larger than the one just lost in England. Graham is stewarding history for us all. That sycamore is close to George Washington’s headquarters from where he marched to Valley Forge in 1777. As he put it, it’s every bit as much a work of art as the ~500 year old maps he helps me collect.
Graham’s note reminded me of a book I had read recently, the Chipko Movement, that chronicles a grassroots movement in the Himalayan hill region that is today’s Uttarakhand state in India. The movement dates back to 1973. Its antecedents lie a century earlier in exploitative British colonial forestry practices and it’s today lauded with launching the sustainable development debate in India. Chipko is a Hindi word that, in this context, evokes ‘sticking to the trees.’ Local inhabitants hugged the trees to impede the commercially exploitative practices of harvesting timber for industrial purposes, in wanton disregard of nature’s balance. Graham has figuratively enveloped the giant sycamore in a protective embrace.
Like Graham, humans go to great lengths to preserve the patrimony of trees. So many societies imbue trees with spiritual significance. The Buddhists revere the bodhi tree as a source of wisdom and spirituality, as it’s the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Indian mythology extols the kalpavriksha, literally ‘wish fulfilling tree,’ as source of sustenance and abundance. The Tree of Life is recognizable in many traditions, often representing the cycle of life and death.
Beyond spirituality, science is also expanding our understanding of the value of trees. The German forester, Peter Wohlleben, in The Hidden Life of Trees, shows that a collection of trees constitutes a social network, communicating through underground intertwined root and fungal networks (through smell and electrical signals among other ways), and sharing water and nutrients. An individual tree is a carbon sink, but a cluster also ends up influencing local climate patterns and then some.
Trees constitute part of what I’d refer to as natural capital, with attendant economic benefits, even beyond their pleasing demeanor, shady succor and sheer majesty. A full accounting of the damage in the aftermath of the St Louis tornado would, I conjecture, be much greater than the arithmetic tabulation of directly observable damage currently suggests. Economists struggle to deal with such forms of capital. We’ve made good progress in valuing some types of intangible capital – intellectual capital and human capital for example – but have not reckoned with nature’s bounty fully.
One intriguing effort recently is to anthropomorphize nature, in the so-called ‘rights of nature’ movement, which endows river, forests, etcetera, with rights. Ecuador pioneered this in 2008, and its courts ruled in favor of forests and rivers and against a mining company more recently. What if Graham’s 350 year old sycamore had rights defensible in a court of law? Regardless of what one thinks of the rights-of-nature effort, I laud its intellectual ambition. If we can get a better accounting of nature’s bounty, we’d better to be able to understand how societies develop.
Earlier in May, on Mothers’ Day, my family and I made our annual pilgrimage from our home in Boston to Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum where there is always a beautiful display of lilacs in bloom. But it was our usual detour, whenever we visit the Arboretum, to the small but gorgeous display of bonsai trees that I recall as I write this. What could more embody long-lasting natural capital than these miniature specimens, 100-400 year old paeans to artistry! As with all trees, it is their permanence that inspires and reassures, amidst other mayhem around us.