I hate seeing trees felled, especially big and old trees. (A nearby street tree is being felled today.) The sound of chainsaws is harsh and ugly, and sets my nerves on edge when I hear one, as it means the death of another tree. Several large trees in my neighborhood have been cut down since the 1990s (mainly liquidambars) and their green leafy shade in summer is sorely missed.
I think I got the extract below from a site called “Champion trees” (the domain name seems to have been hijacked by some casino spammer, so I won’t link to it – could the death penalty be instigated for these parasites?); it is worth quoting:
In New Zealand a few years ago, I experienced more cogently than ever the sheer gravitas of trees. I was in the presence of Tane Mahuta, the world’s largest kauri, on the North Island. Kauris are conifers of the genus Agathis in the family Araucariaceae. Also in the family are Araucaria, the group to which the South American monkey puzzle tree belongs, and Wollemia, the so-called Wollemi pine, which was thought to have become extinct 120 million years ago and then turned up in a valley in New South Wales, Australia, in 1994.
[…]
…Kauris are the biggest of their family. The great trunk of Tane Mahuta rises like a lighthouse out of the gloom, 5 metres in diameter – it would touch all four walls in a good-sized living room – and 15 metres in circumference. It is straight up and leafless for 20 metres or so, then start the great horizontal boughs on which rests a virtual park, a floating island straight out of Gulliver’s Travels, with an entire ecosystem of ferns and flowers, lizards and goodness knows what else.
Tane Mahuta is about 2000 years old. By the time the Maori arrived it was already 1000. For the first 1400 years of its life moas strutted their stuff around its buttressed base. The largest of the moa species was the tallest known bird. They were harassed by commensurately huge, though short-winged, eagles that threaded through the canopy to prey on them. Today, the moas and their attendant eagles are long gone; Tane Mahuta lives on.
[…]
…Trees pose many challenges to modern industrial economies, not least to the greatest western conceit of all, that we can conquer nature or control it. This idea is still taken as a mark of modernity. One long look at a tropical forest is enough to reveal the nonsense in it. In the tropical forests of Central and South America there are around 30 000 different species of tree, with up to 300 kinds in any one hectare. Compare that with the US, with only 600 or so native species, or the UK with a mere 39. Each kind of tropical tree may harbour thousands of species of insects and other creatures. We can never know all the interactions between the trees, their inhabitants and their visitors, and even if we could we would not be able to control the system. It is of a type physicists would know as chaotic – innately unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable. All we can be reasonably sure of is that anything we do to the forest will reduce its diversity and hence its ability to adapt.
In Oxford in 1879, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins lamented the felling of poplars:
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew
Hack and rack the growing green!We still don’t know what we are doing, and never can in any detail, but the hacking and racking continue more vigorously than ever. The only sane approach if we want this world to remain habitable is to approach it humbly. Trees teach humility. It would be a good idea to begin the renaissance with them.
– “Let the future take root”, Colin Tudge
If I were to go to the USA one of the few places I would like to visit are the remaining redwood forests in northern California; to walk amongst those huge ancient trees would be awe-inspiring. Tasmania also has some tall forests (under threat from logging) as does Gippsland in Victoria (also being logged).
As I have griped about in my other blogs, I am becoming increasingly aggrevated by certain elements in the spaceflight community who say we have to go into space because it is our “Manifest Destiny”. The words “freedom”, “frontier” and “leadership” are also frequently used. A recent example is an article mentioned in this NASA Watch entry. An astronaut, Scott Parazynski, climbed Mt. Everest earlier this year. As have hundreds of people, littering the mountain in the process. To me it seems a rather pointless, even disrespectful, endeavour. The “Mother Goddess of the Earth” does, however, take “sacrifices” most years.
A selection from the comments in that entry, displaying the mentality that annoys me:
Well done Scott for climbing Everest pushing the limits has its rewards. As a person that lives in New Zealand where Sir Ed Hillary came from i say to Scott quoting our hero “you knocked the bastard off” Ed would be proud of you.
The nations that lead on the frontiers, dictate the course of human history.
Agree 100% with Scott. A country that becomes complacent and is fearful of risk is a country that faces obslecence.
Europeans did more than just explore the new worlds that they discovered. They also colonized them.
It is Manifest Destiny that saw explorers from Europe trash the lands and indigenous populations they encountered, in the name of “Progress”. (I have been reading the Avatar scriptment which has this as a theme, so I have been thinking about this a lot recently.) Is “progress” worth it? As I noted in my previous 19/7/2009 entry, for all its advanced technology, modern civilization seems no happier and is seriously dysfunctional. While I wouldn’t want to forgo the advances such as medical care, I wish there were a way to reconcile both ways of living.
“A slow death by progress: If our global civilization dies, what’s left to replace it?”, 6/8/2006 (originally at TheStar.com, but no longer online). A speech by Ronald Wright that warns of the unsustainability of our society.
Our present faith in an ill-defined material progress and our capitulation to the market forces that claim to drive it (the very forces that turn fields into parking lots and forests into paper towels) may not seem religious, but is hardly less dangerous or delusional. When, how, and above all why did we start believing that the stock market must run the world?
[…]
The bets our ancestors unwittingly placed when they invented civilization now rest on a single high-stakes throw. We have in effect one big civilization, feeding on the whole world at such a rate that we can observe the exhaustion of natural capital within our own lifetimes, whether it be the loss of wildlife, clean water, coral reefs, rainforests, or topsoil. We are cutting old-growth trees everywhere, we are irrigating everywhere, we are mining and fishing everywhere. And no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. As each year goes by, the world loses an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl, while 70 million extra human mouths must be fed.
Some years ago, I called civilizations “pyramid schemes,” partly because they build pyramids (costly but unproductive projects that may take the form of colossal statues, extravagant tombs, sumptuous temples, office towers, or missile shields) but mainly because civilizations often behave like “pyramid” sales schemes: thriving only while they expand, paying the present by stealing from the future, collapsing suddenly in political and environmental bankruptcy.
I posted a message at the SETI “Earth Speaks” site: “Please come and save us from ourselves!” Apparently someone was not impressed as they only rated it ½ a star out of 5! My own feeling is that humanity is incapable of changing its self-destructive behavior, and only the intervention of aliens (or perhaps an Artificial Intelligence) will do so.
