trees
What We Can Learn From Trees
They are our ancestral model for cooperative, non-violent, and sustainable communities.
As I began this piece on trees in forests, woods, and parks, a friend asked, why in January in New England? Why didn’t I wait until the deciduous trees were a palette of new spring green crowning the stark brown trunks and branches of winter? The next day, January 7, nature provided the answer: a 10-inch snowstorm. Trees after a winter snowstorm—their upstretched dark deciduous branches shouldered with snow and their downreaching evergreen branches pillowed with snow—are a feast for the eyes.
“A forest is a sacred place... The medicines available in the forest are the second most valuable gift that nature offers us; the oxygen available there is the first.” These are the words Diana Beresford Kroeger, Irish-born and educated in the ancient Celtic culture of spiritual and physical respect for trees. This brilliant botanist went on to receive advanced degrees, culminating in a doctorate in medical biochemistry. She affirmed that simply walking in a pine forest is a balm for the body and soul, elevating our mood, thanks to their chemical gift of pinenes, aerosols released by pine trees and absorbed by our bodies.
Korean scientists confirmed that walking through forest areas improved older women’s blood pressure, lung capacity, and elasticity in their arteries. Walking in an urban park with trees, or an arboretum, or a rural forest reduces blood pressure, improves cardiac-pulmonary parameters, bolsters mental health, reduces negative thoughts, lifts people’s moods, and restores our brain’s ability to focus—all findings of recent studies. Park RX America (PRA), a nonprofit founded in 2017 by the public health pediatrician Dr. Robert Zarr, has established a large network of healthcare professionals who use nature prescriptions as part of their healthcare treatment for patients. A sample prescription: “Walk along a trail near a pond or in a park with a friend, without earbuds, for half an hour, twice a week.”
Without trees, we could not survive, whereas they have and could live without us.
The healing potential of nature even stretches to those hospitalized. Patients recovering from surgery heal more quickly and need fewer pain killers if they have a hospital room with a window that looks out onto nature. Similarly, studies of students in classrooms with a view of nature have found that they both enjoyed learning and learned more than students without a view of nature.
Suzanne Simard worked for Canada’s minister of forests doing research on the most efficient ways to re-grow forests that had been clear-cut by the logging industry. Loving forests since a child growing up in rural British Columbia, she grasped immediately that clear-cutting whole areas of a forest and applying herbicide to kill any competitor plant or tree before replanting monoculture tree seedlings was a “war on the forest.” In testing her insight, she found that clear-cutting and planting single species seedling trees made no difference to speeding up the growth of the desired tree plantation and in some cases, reduced tree survival in the monoculture wood lots.
In pursuing a doctorate and subsequent years of research, Simard documented that biodiverse forests are the healthiest of forests, with trees communicating with other trees of their own species and other species by an underground fungal network linking their roots with each other. Through this network, known as the wood wide web, trees provide chemical food and medicine to keep each other as healthy as possible. Her work has shown that “the fungal networks between roots of diverse trees carry the same chemicals as neurotransmitters in our brain,” strongly suggesting, she says, that trees have intelligence. She has learned from Indigenous people that “they view trees as their people, just as they view the wolves and the bears and the salmon as their relations.” We need that back, she asserts.
Trees teach us lessons of community and cooperation through all the seasons, writes German forester Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees. He deems forests as “superorganisms,” sharing food with their own species and even nourishing their competitors. Together they create an ecosystem that enables them to live much longer as a community than a single living tree alone, a life lesson for us humans. Moreover, “sick trees are supported by healthy ones nearby… until they recover; and even a dead trunk is indispensable for the cycle of lifesaving as a cradle for its young.”
Trees are essential for life on Earth; the older they are, the more essential they are. They remove carbon dioxide from the air, store carbon in their tissue and soil, give back oxygen into the atmosphere and slow global temperature increases. They offer cooling shade in hardscape urban neighborhoods, buffer cold winter winds, attract birds and wildlife, purify our air, prevent soil erosion during rainstorms, and filter rainwater falling through their soil.
Without trees, we could not survive, whereas they have and could live without us. Older than we so-called homo sapiens (“wise men”) by a thousand times, they are wiser than many humans: They do not wage war with each other nor destroy their own habitat. They know not genocide nor ecocide. They are our ancestral model for cooperative, non-violent, and sustainable communities.
I write this to honor and thank the multitude of forest protectors across our country and those working to restore nature to their towns and cities.
The UN’S Green Climate Fund Must Stop Financing False Solutions
Climate finance must be redirected away from greenwashing and towards real solutions like a just transition, helping frontline communities, conservation, protection of land and forests, and reforestation.
On July 12, 2023, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Green Climate Fund, the largest global fund dedicated to combating climate change, approved a funding proposal by the &Green Fund for more than $189.3 million for monoculture plantations of oil palm, cocoa, and rubber, and for unsustainable industrial cattle farming. It was passed during the fund’s 36th Board Meeting, held in the Republic of Korea.
Civil society organizations had earlier raised concerns that the Green Climate Fund (GCF) was considering more investments in false climate change solutions such as monoculture plantations and intensive livestock farming, which exacerbate the impacts of climate change. The GCF Observer Network had put forward their concerns prior to and during the board meeting outlining why &Green Fund’s proposal should not be approved. Despite strong opposition that the project—which has the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) as the accredited entity—would further undermine the rights of Indigenous Peoples and enable greenwashing, the proposal was passed.
The &Green portfolio includes agribusiness such as the multinational food processing company Marfrig from Brazil, which has been accused of repeatedly being involved in illegal tree cutting, “cattle laundering,” and extensive palm oil monoculture tree plantations in Indonesia.
The GCF, established in 2010, is mandated by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris agreement to support countries of the Global South in countering the impacts of climate change. However, the GCF has historically approved and funded other highly-controversial projects, such as a $25 million equity agreement with the Arbaro Fund, a Germany-based private equity investment firm, for monoculture tree plantations that have led to devastating social, environmental, and economic harm particularly in the Global South, to Indigenous peoples, local communities, and women in all their diversities.
Public Finance Continues to De-Risk Private Sector Investments in False Climate Change Solutions
Cattle graze amongst the hazy smoke caused by fires along the BR-230 (Transamazonica) highway in Manicoré, in Amazonas, Brazil on September 22, 2022.
(Photo: Michael Dantas /AFP via Getty Images)
The &Green Fund has been fully operational since 2017 and currently has a portfolio of seven ongoing projects, mainly consisting of intensive cattle farming and monocultures. The funding proposal submitted to the GCF basically consisted of a request for public finance to de-risk private sector investments in “deforestation-free and socially inclusive commodity supply chains”—in other words, for monoculture plantations of oil palm, cocoa, and rubber, and unsustainable industrial cattle farming. The &Green portfolio includes agribusiness such as the multinational food processing company Marfrig from Brazil, which has been accused of repeatedly being involved in illegal tree cutting, “cattle laundering,” and extensive palm oil monoculture tree plantations in Indonesia.
The funding proposal had many other concerning aspects such as a very complex financing structure, overly optimistic claims of CO2 reduction, and the fact that their projects could include GMO seeds. It demands public climate finance to support agribusinesses that already have access to large amounts of finance. If this funding proposal is approved, we will very likely see some of the same impacts and mistakes that are being reported in the sub-projects part of the Arbaro Fund.
History Repeats: More Eucalyptus, Fewer Food Crops, Rising Unemployment
A eucalyptus plantation is seen in Sao Luis do Paraitinga, Brazil on January 1, 2015.
(Photo: Laurent Guerinaud/AGB Photo Library/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Arbaro Fund proposal approved by the GCF in 2020 led to the establishment of 75,000 hectares of new tree plantations across seven target countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Since its creation, the Arbaro Fund has been critiqued by more than 100 civil society organizations due to the negative social, environmental, and economic impacts of extensive monoculture tree plantations for industrial purposes. These include the displacement of local communities from their traditional land and livelihoods, increasing insecurity in land tenure, a disruption in the local peasant economy, the worsening of economic difficulties, rising divisions within the communities, and the further erosion of the rights and agency of women in all their diversities.
These impacts have been documented in studies and reports by the World Rainforest Movement, the Global Forest Coalition, and Centro de Estudios Heñói. More recently, an investigation led by Lighthouse Reports showed how European development finance institutions, including the FMO, where the Dutch state is the bank's largest shareholder, fund forestry businesses that use agrochemicals that are banned by the European Union itself.
As the studies show, the territorialization of agribusiness and, in recent years, of eucalyptus plantations, has led to the large-scale displacement of communitie
False promises of development and mitigation of climate change and the expansion of industrial monoculture tree plantations have been a common pattern in the countries where Arbaro operates. The Centro de Estudios Heñói has highlighted the tendency of the forestry industry to reproduce the predominant agro-export model in Paraguay. Quite contrary to the declarations of good intentions and the greenwashed claims of carbon capture and greenhouse gas reduction, these eucalyptus trees end up as charcoal to dry soybeans, corn, wheat, and others.
As the studies show, the territorialization of agribusiness and, in recent years, of eucalyptus plantations, has led to the large-scale displacement of communities. The inhabitants also experience biodiversity loss, as animals, food crops, water, and soil are affected. There are cases of overt and potential land conflicts with the companies (in Santaní, area of influence of Forestal Apepú, a timber production business fully owned by Arbaro) and other historical cases such as the case of Barbero Kue (area of influence of Forestal San Pedro). Contrary to the companies’ claims about their social commitment to the communities, the inhabitants report that they do not receive any type of assistance. Most jobs are temporary and dangerous and disassociate the workers from their peasant culture.
“Nothing Grows Here Anymore, No Beans, Cassava, Corn, Nothing.”
Indigenous people camp outside the National Institute of the Indigenous headquarters during a protest asking assistance for agricultural production, land purchase and better health service in Asunción, Paraguay, on January 23, 2023.
(Photo: Norberto Duarte/AFP via Getty Images)
In June 2023, Heñói Centro de Estudios conducted field visits to communities near Apepú Forestry. The villagers told Heñói that they were economically impoverished and that the rural youth are being forced to relocate to other regions for work. They also noted that there were threats looming over the Indigenous Peoples and the local communities, owing to the interests of big businesses and large-scale landowners. They stated that they have been dispossessed of their lands, and were going to starve in the cities.
A farmer stated: "The eucalyptus plantations have ruined the water and the soil. Nothing grows here anymore, no beans, cassava, corn, nothing. Before the eucalyptus, our corn was big and beautiful, and we had bountiful harvests. We have lost everything, even after all the sacrifices we have made.”
The weakening food security in the region also impacts the culinary culture of the region. Villagers reported that it is no longer possible to make Vorí vorí, Paraguay soup, or chipa guasú. Food is fundamental to primary socialization, and the communal binding of the peasantry is being lost.
"Though we are the ones who produce food for everyone, farmers are not prioritized by the state or by the companies."
The peasants receive no assistance from the state. "Though we are the ones who produce food for everyone, farmers are not prioritized by the state or by the companies. If food production ends, what will happen to all of us? They do not value us," said another peasant farmer. The local community has been discussing the importance of working together to find a resolution and to demand technical assistance for small producers.
To honor the pledge and recognize the Paris Agreement benchmark of 1.5°C, climate finance must be redirected away from greenwashing and towards real solutions—just transition, climate resilience of frontline communities, conservation, protection of land and forests, and reforestation—and provide direct funding access to Indigenous Peoples, women from frontlines communities, and local communities. Their land rights must be secured, as must their rights to resources, their territories, and their right to govern. Real solutions that are rights-based and gender-just do exist, and they are the only way to prevent catastrophic global climate change.
Learning the Climate Lesson of Pine 58
Making sure that our forests grow more trees like this towering eastern white pine will allow natural forests to assist carbon drawdown for centuries after the rest of us are gone.
Climate news can be disheartening. But as an older climate scientist, I am neither discouraged nor disengaged. Instead, I feel more determined than ever to support younger generations ready to face our climate challenge head-on, and promote steps to reduce carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere to limit rising temperatures.
As a professor of chemistry for twenty-six years, I centered my professional life on calculations and experiments. Then in the late 1980s I launched an "encore career" in climate science for diplomacy, including as lead author on five reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It's fair to say that I am deeply versed in the science of climate change and its technological solutions. But not until I walked the Massachusetts woods a few years ago with forest expert Bob Leverett did I truly grasp the major role that forests could play in moving the world beyond net-zero carbon emissions and putting brakes on global warming.
At a state forest less than an hour from my western Massachusetts home, Bob led me through woods he knows well to a grove of towering white pines, seventy-six trees that got their start around the time of the Civil War.
Nearly my age, Bob is a retired engineer, big-tree expert, and co-founder of the Native Tree Society. He and his colleagues have developed state-of-the-art methods to measure tree volume, and calculate the weight of trees from their density. Since wood is half carbon by weight, he and I have determined precisely how much carbon mature trees contain between ground and crown.
Bob pointed to a tree he called "Pine 58," and we craned our necks. "This tree has grown 21 feet taller in the thirty years I have been measuring it," he told me. "At 176 feet and still growing, it is the tallest accurately measured tree in New England."
Taller than a 15-story building, Pine 58 has captured nearly 20 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored six tons of elemental carbon in the wood of its trunk, branches, and roots. Additional soil carbon has accumulated as fallen trees, branches, and needles decompose and networks of carbon rich fungi connect tree roots throughout the soil. From root tips to pine cones, this tree is a carbon champion.
Unlike the two of us standing in its shadow, Pine 58 is barely middle-aged. Barring storms or saws, this pine has at least another century of life ahead of it. Such trees should not be rare in our forests, but they are. Nearly 96 percent of all American forests are younger than Pine 58, even though most tree species can live for two hundred years or much longer. And throughout their lifespans, trees accumulate carbon.
"Many people think trees stop growing productively long before they do," Bob tells me. "Pressure to log them for profit and misinterpretation of data on how trees actually grow perpetuate a myth of early senescence."
It can take more than 30 younger trees half the height of Pine 58 to store as much carbon as one mature tree like Pine 58. Protecting mature trees so they can keep growing (instead of cutting them down)—a management practice I call "proforestation"—can deliver three to ten times the carbon storage benefit of planting new trees during this critical century. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "protection of existing natural forest ecosystems is the highest priority for reducing (carbon) emissions …" citing our proforestation paper.
Large older trees maintain their carbon storage advantage over small younger trees as they age. The total amount of carbon captured and stored above ground by forests is greater in older stands, and the amount of carbon accumulated continues to increase well beyond 150 years.
Trees can no longer accumulate carbon when they are cut down. Even though lumber contains carbon, less than half the wood in a harvested tree ever becomes a board. The rest winds up, sooner or later, as released carbon dioxide.
Planting trees is an excellent thing to do, but from a carbon point of view, saplings will always lag the amount of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere by existing trees that are allowed to keep growing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live among trees fulfilling their potential to accumulate carbon at high rates for centuries?
In Seattle last April, President Biden directed federal agencies to safeguard mature and older forests on public lands. Just one month before that report is due, agencies are announcing major harvests including in older forests. A few months following the President's directive, the US Department of Agriculture launched its "Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities" program, including incentives to log on private forestlands.
"Climate-smart commodities?" I am not convinced. By contrast, Washington State's Department of Natural Resources is on track to designate 10,000 acres of timberland as "carbon reserves," older forests protected from logging. Creating carbon and biodiversity reserves, spared from the saw, is central to proforestation management.
Here's how you can help: Let local leaders know that you recognize the climate importance of larger trees. Protect trees on your local landscape.
Both in our eighties, Bob and I are healthy and expect to live past 2030, the year by which humanity must slash carbon emissions by half to have a shot at "net zero carbon" by mid-century and a tolerable limit on global temperatures. That's the point at which carbon removed by nature equals carbon emissions.
Then, to avoid irreversibly severe floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires, humans must emit less carbon dioxide than land and sea absorb each year, until and beyond the year 2100.
The oaks and pines near his Walden Pond cabin inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Pine 58, left alone on a hillside for 160 years and counting, continues to add steadily to the six tons of carbon already stored in its trunk, branches, and roots.
Making sure that our forests grow more trees like Pine 58 will allow natural forests to assist carbon drawdown for centuries after Bob and I—and the rest of us—are gone. Let's accept this gift that forests are offering us—that strikes me as "climate-smart."