KSL 376: On the Nature of Trees

by Tina Erwin

 It seems that everywhere you look, someone is cutting down a tree, some developer is ‘clearing a property to suit’ some potential business buyer. Imagine how much more beautiful a property would be nestled among trees. You really see this tree slaughter in the Southern United States where lot after lot is utterly leveled.

You also see trees leveled by various homeowner associations that live in terror of being sued by the fall of any tree. In some associations it is a wonder that any trees survive at all.

Some people are fearful of trees, thinking that they may fall on a house or car. This does happen at odd times in the West where the dreaded Eucalyptus trees, shallow rooted devils that they are, have been known to fall. Yet, many hundreds of thousands of them line the freeways in California providing some modest grace to an open, often, barren landscape. These same trees also provide nesting places for raptor birds as well as other very large birds like owls, egrets, herons and ibis.

Pine trees can snap in violent windstorms that happen in almost any part of the country. People hate them for the pine needles that fall on their cars. Yet, pines provide so much shade, so many negative ions that clean the air and so much grace that the world would be a much sadder place without them. They are also nesting places for lots of very large birds.

Many people dislike the ‘mess’ that trees create through the normal process of just living. They shed branches, leaves, seeds, needles, flower petals, and pollen. Imagine that! The normal process of living creates messy debris for we humans. We cannot seem to tolerate a mess in plants, but we expect nature to accommodate us as we pollute the planet.

We are so busy being important that we often forget the importance of those things in our lives that make our lives interesting and dynamic.

One of the things that we may also be unaware of is the very subtle yet critical interrelationship between the sky, the air, trees, the land and all the animals. They speak to each other in their own language. Birdsong helps trees to grow, triggering some mysterious reaction in the trees. Trees owe their existence in part to the spreading of their seeds by birds. Birds and trees need the air, the wind to literally lift up the birds on air currents and allow the birds and often seed pods to literally fly across the lands to grow in a variety of places. When trees are cut down, birds have no place to grow, insects cannot populate and grow and all the lesser plants that must have large trees under which to grow, also die out. Decimating trees started the desertification of many areas of the world.

Finally, consider the arrogance of being able to cut down, in a mere seconds, what has often taken nature sometimes a few years to a thousand years to grow as in the case of a redwood or Sequoia.

Tree huggers seem to get a bad rap, yet, they have served to remind us that trees have a personality presence in our lives, a kind ‘statelyness’ that softens any landscape and makes us respect the power and persistence of nature.

What can one person do? What are many people doing? They are planting trees, lots of them. Where you can, plant a grove of trees, create sanctuaries where trees can be protected. Go to planning committees in cities and make it illegal for developers to level any piece of property because of runoff, loss of habitat and the desertification of all of our lands.

Help other people to respect the power and the majesty of trees. Perhaps pondering the long term commitment to a relationship we have with nature will empower all of us to be more circumspect when we have to cut down a tree. Perhaps, possibly in the future, there will be a better way to do things.