Dear California Trees,

When are you going to stand up and take some responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not only the blue-purple blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars, or the colonies of disease-carrying rats that you palms harbor, or even the roots you magnolias use to keep messing up the sidewalks on my street. It’s not even that your out-of-control-fires foul California’s air, destroy homes, and drain the state budget.

No, what most upsets me is that, instead of being accountable for the trouble you cause, you leave us humans to solve all your problems. You trees are more aloof than any Hollywood star. Do you think the Lorax from Dr. Seuss is going to show up to speak for you? Or do you think you’re magical heroes, like the trees from The Lord of the Rings?

The only reason you get away with this irresponsibility is your millions of human apologists, who constantly shift blame away from you flora and onto us fauna.

We are told that the stuff you trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities who don’t keep you guys away from their power lines, or government agencies who don’t properly manage you, or rural homeowners who insist on living among you in the wilderness, or even the homeless who seek shelter among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation! That’s pretty rich when you recognize the reality: This state is much more yours than it is ours. There are 4 billion live trees in California—100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under your rule. And you dominate geographically, with forests covering one-third of the state’s land mass.

Now, to your credit, you in the forestlands pull your weight in some ways: You provide opportunities for recreation and contemplation. You store carbon, helping limit climate change. And a big shout-out to you trees in the Sierra: You collect and store the snowpack that California humans depend on for water and, while you’re at it, you filter pollutants out of runoff and reduce erosion that would send sediments into our streams.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has been slipping.

Why? It starts with your total failure to plan for self-defense, a lack of foresight that looks like some combination of laziness and grift, as you profited from the good nature of humans while shortchanging us in the process.

You exploited our fire suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. And while humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and limiting development (not to mention giving up newspapers), you grew everywhere, creating forests with 10 times more trees per acre than a century ago. And while that might have been OK if you’d produced the grand and majestic trees that you once did, instead you gave us small, flimsy imposters. (Many of you are also non-natives—unauthorized immigrants—but let’s not get too much into that here, lest ICE try to deport you.)

Today’s overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and the infestation of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million California trees to die between 2010 and 2017.

And did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads, and power lines, while littering the forests and fueling apocalyptic fires that burned for months. To take just one example, 2017’s Wine Country fires killed 22 people and caused $8 billion in damage and destruction—more than the state’s annual investment in the University of California—torching 14,000 homes, 4,000 commercial buildings, and 3,200 cars.

Such fires extinguished much of the goodwill you built with your environmental work. After all, mega-fires have badly lowered air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect, while emitting carbon you’re supposed to store.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard and costly work because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you help us humans with massive and money-losing thinning projects across such huge swaths of California? Do you tax yourselves to cover the costs of making the forests healthy? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to manage and restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership on tree issues has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees—especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman—were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires.

When Governor Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief. Environmental groups said thinning would just ease logging practices that harm forests, and argued that wildfires are more the fault of grasslands and that dastardly chaparral than of you trees. At the same time, logging-minded folks and homeowners in the North State suggested they needed more freedom from environmental regulation to cull the forest. That descended into all kinds of other arguments, including how responsible utilities should be for wildfires that stem from their power lines.

Meanwhile, you trees, in failing to address your own problems, even gave an opening to the political arsonist in the White House, who blamed environmental lawsuits for not getting rid of more fire-prone trees. This was dishonest scapegoating, since most of our tree problems are on federal lands that his government fails to manage adequately.

Reflexively, humans blame themselves and not you for such problems. I’ve seen some commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But that’s not true. Years ago, Governor Brown saw this problem emerging and convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that comprised state agencies, local governments, scholars, utilities, emergency services, and pretty much every stakeholder in our forests except you trees.

Without the task force’s work on maintenance and dead tree removal, the tree situation in California would undoubtedly be worse. It might have helped if you trees had demanded a much greater budget allocation for the tree crisis, but you preferred to remain quiet.

You can’t play shy anymore. The truth is that California’s tree problems may have become too big for humans. For us to help you, we’d have to come together as never before to engage in long-term collaborations to restore our massive forestlands, to find significant new funds for managing forests, and to embrace very different systems for fire prevention and land preservation. That kind of thoughtful, far-sighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

Which is why, California trees, it’s time for you to face the same reality that confronts every interest group. If you want to solve your problems in this state, you trees will have to do the work yourselves.

The post California’s Trees Need to Stop Just Standing There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I visited, six months after Maria, the roadside debris still hadn’t been removed. Electric lines drooped from trees or lay abandoned on the shoulder. Tattered blue tarps served as makeshift roofs. Other houses stood abandoned, missing doors and windows. Power to many rural areas hadn’t been restored, which meant that thousands of people were living without refrigerators and other necessities that we take for granted. Many people had left the island to escape these conditions, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that several thousand people may have died because of the storm.

Hurricanes are a natural occurrence, and the island and its people know them well. If you want to study what happens when hurricanes hit tropical forests—which they are doing with increasing frequency—then El Yunque is where you want to be. The forest here was hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, had considerable damage from Georges in 1998, was side-swiped by Irma in early September 2017 and then floored two weeks later by Maria and her 140-mile-per-hour winds.

For nearly a century, scientists have been observing how El Yunque handles hurricanes. Ecological systems don’t function separately from human systems. Rather, the two are always intertwined. Researchers at El Yunque attempt to parse how human actions—such as building roads, harvesting timber, and diverting water for domestic and municipal use—affect how this forest deals with its periodic hurricanes.

El Yunque is uniquely positioned for not only observing but also measuring what happens when hurricanes “batter” the forest, though scientists like Zimmerman actually use the word “affect.” This is not simply a scientist adhering to a language standard, it’s how the scientists at the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research site routinely describe what happens here. Changes this dramatic and on this grand a scale are natural. These forests have evolved with hurricanes, so they are remarkably resilient. “Everybody asks, ‘How’s the forest?’ It’s a hurricane forest, it has gone through this before. It looks pretty bad right now, but you wait,” Zimmerman said.

He’s confident in its recovery because he and his colleagues have seen it happen before. Since the 1940s, foresters then ecologists and biogeochemists at El Yunque have been staking out their study plots, delineating them with surveyors’ pin flags and white PVC pipe. The forest is further festooned with mesh baskets to measure how many seeds and leaves fall from trees and plants, flagging tape (green, orange, yellow, red) to mark study areas that are monitored regularly, small solar collectors to run equipment, and instruments for recording all sorts of data, including soil nutrients, temperature and humidity, tree diameters, and outputs of methane and nitrous oxide.

The Luquillo research site spans the whole national forest, and Zimmerman is its lead principal investigator as well as director of the El Verde field station—one of two in the forest. Right after Hurricane Maria hit, while the rest of the island was reeling from the loss of power, the scientists at the forest were in a race against time to get back to their measurements. Some of their equipment was buried by leaves and branches torn from the trees above. “In Hurricane Georges, we had some gaps in the data, and I didn’t want that to happen again, so I was just focused on keeping up that rhythm and getting out to all those different plots,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t think I picked up my computer for three weeks.”

The roof to the research building had been blown off, and trees were leaning on other buildings. After assessing the damage, and locating some tarps to stretch over the missing roof, Zimmerman led a crew out to the forest. His staff, along with some researchers and volunteers, used hand saws and a lot of grunt labor to open the trails to the various study plots. They worked steadily and with a sense of urgency, as a number of the experiments relied on timely data collection. For instance, the staff measures nitrate and potassium levels in the soil water every two weeks, and understanding Maria’s effects on these nutrients was crucial. “It’s samples like that you don’t want to lose the rhythm to in an event like this,” Zimmerman explained.

The most striking thing about the forest in those first days was its new color: brown. If you gazed up at a once verdant hillside, you might think it had been burnt—all the green leaves were gone.

No mature tree, anywhere, can withstand 140-mile-per-hour winds. Along with the leaves, something has to give, and it will be the weakest part of the structure: the roots, the trunk, or the crown. In temperate forests where hurricanes are a rarity—as in much of the mainland United States—most large trees are uprooted because the roots are the weak link. In the tropical forest at El Yunque, the roots held, some of the trunks were snapped, but nearly all of the crowns blew apart. The vast majority of the trees—maybe 95 percent of them—remained upright, even though they’d lost most of their limbs, branches, and leaves. It was as if someone had replaced trees with telephone poles.

During Hurricane Maria, high winds snapped all of the branches off the crowns of trees in the forest, leaving these bottle brush-like trees. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

Six months after the hurricane, when I visited Luquillo and walked out into the forest with Zimmerman, the green had returned. The telephone poles had already transformed into bottle brushes—their green leaves growing like bristles from the upper stem. Unlike mainland forests, a tropical forest has no dormant season, so the palm, the tabonuco (known for grafting its roots to those of its neighbors), the ausubo, with deep buttresses at its base, and all the other trees began sprouting branches and putting on leaves almost immediately. The trees had no time to waste, because they continue to respire and the only way to replenish the storeroom of carbohydrates is through photosynthesis—which requires leaves.

Luquillo’s forests are primary forests, which means that they were never cleared for agriculture, unlike most of Puerto Rico’s forests. There has been some sporadic logging, but that ended 70 years ago. So some of the larger ausubos and tabonucos are surely hundreds of years old, though it’s impossible to know, since the lack of a dormant season also means there are no annual tree rings to count.

It’s safe to assume that many of these trees stood through San Felipe II in 1928, the most recent hurricane comparable in strength to Maria. The strategy that has enabled them to survive this long is that they sacrifice their crowns, like sailors reefing their sails when the wind gets too rough. Any species less windfirm has been knocked off the mountain by now. Researchers have shown that selection for hurricane resistance also operates within species. Palms and mahoganies grown from seeds from hurricane-prone areas are more windfirm than those from areas lacking hurricanes.

Even though the greening of the canopy overhead was spectacular, it was no match for what was happening on the ground, where a sea of verdant jade was flooding in around us. Zimmerman pointed out the pioneer tree species soaking up the sun. These species cannot grow in the deep shade of a rainforest, but when a hurricane blows the canopy away, they seize the day. Seeds that were deposited in the soil decades ago—the last time the canopy was wide open—suddenly have enough sunlight to germinate. They do so by the thousands. One of these pioneers, the cecropia, gathers light with a leaf so huge it could function as an umbrella.

After the hurricane removed the dense tree cover that shielded the forest floor, sunlight awakened seeds—some of which had been waiting for decades—and the green understory sprang to life. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

“We’re seeing a lot of herbs that we haven’t seen,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a lush heliconia, a wild plantain. “There are huge patches of these heliconia, and they were virtually non-existent before the storm. I’ve seen pokeweed. That’s a pasture plant, not a forest plant. In two or three years there will be tons of shrubs in the understory. This is their time to grow, to flower, and to produce fruit to fill up the seed banks and to wait for the next hurricane. This is their opportunity to go.”

Grasses, vines that completely envelop tree trunks, begonias, tree ferns, all of these plants thriving in the sudden gift of sunlight are turning what was once an open park into a puckerbrush. But they are racing against the clock. This is a very dynamic time at Luquillo. Can any of the new trees grow fast enough to make it to the canopy? Sprouts on residual trees become branches, branches become limbs, and the canopy fills in the gaps. The 30 percent canopy cover of today will return once again to a full canopy, leading to light levels near the ground low enough to make photographers weep. And the live-fast, die-young pioneer species will indeed die young, starved of sunlight, though they will most likely have made plenty of deposits in the seed bank.

The ecological concept of resilience is surprisingly straightforward. It is a measure of how long it takes for a system to return to pre-disturbance conditions after an event like a hurricane. The forests of El Yunque have shown that within 25 years, they can return to pre-hurricane conditions. Only time will tell if Puerto Rico’s political, social, and economic systems will be able to make the kind of recovery that we can expect to see from its treasured rainforest.

The post The Puerto Rican Trees That Can Stand Up to Hurricanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

The post The 1938 Hurricane That Revived New England’s Fall Colors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thanks to the ample snows that usually fall, the Sierras have been California’s most efficient water storage system. In normal years, the mountain range’s snowpack provides 30 percent of the state’s water. It is the primary source for reservoirs that supply drinking water, agriculture, and hydroelectric power. But this year, the snowpack was at just 5 percent of its 50-year average. This statistic, which was announced by the California Department of Water Resources on April 1, became the poster child for the extreme drought conditions that have plagued California for the last four years. When California Gov. Jerry Brown declared the first-ever mandatory state-wide water restriction, he chose a Sierra Nevada snow-measurement station as his backdrop. For the first time in 75 years, that station was surrounded only by dirt.

For me, Brown’s announcement worked as a call for action. After my time in the Sierras, I had realized that my main research interest—the interaction between climate and forest ecosystems—could best be pursued amidst the majestic landscapes of the American West, so in 2011, I became a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I now lead a team that uncovers the past climate of California by studying its trees. I knew my research could put this year’s 2015 snow drought in a much longer context.

While there are no written documents about the climate in California from centuries ago that anyone knows of, nature itself has been writing the story of its past in many places—caves, shells, lakes, and, of course, trees. My job as a paleoclimatologist is to decipher this story. Trees are remarkable creatures: In California’s Mediterranean climate, they form a growth ring every year, and the width of that ring depends, to a large extent, on that year’s climate. After a wet winter, the ring that forms is relatively wide; after a dry winter, the ring is narrow. By measuring the widths of these rings in trees that have lived for centuries, my team can “read” what the climate was like in each year over that time span. And we can extend this outlook even further by collecting older dead wood.

The amount of snow on the ground at the end of the snowy season in the Sierras is largely determined by two climate components: how much precipitation fell during winter, and how warm or cold the winter was. Temperature determines how much of the precipitation that fell was rain versus snow, and affects the speed of snowmelt. We put two tree-ring data sets together to represent precipitation and temperature over the last 500 years. By measuring the width of the rings of more than 1,500 blue oak trees in central California, some of the most climate-sensitive trees on the planet, we were able to reliably trace Pacific Ocean storms that have traveled east over central California and brought precipitation to the Sierra Nevada. We complemented this data with a 500-year-long winter temperature record derived from tree-ring data from a variety of trees throughout the American West, which was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By comparing these two data sets to Sierra Nevada snowpack records dating back to the 1930s, we were able to reconstruct the history of snowpack in the region all the way back to the year 1500. The results, which we published last week, made national headlines: The mountain range’s 2015 snowpack level is the lowest it has been in the last 500 years.

To put that in perspective, this means this winter has been the worst since the first European explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, explored California in the 1540s—about 230 years before the first mission was established. When my team started our work, we thought this year’s snow drought would be extreme, but we did not expect it to be the absolute lowest.

Sadly, while this research sheds light on the past, it’s actually not a very good barometer for the future. It very likely will not take another 500 years to reach the next record snowpack low. California temperatures are only projected to rise over the coming century. Even if the projected strong El Niño in the Pacific dumps loads of rain on southern California this year, chances are that the Sierra Nevada snowpack will be a less reliable water source for the state going forward. This means fish and wildlife communities will suffer and, of course, California’s growing population of farmers, gardeners, skiers, and residents are only going to keep wanting more, much more.

As I write this, the summer monsoon is rolling in over Tucson, and I am reminded that it brings a chance of redemption after a dry winter in Arizona. But California doesn’t have monsoons. Instead, in the last few days, my Twitter feed has been filled with pictures and stories of the Butte and Rough fires that are raging through the region. To me, they demonstrate the well-studied link between low snowpack, earlier spring snowmelt, and the increased risk of wildfire.

Now the ancient Giant Sequoia trees that left me in awe when I first saw them are at risk of being felled by drought, and even under the immediate threat of the Rough fire. To a tree-ring scientist, these 3,000-year-old trees are the enigmatic face of the power and resilience of nature. They have doubtless survived many threats and disturbances that we are not even aware of. To walk amongst these giants for the first time was a dream come true. Little did I realize then that I’d be keeping my fingers crossed for their survival less than a decade later.

The post How We Discovered the Sierra Nevada Snowpack Is at a 500-Year Low appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thankful, my country, be to him who first
Brought thither from Australia oversea
Sapling or seed of the undeciduous tree

Fourscore years later, Robert Sward of Santa Cruz penned a seriocomic poem about a particular species of eucalyptus, Tasmanian blue gum, subtitled “The Tree That Destroyed California.” Here’s a representative couplet: “Blue Gum, the Waste Land as tree, / Blue Gum that smells of rot and Noxzema …”

What happened? How did eucalyptus become flora non grata in California? The story is a spectacular rise, and equally spectacular fall, in three phases: introduction, naturalization, and deterioration.

First came the era of mass introductions. For roughly half a century following the gold rush, California nurserymen imported eucalyptus seeds from Australia and grew them by the millions. Pioneer planters and state authorities promoted eucalyptus as a replacement for overharvested oaks and redwoods, as a producer of railroad ties, as a preserver of soil and climate, even as a remedy for malaria.

Plantings peaked during the “eucalyptus craze” of the 1870s and the “eucalyptus boom” of 1907 to 1913—the Golden State’s answer to Dutch tulipomania of the 17th century. Start-up timber companies hyped the “miracle tree” as the answer to a looming national “hardwood famine.” In fact, many of these companies were fronts for real estate flippers. The bubble collapsed in 1913 when a government study proved that young eucalyptus makes low-grade lumber. Timber companies immediately shut down, leaving small-time investors stuck with devalued property. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of acres of seedlings in coastal hills from Marin to Santa Barbara County were essentially left to go wild. The trees thrived in the fog belt: they naturalized in the biological sense.

As of 1913, lowland California was still paradise for eucalyptus: a bioregion with favorable soil and climate but no Australasian diseases, insects, birds, or nibbling koalas. Protected by the wide Pacific from natural enemies, gum trees in the Golden State grew preternaturally fast and large—attaining sequoia-like size in 50 years, becoming some of the largest hardwoods on the planet.

Eucalyptus also naturalized in the cultural sense: “California’s adopted tree” seemed at home. Even though eucs had repeatedly failed to meet the outsized hopes of promoters, they remained important as firewood, as orchard windbreaks, and as roadside ornamentals. As of the 1950s, one could drive nearly the entire length of the Golden State, from Shasta County to San Diego, without ever losing sight (or smell) of blue-green foliage. Gum trees from Australasia were far more prevalent than redwood, the official state tree, and scarcely less iconic.

In this second phase, post-pioneer residents honored eucalyptus as the “next thing to native.” Regional impressionists of the early 20th century painted eucalyptic canvases by the hundreds. Ansel Adams took large-format portraits of eucs that mimicked the style of 19th-century sequoia views. In the 1960s, Harold Gilliam, venerable nature columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, declared: “Eucalyptus seems an indispensable element of this State’s landscapes, as indigenously Californian as the redwoods, the poppy fields, the long white coastal beaches, the gleaming granite of the High Sierra.” On the original Earth Day in 1970, student activists in Ventura County used civil disobedience in an attempt to save gum trees from a road project. Into the early ’70s, members of the Sierra Club made annual visits to the gravesite of John Muir and, as a memorial gesture, linked hands around the adjacent manna gum—one of Muir’s favorite trees on his estate—and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

So how did Californians grow disenchanted with eucalyptus? And why did the most commonly cultivated species, Tasmanian blue gum, go from being a marker of belonging to a vexed symbol of nonnativeness? The explanation consists of several overlapping factors and one big disaster.

Starting in the 1980s, land management agencies advocated—and often mandated—habitat restoration at certain publically owned nature preserves. Conservation biologists wanted to bring back aspects of California’s pre-settlement lowland landscape, which was marked by grasses more than by trees, and browns more than greens.

In the Bay Area, leftover blue gum plantations from the boom years had become feral forests. Because these woodlands adjoined densely populated areas—and because postwar developers built neighborhoods within them—they grew into a fire hazard. The hazard became deadly during the Berkeley Hills firestorm of 1991, which took 25 lives and destroyed the homes of some 5,000 people.

After the disaster, many residents disowned eucalypts and, borrowing from conservation biology, reclassified them as giant weeds and alien invaders. Strange scenes unfolded in the Bay Area. Euc-hating environmentalists fought tree-huggers and defenders of migrating monarch butterflies, which roost in coastal eucalypts. Habitat restorationists worked against landscape preservationists. Eucalyptophiles from the 1980s to the present have at times used inflammatory phrases like “veggie racism,” “botanical xenophobia,” and “biological nativism” to describe the motives of native plant advocates.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, eucalypts proved all too mortal. They fell victim to development, age, drought, and beetles. In the ’80s and ’90s, a series of insect infestations—a consequence of container shipping and non-stop transpacific flights—caused widespread die-offs of old eucalypts in cities throughout the state. A series of well-publicized street tree accidents in the past few decades has added to the impression that eucs present an imminent public safety risk.

No less a figure than Les Murray, the “bush bard” of Australia, added fuel to the fire with “Eucalypts in Exile” (2008):

They explode the mansions of Malibu
because to be eucalypts
they have to shower sometimes in Hell

Do gum trees in California deserve this evil reputation? The answer is a carefully qualified no.

Every tree in the world will eventually undergo structural failure if something doesn’t kill it first. Trees of any kind can be eaten by beetles, weakened by fungus, stressed by drought, buffeted by wind. Eucalypts sometimes drop large branches out of the blue—a terrifying thing—but so do many native trees.

Nonetheless, people interpret tree failure differently for different species. Hazard is a cultural and legal concept, not a botanical one. When a naturally occurring native oak collapses onto a bicyclist, it can be legally categorized as an act of God. When a nonnative eucalyptus—a “killer euc”—does the same thing, it can potentially be construed as a liable offense.

Since Californians planted a large percentage of the state’s eucs in two frenzied moments of afforestation over a century ago, this pioneer cohort of California gums has now aged to the point that it may indeed be disproportionately more hazardous than other groups of trees. But it’s wrong to claim, as many do, that eucs are inherently dangerous in California. Eucalypts are of course more flammable than redwoods, and produce much more fuel in the form of leaf and bark litter than fire-resistant native oaks. Nevertheless, the fire danger present at locations like San Francisco’s Mount Sutro (the island thicket above UC San Francisco and below Sutro Tower) is more about long-term resource mismanagement than about the unavoidable danger of so-called “gasoline trees” or “napalm trees.”

The matter of biological invasion has been similarly overstated. Of almost 400 eucalyptus species introduced to California since the 1850s, fewer than 20 have naturalized—that is, become self-reproducing populations. And only one of these naturalized species, blue gum (E. globulus), has become a nuisance as a moderately invasive species. And only in the urban-wildland interface in one eco-zone, the coastal fog belt. And only after humans gave it a huge head start by establishing plantations.

E. globulus cannot be considered a textbook invader, or even a noteworthy one. It’s not as if eucalyptus escaped and overran lowland California on its own like periwinkle, pampas grass, ice plant, tamarisk, English ivy, Scotch broom, French broom, Russian thistle, Himalayan blackberry, or any number of other true problem plants.

Blue gums continue to serve as lightning rods in California for two main reasons—one about location, the other about symbolism.

Old specimens tend to be found in highly visible locations near or within cities. They are associated with infrastructure problems such as disrupted sewers, buckled sidewalks, impeded power lines, littered yards, obstructed views, increased insurance rates, and exposed liabilities.

The other reason for their infamy is almost too obvious: blue gums are distinctive-looking trees, and trees can function as symbols in a way that grasses and shrubs cannot. They can be easily individuated and anthropomorphized. They can be imagined as grandfathers, guardians, adopted children, dirty foreigners, shallow-rooted immigrants, naturalized citizens, or illegal aliens.

We should stop using eucalyptus as a political symbol of bioinvasion in California. Instead we should see it as a historical symbol of desire. In the past, Californians desired and cultivated eucs because they grew quickly, tolerated a variety of growing conditions (including heat and drought), and, most of all, because their foliage, bloom, scent, and shade made the Golden State more beautiful. All of which is still true.

Going forward, we need subtler terminology and politics to deal with the problem of plants out of place. We inhabit an eco-cosmopolitan world; globalization is here to stay. It matters less where plants came from originally than how they fit in now. From this point of view, eucalyptus belongs in some parts of California and not in others. Context means everything.

In nature preserves like Channel Islands National Park and fire-prone neighborhoods like the Berkeley Hills, it makes perfect sense to eradicate eucs or thin their numbers. But in other places—for example, the edges of farms, highways, campuses, and large metropolitan parks—gum trees ought to be maintained as elements of the biocultural landscape. Here they should be tended and replanted as part of the Golden State’s heritage. But we don’t have to use the same species as 19th-century planters. Botanists and arborists can recommend species and varietals that are shorter, less messy, and more water-wise than blue gums.

A wonderful poem, “Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It,” by the California writer Kevin Hearle begins: “A eucalyptus has its implications where I come from …” In California, gum trees imply that this bioregion was conquered with greenery. Even as American settlers felled redwoods and oaks with abandon, even as they drained and filled wetlands, they brought forth artificial forests, garden cities, and gainful orchards. They staged a revolution with trees. We are the caretakers of this horticultural legacy—the good, the bad, and the beautiful.

The post The Rise and Fall of the Gum Tree appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nikiko Masumoto — performance scholar, gender studies major, world traveler — has come home to the Central Valley to farm. The 25-year-old has moved back into her room in her grandmother’s house, abutting the 80 acres of grape vines and fruit trees in Del Rey, California (pop: 1,639), just southeast of Fresno. Nikiko has always returned home for the summer harvest. This time, she is home for good.

Like her father, the renowned author and organic farmer David Mas Masumoto, Nikiko went to Sanger High School, home of the Apaches. Like her father, she escaped as fast as she could to the University of California at Berkeley. She flourished in that rarefied academic world, and thought that she would never return to the Central Valley. But, like her father, she was drawn back as if by gravitational pull.

Her epiphany came during sophomore year in an environmental studies class. A guest lecture about pesticides prompted Nikiko, for the first time, to place her family’s organic farm in a global context. She began to think the family legacy meshed with her social justice and environmental passions, and her newfound political boldness. (Before college, she says, offering an example of her trajectory, she did not have a position on abortion. The issue simply had not come up. )

When Nikiko told her parents she wanted to apprentice and eventually take over the land her grandfather purchased in 1948, her announcement was greeted with surprise and a degree of skepticism. “I think they took me a little more seriously when I got my peach tattoos,” Nikiko says. A small peach just above her left ankle is the most visible; a spray of Elberta peach blossoms adorns her right shoulder blade, and engraved on top of her right foot is a verbal marriage of peaches and politics that reads “Radical: of or from the root(s)”.

Nikiko returned home after graduating from Berkeley in 2007, but found she needed more time away. She wanted to explore a different side of her heritage – the experience of Japanese Americans like her grandparents, who were interned during World War II. She enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in a master’s program to study performance in relationship to history, culture and local communities. Her dissertation explored collective memory and bears witness to the anguish of Japanese Americans and their quest for redress. She composed a play based on historical archives, performed the work, and wrote about its place as performance scholarship.

Now Nikiko studies the art and anguish of harvests: When and where to pick the seven varieties of peaches. “It is the most beautiful and heart wrenching part,’’ she says. “Part knowledge, part guessing.” Each tree will be picked several times, at set intervals. Like a surfer, you must catch the wave at the perfect moment. “If you hit it right, it keeps on going. If you start at the wrong time …” she trails off. “I learned this year, if you get the first day right, you’re set.”

Nikiko revels in the state she calls “constructive exhaustion” – always in motion, arms waving, mind racing. She tweets about Masumoto peaches and blogs as the Feminist Farmer. She is writing a peach cookbook with her mother, Marcy, whom she calls her best friend. At the end of harvest, she squeezed in rehearsals for a play she brought to the nearby community of Fowler, a collaboration between a professional Los Angeles theater troupe and local volunteers. Nikiko, her parents, and her younger brother, Korio, joined the cast.

In the two months she has been “replanted” in Del Rey, Nikiko Masumoto has begun to confront issues far more complex than how to time the harvest. How to define her place among young people in the Central Valley, a world starkly separated by the Great Divide – those who leave, and those who stay behind? How best to function in a world with no separation between work and family, and with no demarcation between her roles as daughter, co-worker, employee, and manager?

“Days are so long. Tempers flare. Insecurities ripen,” she says. “There is no going home and having a beer and forgetting about it.”

And how will she carve out her own legacy while apprenticed to a man dubbed the “rock star farmer” for his success in rescuing heirloom peaches and writing eloquently about his travails? Mas Masumoto’s peaches have won raves from the chef Alice Waters. Rick Bayless is a personal friend, and Martha Stewart featured the farm in Living magazine. Nikiko has inherited her father’s values, as well as his personal flair. But how will she put her own stamp on the Masumoto legacy?

She has turned to Buddhism, the religion of her father, to ease the intellectual and emotional uncertainties as well as the physical pain of farming. Sustainability, she argues, is vital not only for the land, but for the people: “It is important to honor my limits.”

Standing in front of his trees, Mas Masumoto seeks to convey a sense of farming to a group that has gathered to harvest peaches on a recent weekend. He reads aloud from one of his books, a letter to his children in which he ponders their inheritance: “The greatest memorial to our family will be the farmland that stays behind, something you can touch and feel and smell. …As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize it’s not success I hope to leave behind. Rather, it’s significance.”

Nikiko Masumoto has her father’s gifts of poise and self-awareness. In a community and an industry desperately in need of young leaders, she has already assumed an important role – one she seems destined to shape and enhance. She is preternaturally aware of the significance of which her father speaks – inspired, a little awed, a little scared. “It’s a formidable legacy to be part of,” she says. “If something doesn’t work, I can’t just quit my job. Because, it’s my family.”

Miriam Pawel is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of The Union of Our Dreams – Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement.

*Photo by Miriam Pawel.

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A canopy scientist, an artist and a farmer, respectively, the trio explored trees from a wide variety of perspectives in their discussion at the Getty Center. Moderator Bob Sipchen, editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine, guided them to think broadly about the subject, which was prompted by Getty exhibit called In Focus: The Tree.

“We love trees, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a bit of a love-hate relationship,” Sipchen said.

A Human Connection

Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, said her love of trees began as a young child. Her parents, a Hindu raised in India and an American Orthodox Jew, imbued her with a strong relationship with the environment.

“From my earliest times I sort of had this combination of cultures and ways of approaching the natural world both from science and communications [perspectives], and I found myself wanting to climb trees all the time, which I did.”

Since then, Nadkarni has spent extensive time in trees – she climbs them regularly to this day and leads artists, musicians and others up into the forest canopy.

“There’s a primal sense of ‘I’m in the right sense when I’m up high,’ she said. “There’s something magical about it.”

Steinkamp, a visual artist who has created several works featuring computer-generated trees, has similarly been influenced by different cultures and religious imagery, she said. One of her artworks was inspired by a dervish performance in Istanbul.

“I thought maybe I can make trees that move kind of like dervishes,” she said, showing the piece on a video screen. “These trees are attempting to have a spiritual experience, I guess.”

Another video Steinkamp played showed children trying to hug the video display of trees in a gallery. Nadkarni said the video confirmed that children feel naturally drawn to trees.

A Beautiful Commodity

Masumoto, who operates an 80-acre organic peach, nectarine and grape farm near Fresno, Calif., said his relationship to trees is different from the others’ because he relies on them for income. He told the audience about the first time he felt a connection to trees, when his father told him what the family peach trees meant for his life.

“He joked that the profits from these trees would send us all to college, and it worked,” he said.

Years later, when experts recommended eliminating those same trees because the fruit they produced was not shelf-stable, he initially agreed but changed his mind.

“I had a crazy moment, sort of like the moment in Tiananmen Square, and I stood in front of the bulldozer,” he said. “I realized, ‘what have I done, we are keeping this tree that no one wanted.’”

Now, those trees are a key part of Masumoto’s career, producing unique heirloom peaches that are in high demand.

A Fraught Relationship

Steinkamp was the least effusive of the three panelists about trees – her fellow presenters joked that she’s a tree-hater, and although she disputed that characterization she admitted she is not a giant nature lover.

“I like hotels,” she joked.

But all three agreed that there is a dark side to trees. Nadkarni said she is fascinated by the roots of trees, which people never see and tree-related art rarely features. And though trees often represent beauty in art, it can have less positive connotations.

“The timber that comes from trees makes things like caskets and gallows and all sorts of things that we associate with death,” she said.

There has always been a tension between humans and nature, Sipchen said, and people’s relationship to trees is complicated by the fact that we take their fruit and cut them down to survive.

“Farmers manipulate nature, it’s what we do,” Masumoto said, adding that he considers it humane euthanasia when he has to cut down an old tree.

But Nadkarni pointed out that humans can be good for trees as well: scientists are working to bring the characteristics of old-growth trees to newer forests, which would be good news for the ecosystem.

Trees in Art

The relationship that many people consciously maintain with trees is seeking shade and appreciating their aesthetic value, Sipchen said. That is reflected through the prevalence of trees in artwork.

Steinkamp was first inspired to create artwork of trees when she saw an image of the Greek goddess Medusa. After extensive research, she decided to emulate the movement of the snakes that make up Medusa’s hair through tree branches.

Nadkarni has used physical trees to make art, tying paintbrushes to branches in front of an easel. The product was a painting, but also a sense of the fluidity of trees that resulted from elaborate measurements.

“A single tree, seemingly standing in place, actually moves 186,540 miles per year,” she said. “So if we simply look at it from another perspective, we’re looking at something that’s extremely mobile. Trees have hidden lives, just as we do.”

Masumoto, too, sees an artistic component to his work with trees. Farmers can’t wait around for their trees to produce great fruit, he said; they are constantly tweaking different factors in hopes of creating a better product.

“I do think I work almost as an artist,” he said. “There is so much more beyond economics in farming and working with trees.”

For event photos, please click here.
For full video, please click here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido

The post The Majesty of Trees appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Environmental issues are a bigger part of the collective consciousness than ever before. Recycling has become the norm, water conservation is a major issue in the American West, and environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are front-page news. Yet by many measures, Americans’ relationship to nature is at an all-time low, as we spend more time inside in front of screens. In advance of a panel on “Why We Love Trees” at Zócalo on April 21, we asked experts about whether environmentalism has improved our relationship to nature.

We’ve Never Been More Distant From Nature

The “Age of Environmentalism,” the world’s great environmental awakening, began in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring. In this modern classic, Carson warned of the dangers that pesticides posed to the environment. In a broader sense, however, Silent Spring raised the specter of humanity’s exploitation of nature becoming its very undoing.

Since Carson’s time, the environment has become a national – even international – policy issue. Nowhere has the impact been greater than in our educational system. Prior to Silent Spring, we never heard mention of “the environment”, while in academe today curricula are replete with courses on the topic; indeed, one can even earn a college degree emphasizing “the environment.”

Students may study the environment, legislators may write laws to protect it, but it is my belief that none of this has brought us closer to nature. The evidence is all around us:

• Public opinion polls indicate that “the environment” has declined as a national policy priority. Only 2 percent of American’s currently believe that it should have precedence on the legislative agenda.
• The National Park Service indicates that visits have declined about 6 percent since 1999. The decline has been attributed to rising gasoline prices and a general lack of interest in the out-of-doors.
• Recent Gallup polls indicate that the trend in public skepticism regarding global warming, possibly the most serious long-term threat to the environment, is increasing. Furthermore, it has become a partisan issue with 66 percent of Republicans, vs. 22 percent of Democrats, claiming the threat is exaggerated.
• The threat posed by the Deep Water Horizon offshore platform, the site of America’s greatest environmental disaster of our time, was cavalierly dismissed by the government as a categorical exclusion in the National Environmental Policy Act process.
• Recent attempts by the GOP to defund the EPA have met with almost no resistance from the public or the opposing Democrats.

In his best-selling book, Wilderness and the American Mind, Rod Nash argues that 19th century America’s appreciation of the natural world, oddly enough, began to increase only after people began forsaking a bucolic life to move to the city, far removed for the wilderness. Such is certainly not the case today. Americans seem more distant than ever from nature despite the Age of Environmentalism.

J.E. de Steiguer is professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs.

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We May Not Be Outside, But At Least We’re More Aware

The ‘age of environmentalism’ may not have brought us closer to nature in the most romantic model of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. People are not necessarily spending more time in nature; however, they are changing how they think about the natural world and use environmental resources. Whether it is recycling in the home or workplace, working to reduce water consumption or buying organic foods, there does seem to be a remarkable uptick in demand for greener products and services.

Beyond individual demand, partnerships between landowners, corporations, advocacy groups and entities at local, state and national levels have led to innovative efforts to recognize the value of nature. From programs that pay landowners to protect and grow wetlands and forests as natural carbon sinks and water filtration systems, to working with major corporations to “green” their supply chain, there is growing recognition that nature’s “services” are a valuable component to protecting and improving our quality of life and the economy.

This recognition needs to grow now that the world’s population is expected to increase to nine billion people by 2040. As population increases, so will demand for food, water, energy, recreation and other services that nature provides. As demand for the world’s resources grows, so could the environmental damage to our oceans, climate, land and wildlife. Fortunately, innovative programs that recognize and reward environmental stewardship are expanding. This ultimately brings us closer to nature.

David Festa is vice president for the West Coast and the Land, Water, Wildlife program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

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We’ve Made Children Afraid of Interacting With the Environment

Indeed, visits to national parks have been trending down since 1987; in 2008, fewer people entered national parks than they did 20 years ago. While researchers debate the root cause of people spending less time outside and its associated impacts on mental and physical health, there is little debate that this trend spells trouble for our commitment to conservation.

What can we do to get our kids out of the virtual world and into the woods? First, we must say no to the negative eco-propaganda that dribbles down on them all day. For example, there are all sorts of scary green monsters, from cow eaters to forest destroyers to villainous corporations discussed in schools and in children’s books. When asked what global warming means, many kids have absolutely no idea, but they know it’s caused by humans.

Green mantras are also seeping into classroom textbooks. Authors of textbooks are influenced “by an ideological view that presents human beings as evil,” according to Dr. Michael Sanera, director of the Center for Environmental Education Research. Sanera compared science textbooks used in sixth through 10th grades in Wisconsin. Though he felt the textbooks all did a good job explaining the carbon cycle and greenhouse effect, nearly all focused only on the human causes of climate change and all predicted catastrophic impact. What is often left out is all of the postiive impacts humans are having on the environment. The basis of a better environment turns out to be the same “secret” behind other success stories, human ingenuity. As humankind grows more creative in using the natural world to improve life, the natural world responds with bounty. The well-known and respected professeor Julian Simon believed that the ultimate resource is human ingenuity. “With every mouth comes two hands and a mind,” he said.

Rather than scaring susceptible young people about the environment, why not teach them the truth and get them outdoors? To really “teach the truth,” Holly Fretwell, author of The Sky’s Not Falling, says, “we must teach students of all ages to become critical thinkers and to gain knowledge, not just information, from science.” Demonstrating the complexities of science and providing them with tools to find and evaluate evidence creates self-reliance, critical thinking and hopefully enough curiosity to go outside and explore nature.

Laura E. Huggins is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. She is the co-author of Greener Than Thou: Are You Really an Environmentalist?

*Photo courtesy of Trevor Manternach.

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