St Barbe Baker was the man of the trees during the 20th century. He helped save the Californian Redwoods, and worked on the desert reclamation of the Sahara. No man has been a more passionate advocate of the value of trees, or more articulate about their importance to man and our place in nature. He wrote and lectured widely. Here are some of his thoughts:
I learnt early on to regard the forest as a society of living things, the greatest of which is the tree. Its (the tree’s) value depends upon its permanence, its capacity to renew itself, to store water; its many biological functions including that of providing nature’s most valuable ground cover, and building up to a great height stores of one of the most adaptable of raw materials, wood.
The truth is, we know all too little about the vital functions of trees. They consume little from the earth and, indeed, give back much more than they take, and as for water, it would seem that they create it.
Besides water, trees provide pure air. They are the great filtering machines for the human organism. They improve and transform the air in a way which is most favourable and most acceptable to the lungs of man.
The first living things
According to ancient mythology, trees were the first living things on earth. This is borne out by scientific reasoning which shows that it is through them that the air we breathe can give life to humanity. Through countless ages trees have been drawing carbonic acid gas from the atmosphere, absorbing and incorporating the carbon, assimilating it; then when they die, bequeathing to the soil their carboniferous remains. The consequence has been that eventually the atmospheric oxygen was left sufficiently pure for the requirements of birds and mammals which have replaced the flying reptiles and monstrous amphibians that were able to endure the heavy air of primeval swamps and jungles.
Water must be a basic consideration in everything: forestry, agriculture and industry. The forest is the mother of the rivers.
A man who plants a tree is doing a very wonderful thing. He is setting in motion an organism which may far outlive him or his children, and year by year that tree is storing up energy and power, working with precision like a factory, but far superior to any factory of man. On a full grown tree there are thousands of leaves constantly working, evaporating and breathing out water into the atmosphere. Think of the enormous surface of these leaves. Take for instance a large elm in one of our London parks. If you were to defoliate it and spread all the leaves side by side on the ground, the leaves from a single tree would cover ten acres of land. Now imagine those leaves covered with minute stomata, each working, absorbing the maximum quantity of solar energy, nitrogen (from) the atmosphere and various other elements and minerals, and many different radiations which they accumulate and elaborate by means of millions and millions of chlorophyll cells.
Our natural capital
The health and the economic security of the human race depend on how well the forests of the world are managed. All the countries of the world are suffering the penalty resulting from man’s neglect to plant where he has reaped. He has destroyed the gifts of a generous Creator without realizing that they were a trust to be handed on to future generations. The earth’s green covering is nature’s capital, and, if man exacts more than the interest of annual increment, he is endangering the source of wealth and the very means of his existence on the planet.
Animals versus trees
The pyramid of life is upset, and one of the things we must do is to turn from an animal economy to a silvan economy. We’ve got to have tree crops, instead of wasting all this land for raising beef. It takes eighteen times more land to feed people on beef than it does on nuts and fruit. Eighteen times more land! When half the human family today are dying from starvation, I don’t feel justified in making these demands on the earth.
It therefore comes as rather a shock to us that the civilizations of the New World, which have developed with such rapidity, may decline with like speed.
Trees for farms
Trees create micro-climates, reduce the speed of wind, lift the water table and increase the population of worms… If farmers only knew how to harness worms, they could double their crops. Trees provide the answer… If you want to double your supplies of food, then you should devote twenty-two percent of your farm to trees, to strategically-planted shelter belts.
The deserts of the world are on the march. Civilization, so-called, has been ruthless in the destruction of natural resources, so that the very existence of man on his planet is now being threatened. Can the tide of destruction be stemmed? This is a question we are unable to answer. Nature pays her debts, and when she is disregarded exacts terrible penalties.
Clear felling
In my opinion there should be no clear felling at all. Felling should be by selection of the best stems, the mature trees or by a group selection method where a cluster of trees is removed to enable the surrounding trees to regenerate the land. Planting should be the last resort. Good forestry, good silviculture allows natural regeneration and planting should only be done in the case of emergency, or on fresh land. “You can gauge a country’s wealth, its real wealth by its tree cover”.
If a man loses one-third of his skin he dies; the plastic surgeons say, “he’s had it." If a tree loses one-third of its bark it dies… Would it not be reasonable to suggest that if the earth loses more than a third of its green mantle and tree cover, it will assuredly die? The water table will sink beyond recall and life will become impossible.
The minimum tree cover for safety is one third of the total land area.
When the Australian farmer uses the term planting, he usually means sowing grass seed or farm crops. This is done after the felled forest has been burned off… almost anything will grow without cultivation in this ash from the trees that have protected and enriched the soil for a thousand years; though these methods are nothing less than despoiling the earth of the stored-up wealth of the ages.
As we look at the world today, we see many parts that have been denuded of tree cover. During this past century we have bitten deeper into the natural resources of the earth than all former generations of mankind. We have upset the water cycle by removing the tree cover.
The unbridled avarice of man is in nearly every continent of the earth, destroying the biological balance. What appears to be an inexhaustible treasure-laden earth is slowly but surely becoming a plundered planet. Our woods and forests, the indispensable lungs of our earth-organism, are falling into a murderous dance of death.
Quotations from 'Man of the Trees'.
Published by Ecology Action California USA.