Trees: On the ground aid for an ailing planet

By Liza Field

04/12/2009

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
-Wendell Berry, "Sabbaths"

This upcoming Friday (April 24th), National Arbor Day will bring thousands of Americans outdoors to dedicate that most vibrant and useful of monuments to the future-a living tree.

Why? Each end-of-April, I find myself on a school campus or riverbank with buckets of sap-odored seedlings and shovels, trying to articulate the ever-expanding answer.

"The parking lot will stay cooler." "Your real estate value will increase." "You can lower your power bill." "Trees buffer noise and wind." "They absorb carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen." "Trees help attract rainfall and combat drought."

As I hold up a limp little seedling and clump of dangling roots, lag-jawed teenagers and bright-faced grannies listen to its nearly-unbelievable powerhouse of capacities: "It absorbs storm-water back into the aquifer." "It can keep riverbanks from eroding." "Songbirds can someday nest here." "It feeds pollinators, wildlife, soil-and us!"

Frankly, a tree can do so much good, simply by existing, I can think of no act more directly useful in helping the whole world, local and global, than planting one.

Particularly as a teacher, I find tree-planting a great way to bridge the abyss between academia and action, information and how-to-respond. Tree-planting provides one small act almost anyone in the U.S. can undertake to balance the deluge of environmental bad-news.

And for a "small act," tree-planting potentiates monumental relief. From a local heat-island effect to global warming, urban run-off to coastal dead zones, local habitat loss to mass extinctions, trees offer direct, on-the-ground aid for what ails this planet.

Trees act as vertical vents and water pumps, moderating a climate's aridity and temperature, releasing or storing moisture and shading the summer landscape. They filter particulate matter and decrease ozone levels, reducing respiratory illness and health-care costs.

Moreover, they mix deep, subterranean layers of inert minerals, sunlight and CO2 into food that becomes living organic matter. An urban or rural forest literally enriches the land and its inhabitants, proving that something better than money grows on trees.

"The civilized nations....have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted," wrote Henry David Thoreau, exulting in the rich humus continually renewed by his woods. "The same soil is good for men and for trees....fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages."

Thoreau found trees good instructors in wise living. But especially to our high-speed information age, today, trees teach the ability to stand in one place, roots underground, branches to heaven, connecting our higher lights with ground-level usefulness.

Their shade, vertical beauty and loft appear to calm and uplift us. Research indicates that wooded settings can lower blood pressure, improve student concentration, reduce employee sick-time, quicken recovery for hospital patients, and lower neighborhood crime rates.

And trees deepen our sense of place. My students often recall favorite trees from childhood more vividly than buildings. Folk songs, classic poetry and scripture through the ages often include a sacred tree, a world tree, a tree-of-life.

Perhaps most usefully in these discontent days, trees demonstrate how to make do with whatever soil, weather, atmosphere and problems they find themselves among, turning trouble into benefits for others, now and future.

This quality offers hope to counter the gloomy global news of our day. It's become dauntingly clear that the problems of Earth's oceans, climate, soil, waters, and vanishing biodiversity are too big for any one person or nation to solve. But wherever one person happens to stand, Earth is underfoot, her climate overhead. From what better perch could we grapple with change?

Though few individual Americans can save large tracts of forest, most developed landscapes include countless collective acres of potential, future shade, bird habitat and beauty. Churchyards, cemeteries, hospital and nursing home grounds, industrial parks, road and creek corridors, colleges and schoolyards could easily grow something besides flat, useless, high-maintenance lawn and asphalt.

A simple nursery order, some volunteers young and old, and a dig-in party could be the start to a wildlife sanctuary, shady summer grove, prayer garden, outdoor classroom, or mere treasury of great soil-fit to feed new generations of poets, philosophers, problem-solvers and tree-planters.