News Article: Colin Tudge - "Let the Future Take Root"

AT THE age of 11 I started my own nursery: horse chestnut, sycamore, birch, oak and holly, pillaged from the second world war bomb sites that still pockmarked south London. Since then I have sought out trees in tropical, temperate and boreal forests, in wet lands and dry, and in botanic gardens and well-tempered parks in all the continents where trees can grow--although the one where they don't, Antarctica, probably gave rise to some of the most magnificent trees of all before it drifted too far south for them to survive. All these trees have brought me new insights about all aspects of life: biology, politics, morality, what life is and how it can be lived. Trees are good for contemplation: Plato and Aristotle did their best thinking in the groves of olives and figs around Athens, and Buddha found enlightenment beneath a bo or peepul tree, one of the world's 750 species of fig.

In New Zealand a few years ago, I experienced more cogently than ever the sheer gravitas of trees. I was in the presence of Tane Mahuta, the world's largest kauri, on the North Island. Kauris are conifers of the genus Agathis in the family Araucariaceae. Also in the family are Araucaria, the group to which the South American monkey puzzle tree belongs, and Wollemia, the so-called Wollemi pine, which was thought to have become extinct 120 million years ago and then turned up in a valley in New South Wales, Australia, in 1994 (New Scientist, 22 October, P 43). All these trees are southerners, so it is tempting to think that Araucariaceae as a whole must have arisen in Gondwana, the former southern supercontinent, and perhaps in Antarctica itself. But there are fossils from this family in Eurasia, so perhaps they began in the north and migrated south. It is one of many unknowns.

Kauris are the biggest of their family. The great trunk of Tane Mahuta rises like a lighthouse out of the gloom, 5 metres in diameter--it would touch all four walls in a good-sized living room--and 15 metres in circumference. It is straight up and leafless for 20 metres or so, then start the great horizontal boughs on which rests a virtual park, a floating island straight out of Gulliver's Travels, with an entire ecosystem of ferns and flowers, lizards and goodness knows what else.

Tane Mahuta is about 2000 years old. By the time the Maori arrived it was already l000. For the first 1400 years of its life moas strutted their stuff around its buttressed base. The largest of the moa species was the tallest known bird. They were harassed by commensurately huge, though short-winged, eagles that threaded through the canopy to prey on them. Today, the moas and their attendant eagles are long gone; Tane Mahuta lives on. The remaining kauri forest of the North Island is vast and wonderful, but it has been horribly reduced by Europeans over the past 200 years, and by the Maori before them. The Maori's traditional, naturalistic religion required them to hold a ceremony before felling a tree--not just kauri, but other conifers too, including those of the family Podocarpaceae: rimu, kahikatea, miro and the much-favoured red-timbered totara, which they used to make canoes. The main broadleaf was and is the southern beech, of the Nothofagaceae family. The Maori used to apologise to each tree and ask its permission to cut it down. But as a Maori lawyer once said to me, somewhat world-wearily, "They must have held an awful lot of ceremonies." The way the New Zealanders look after the trees that are left is a model for all the world. Rimu trees are no longer felled, and existing planks are prized and meticulously recycled, like the oaks of the Tudor navy that still support the roof of many an English barn. A New Zealand journalist showed me his rimu kitchen with great pride. In many forests you can follow raised paths among the vast conifers, with huge ferns on either side, each worthy of a stately conservatory. You will be led as often as not by little black-and-white fantail birds, which hop ahead with seductively expanded tails, enticing you to stir up insects with your feet. The paths rise to form little bridges over the protruding roots so you don't damage them. They also allow the kiwis to fossick for worms underneath. In one place I came across a platform built over a fallen tree. Here visitors over the next 100 years will be able to watch the spectacular process of decay, as fern follows moss follows fungus. That's conservation; that's intelligent ecotourism.

Ecotourism of an encouraging kind is catching on in China, too. It is one of the world's great centres of biodiversity, though this often goes unstated. Ecotourism is harder in tropical forest than in New Zealand's temperate woods, where the going is easy. You can be in tropical forests for years and hardly see an animal: they know how to hide. In Yunnan province, in the south of the country, I took a chairlift through the canopy and saw that grasses can be forest trees too, with some of the bamboos standing 30 metres tall. The air is thick with dragonflies of iridescent blue and smoky pink. It is glorious. But China, like India and Brazil, attracts attention for other reasons. These are the world's great economies of the future. Which way they jump over the next few decades will determine what kind of a world our children will live in, or whether there will be a world to live in at all. As I have been seeing for myself, all three face the same central dilemma. They might choose to follow the ways of the west, conquering nature, turning farming into industrial agribusiness and driving people out of the countryside. Or they might go another way, as some intellectuals, farmers and foresters in their own countries and elsewhere are urging, and create another kind of economy, qualitatively different from the western model. It would be essentially a new agrarianism, traditional in structure with small, mixed farms integrated into the wild environment and as high-tech as is needed.

All three countries at present seem to have policies that contradict each other. In Brazil, for example, scientists at Embrapa, the country's centre for research in farming and forestry, are looking to establish regimes for the sustainable harvesting of wild trees, ensuring that no area is harvested more than once in 30 years, for example. The endeavour uses the latest science, including the Dendrogene project run by Embrapa's Milton Kanashiro. In this, researchers monitor any loss in genetic diversity as trees are removed by analysing the DNA of the remaining trees. Yet at the same time, the Brazilian congress is voting on a scheme to fell half of the Amazon forest.

Brazil's biggest agricultural export is soya for European cattle. It is grown on a vast scale on what was once tropical forest, and even more is grown on heavily irrigated areas of the Cerrado, the dry forest that occupies the middle of the country. But if new agrarian economies come about, then trees must be at the centre of them. For example, Jose Felipe Ribeiro, also with Embrapa, is showing people who live in the Cerrado how they could make a much better living by exploiting native trees for their hundreds of fruits, drugs and pigments than they ever can from soya farms, which in any case are owned by outsiders and employ as few people as possible in the name of efficiency. The ancient arts of agroforestry--the mixing of trees with crops and livestock--are also finding new life. In Kerala, south India, cardamoms are traditionally grown as undergrowth in virtually wild forest. On a grander scale, coffee and tea grow best in partial shade. Throughout the tropics, sheep and cattle, which northerners think of as grass-eaters, are often raised almost entirely on browse--the leaves and branches of trees. Cattle are essentially woodland animals. Muhammad Ibrahim and his colleagues at Costa Rica's Farm and Forestry Research Institute have shown that dairy cows given shade yield up to 30 per cent more milk than those left to languish in the sun. Trees boost yields far more effectively than injections of hormones. But there is more money in hormones, and so in the world at large biotechnology is winning out over the trees. The agrarian systems that could keep the world habitable have to fight for survival against governments, corporations and the experts who advise them. What is needed is a renaissance: building new ways of life in situ, whatever the pressures from on high. Again, trees show the way. Take, for example, the Green Belt movement of Kenya, begun in 1977 by Wangari Maathai, which to date has planted 30 million trees in places where they had been cut down, transforming landscapes and changing people's fortunes.

Trees pose many challenges to modern industrial economies, not least to the greatest western conceit of all, that we can conquer nature or control it. This idea is still taken as a mark of modernity. One long look at a tropical forest is enough to reveal the nonsense in it. In the tropical forests of Central and South America there are around 30,000 different species of tree, with up to 300 kinds in any one hectare. Compare that with the US, with only 600 or so native species, or the UK with a mere 39. Each kind of tropical tree may harbour thousands of species of insects and other creatures. We can never know all the interactions between the trees, their inhabitants and their visitors, and even if we could we would not be able to control the system. It is of a type physicists would know as chaotic--innately unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable. All we can be reasonably sure of is that anything we do to the forest will reduce its diversity and hence its ability to adapt.

In Oxford in 1879, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins lamented the felling of poplars: O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew-Hack and rack the growing green! We still don't know what we are doing, and never can in any detail, but the hacking and racking continue more vigorously than ever. The only sane approach if we want this world to remain habitable is to approach it humbly. Trees teach humility. It would be a good idea to begin the renaissance with them.

Profile
Colin Tudge writes about biology, agriculture and politics. His books include The Variety of Life (OUP, 2002) and So Shall We Reap (Penguin, 2004). His latest book, The Secret Life of Trees: How they live and why they matter, is published this week by Penguin (20 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0713996986)

Source Citation: Tudge, Colin. "Let the future take root: Colin Tudge has been fascinated by trees all his life. We should revere them, he says, not only because our evolution depended on them, but also because they represent the future of sustainable living across the world." New Scientist 188.2524 (Nov 5, 2005): 44(3). CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals). Thomson Gale. West Vancouver Memorial Library. 10 Oct. 2006