We’re Out of Our Trees

By FRANK LINGO

Let’s take a wild guess at who is better at creating a forest — Mother Nature or human beings?

If you guessed Mother Nature, give yourself a nice slap in the face because we need to snap out of it and realize humans often don’t create or manage forests with wisdom.

Respect and reverence for nature is nowhere near as common around the world as it needs to be if we are to save Earth’s ecosystem from ourselves.

Take trees, for instance. After centuries of people cutting down our tall friends, we’ve lost almost half the world’s forestland. Now there are movements around the world to restore some of the damage we’ve done, but it can be poorly handled if we’re not careful.

The Rainforest Alliance lists nine essential points to learn about the importance of rainforests to a healthy planet. (www.rainforest-alliance.org)

They note that rainforests are being destroyed at 85 acres PER MINUTE! Ever been to NYC’s lovely Central Park? In 10 minutes, its 842 acres would be wiped out.

We need to get out of our mindset that city parks, state and national parks are just picturesque places to play. Trees are our carbon counterpart, breathing out the oxygen we breathe in. They are vital to our survival, not to mention the survival of millions of other species, in case we care about them.

A March 15, 2022, New York Times article described the problems with humans attempting to replicate forests. Some countries and some companies are carpeting areas with tree farms of non-native species, which don’t support the original web of life like natural forests did and can even have the opposite of the intended effect by devastating local biodiversity and threatening water supplies.

“You’re creating basically a sterile landscape,” said Paul Smith of Botanic Gardens Conservation International. “If people want to plant trees, let’s also make it a positive for biodiversity.”

How much biodiversity have we engineered out of existence? Yale University’s 360 published a piece on March 1 entitled “Edible Extinction: Why We Need To Revive Global Food Diversity.”

Yale’s article says that since the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, humans have domesticated about 6,000 plant species but that only four (wheat, rice, corn and soy) now provide about two-thirds of our species’ calories. A couple hundred years ago, there were thousands of varieties of corn, apples, bananas etc. Nowadays there are only a handful of these plant types left because humans decided that was the efficient way to grow food.

“Where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it,” the article stated.

These monocultures leave crops highly vulnerable to blight from plant diseases. The original way of nature’s variety protected the plants from all being infected by ubiquitous strains of bacteria or fungus.

Even the environmental community has not regarded crop biodiversity as a top issue. At last fall’s UN Climate Change Conference in Scotland, not one of the 10 themed days was dedicated to agriculture or our eating habits. The meat industry remains a huge drain on the world’s grains in the midst of human starvation, and meat cultivation is a big contributor of carbon and methane to our atmosphere.

Crop monoculture has a parallel in human culture. In the 1970’s, disco took over the music industry like the kudzu vines that have choked and smothered trees in many places. The wide and splendid variety of soul music in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s disappeared down an abyss of a monotonous disco beat. It was usually automated at nightclubs, forcing live bands out of business and losing the human touch in music, arguably humanity’s most communal art form.

An old saying needs re-phrasing: Variety is not just the spice of life. Variety is the STUFF of life. Variety is not just for a different taste — it ensures survival.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. Visit Lingo's website: www.greenbeat.world

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2022

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