The New Yorker: What We Owe Our Trees

By Jill Lepore May 22, 2023

…”Even if you haven’t been to the woods lately, you probably know that the forest is disappearing. In the past ten thousand years, the Earth has lost about a third of its forest, which wouldn’t be so worrying if it weren’t for the fact that almost all that loss has happened in the past three hundred years or so. As much forest has been lost in the past hundred years as in the nine thousand before…”

…”by about five hundred and seventy million years ago the first complex macroscopic organisms had begun to appear, as Peter Frankopan reports in “The Earth Transformed” (Knopf), an essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six o’clock yesterday. In his not at all cheerful conclusion, looking to a possibly not too distant future in which humans fail to address climate change and become extinct, Frankopan writes, “Our loss will be the gain of other animals and plants.” An upside!…

“People are arboreal, at least vestigially, Ennos points out, with binocular vision, upright posture, hind limbs for movement, forelimbs for gripping, and fingers with soft pads and nails, all features that evolved to help primates live in trees. The first primates were as small as mice, and could scramble wherever they liked, but, as they got bigger, it became harder to stay up in the trees, where it was safest, especially at night. A “clambering hypothesis,” among primatologists, has it that the thinking of great apes got more sophisticated—they developed a “self-reflective psychology”—so that they could better understand the mechanics of climbing and swinging through trees…

“You could tell this story about a lot of places, but consider England and its North American colonies. By the eighteenth century, much of England and in fact much of Western Europe had been deforested, but England needed timber to build ships in order to trade goods, wage war, and found colonies. It especially wanted very tall and straight pines, for ships’ masts. During the long wars between Britain and France, often fought at sea, France had for a time a ship’s-mast advantage, having cut a path known as the Mast Road through the Pyrenees to a stand of tall fir trees. Britain harvested its masts from its colonies, and especially from the tall white pines of New England, having issued an edict, in 1691, that any pine whose trunk, when measured a foot from the ground, was more than twenty-four inches in diameter belonged to the King (later revised, fairly desperately, to twelve inches in diameter). Among the many causes of the American Revolution was the Pine Tree Riot of 1772, when New Hampshire mill owners refused to pay fines for sawing pine trees into boards.

“One of the earliest alarms about deforestation written in English is “Sylva, or a Discourse on Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber of His Majesties Dominions,” by Sir John Evelyn, published in London in 1664. Evelyn called for tree planting as an act of patriotism, and if he was the first to do so he was not the last, as the University of Oregon geographer Shaul E. Cohen reported in his book “Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America” (2004). Writing about forests, John Perlin urges humans to “stop our war against them” in a new edition of his 1989 book, “A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization” (Patagonia), more than five hundred pages but “printed on 100 percent postconsumer paper.” Yet any plans for a truce in this war, including calls for planting trees, have often been pretty suspect, perhaps especially so in the United States.”