The Power of Trees
Trees can be a powerful weapon in the fight against global warming – so long as we leave them alone
Approximate Read Time: 2 Mins
Elon Musk has offered a prize of $100m for the best carbon capture and sequestration proposal. However the money should go to people like Peter Wohlleben, the German forester whose book The Hidden Life of Trees was the most improbable and encouraging blockbuster of 2015. Wohlleben’s idea is this: leave forests alone. Thinking that we can deal with global warming better than can nature is simply short sighted.
For Wohlleben trees are social and sensate and can save us from ourselves. But it seems that it’s terribly difficult to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.
Anyone who has planted a tree in their garden knows that it has a profound effect – it makes your garden cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Forests do that on a grand scale. A deciduous forest in summer is often as cool as a lake. Berlin is 15C warmer than the ancient forests nearby. The coniferous monocultures so beloved of commercial foresters are not such good coolers: they’re up to 8C warmer than their deciduous counterparts.
Forests cool by transpiring. If there’s no water, there’s no cooling. Drought can kill trees fast, but trees have many sophisticated ways of dealing with it, and Wohlleben sets them out. As a species, we have survived many climatic changes by changing our behaviour – and that’s how trees survive, too.
Crucially, trees learn from their past traumas and produce offspring programmed with those lessons. Trees that have narrowly escaped drought are more prudent in the future: they slow their growth and ration their drinking. They have two main methods for influencing their children: the first is good parenting. Mother trees regulate their children’s growth by changing the rate at which they drip-feed them with sugar solution through root networks, and children growing in the rain and light shadow of the mother won’t drink heavily or overeat. The second is epigenetic inheritance, which enables useful behavioural traits to be passed on fast to future generations.
Deciduous forests in particular remove greenhouse gases effectively, and sequester carbon for as long as they live. The rate of carbon capture increases until they’re around 450 years old. Cut them down and destroying them and you’re releasing carbon dioxide not just from the wood, but also from the forest floor – as the soil, previously cool in the shade, warms and therefore accelerates the metabolism of microorganisms, which consume the remaining humus.
The way of the woods is not the way of the market. We need a radically new ethos. If we don’t learn to leave the trees alone, the trees will eventually be alone anyway – but without us.
Ancient Cave Paintings
Approximate Read Time: 2 Mins
Some years ago one of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest. Here archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.
Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There were also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study. The discovery was filmed for a major Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.
The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found.
There are numerous hand prints among the images on the cliff face, similar to these at the nearby site of Cerro Azul. The discovery was made by a British-Colombian team, funded by the European Research Council. Its leader is José Iriarte, professor of archaeology at Exeter University and a leading expert on the Amazon and pre-Columbian history. He said: “When you’re there, your emotions flow. We’re talking about several tens of thousands of paintings. It’s going to take generations to record them … Every turn you do, it’s a new wall of paintings.
“We started seeing animals that are now extinct. The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you’re looking at a horse, for example. The ice-age horse had a wild, heavy face. It’s so detailed, we can even see the horse hair. It’s fascinating.”
The images include fish, turtles, lizards and birds, as well as people dancing and holding hands, among other scenes. One figure wears a mask resembling a bird with a beak. World’s most inaccessible art found in the heart of the Colombian jungle
The paintings vary in size. There are numerous handprints and many of the images are on that scale, be they geometric shapes, animals or humans. Others are much larger.
Many of the paintings are very high up, similar to these at the nearby site of Cerro Azul, some so high they can only be reached by drones. Al-Shamahi was struck by how high up many of them are: “I’m 5ft 10in and I would be breaking my neck looking up. How were they scaling those walls?” Somebelieve that the answer lies in depictions of wooden towers among the paintings, including figures appearing to bungee jump from them.
Speculating on whether the paintings had a sacred or other purpose, he said: “It’s interesting to see that many of these large animals appear surrounded by small men with their arms raised, almost worshipping these animals.”
Observing that the imagery includes trees and hallucinogenic plants, he added: “For Amazonian people, non-humans like animals and plants have souls, and they communicate and engage with people through the rituals and shamanic practices that we see depicted in the rock art.”
‘Humans were not centre stage’: how ancient cave art puts us in our place
Al-Shamahi added: “One of the most fascinating things was seeing ice age megafauna because that’s a marker of time. I don’t think people realise that the Amazon has shifted in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rainforest. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paintings, of course they weren’t going to live in a forest. They’re too big. Not only are they giving clues about when they were painted by some of the earliest people – that in itself is just mind-boggling.
Children and the Natural World
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As parents, as well as a society we can either indoctrinate children to accept falsehood, oppression and domination as a natural and normal part of life. This is mistaken and destructive approach to human sustainability. Instead, children and young people should be encouraged to learn about the true nature of humanity in general, along with that of the Living Earth that nourishes life.
Research indicates that children with regular contact with the natural world, and their fellow humans affirm their humanity and natural instincts to learn and respect their rights and that of others as human beings. Research tells us that those children that play regularly in natural environments show that their play is more diverse and imaginative, creative and collaborative. It also tends to advance motor fitness, including coordination, balance and agility, and they are sick less often.
Contact with the natural environment helps to improve children's cognitive development by improving their awareness, reasoning and observational skills. It also seems that contact with the natural world helps to shield children and indeed adults from the impact of life's stresses and helps us deal with adversity.
Interestingly, it seems that play in a diverse natural environment reduces, or eliminates bullying. Once again research tells us that contact with the natural world helps children develop powers of observation and creativity and engenders a sense of peace and being at one with the natural world.
Early experiences with the natural world have been positively linked with the development of imagination and the sense of wonder and wonder is an important motivator for life-long learning. Play in the natural world also generates increased appreciation of the natural environments while encouraging positive social interaction between children as well as between children and adults.
It is important to note that an affinity to, and love of nature, along with a positive environmental ethic, grow out of regular contact with the natural world during early childhood. Children's loss of regular contact with the natural world can result in a future generation not interested in preserving nature and its diversity, the very things that sustain human life on Earth.
"There's no way that we can help children to learn to love and preserve this planet, if we don't give them direct experiences with the blessings of nature." Anita Olds