The Forest Planet

Earth was a forest planet.  Forests and oceans.  Humankind cut down most of the forests, thereby longterm cutting its own throat.

Emerald Isle?  Ireland has no forests anymore.  The Black Forest of Germany?  It's a cake.  Greece?  Not for milennia.  The great pine forests of eastern America, gone, gone, gone.  The precious redwoods of California, 95% gone.

Forests (and oceans) have been protecting us from our own idiocy throughout the industrial age by compensating for the carbon overload in the atmosphere.  It's a losing battle now.  And as temperatures rise (or fail to fall as far) more diseases and insects that prey on trees are successfully killing the remaining forests.

Humankind, more powerful that smart, is just learning how little it actually knows about forests, about trees and the Earth.  Earth Day is a good day to remember that.

Over at Books in Heat  is my review of a book that notes this context in the course of telling the remarkable story of David Milarch and his project to clone the champion trees and reforest the planet.  The project has had its ups and downs, but today it got some fanfare for planting two dozen clones of California redwoods in seven countries around the planet.  These include clones taken from a stump, 35 feet in diameter, some 4,000 years called the Fieldbrook Stump, which sits nursing new growth redwood just a few miles from where I live.

It's a publicity move that worked, timing it to the U.S. Earth Day, but the project is not all feel good public relations.  For one thing, there's an easily understood rationale for cloning the biggest and oldest trees: their DNA is survivor stuff.  As threats to forests from climate, weather, pests and disease increase in the Climate Crisis era, surviving is going to be a challenge.

It's also a more sophisticated project than even that, because these trees are just not planted randomly anywhere.  Though our redwoods got the headlines today, champion trees of various species are planted where they can thrive and do the most good, and in ways that encourage forest growth, not just tree growth. For instance, willows are particularly good at detoxifying rivers.

Plus the "cloning" may get attention and sound all high tech, but many of the methods are very old, and don't involve test tubes.  They do involve a lot of care and precision.  And luck.

There are a lot of efforts underway to get Gaia through this long crisis.  Some are simple (though not simple enough for politicians) and some are complex, technological and visionary.  (Some of course are technological and stupid, guaranteed to make things a hell of a lot worse.)  But there are few as simple and soaring as this, as grand and as just very clearly right.  Reforest the Earth.