The environment is complex.
We all know we need to learn more and change our behaviours but, personally, I always feel like I’m one step behind.
I switched from plastic food containers to glass, only to be told that glass is heavier to transport and uses more fuel.
I religiously drink oat milk because cows “produce methane, a greenhouse gas” only to be told that one oat milk factory uses the same amount of water as a small city.
My brain cannot compute all the unintended consequences of each behaviour.
Most resources intended to help are written by someone with an agenda, someone with a solution to sell.
Luckily, if you want to learn more about trees and how to reforest our world, to improve our world, a new book tackles these complex ideas with nuance.
The book is A Trillion Trees by Fred Pearce.
A Trillion Trees
Fred Pearce, is an environmental expert. The book comes from decades of research. Importantly he does not (appear to) have an agenda.
He simply wants to understand:
- Why trees are good
- How to get more of them
Pearce credits his readers with the mental capacity to hold complex, sometimes conflicting, ideas in their minds.
One of my favourites is
Q// Rising Carbon Dioxide levels allow trees to photosyntheize more easily. Since 1995, trees and other vegetation have been putting on a growth spurt across the planet. This doesn’t halt global warming, but it does moderate it//
Pearce 2021 p.25
How amazing. Whilst the planet is warming (generally bad) it’s actually helping more trees to grow (generally good)!
In summary:
We should have hope.
Trees generally have a positive effect on our world and we’ve already significantly increased tree coverage. Humans razed over half the world’s trees. But today, Europe has 30% more trees today than it did in 1900 (Pearce, 2021, p.10).
However, we can’t just start planting trees.
Planting forests can to monocultures and can even lead to more global warming. For example, if you plant trees in an area covered by snow, the darker colour may absorb more heat, where the white snow would normally reflect the light and heat. This can contribute to global warming.
What we really need to do is make more space for trees to grow. And then let nature get along and do it.
Why Read This Book?
If you’re looking for an easy to read, that will also make you feel educated and hopeful, this is a book for you.
He discusses the benefits of forest fires, questions sustainable wood “certifications”, describes the phenomena of flying rivers, explains how trees actually create wind! Every chapter brings new ideas.
Below I explore the three topics I found most enlightening.
Buy it, read it, learn how to do your part to become part of the world’s reforestation.
Natural Reforestation can Erase Human Intervention
Q// Much of what is today the world’s largest tract of apparently untouched rainforest was, until little more than 500 years ago, a landscape dominated by human activity //
(Pearce 2021 p.79)
The Europeans killed 90% of the Amazon population by bringing new diseases and weaponry on their arrival in 1492.
Evidence shows that the Amazonian people killed were not “hunter gatherers” but sophisticated farmers. They lived in settlements of up to 10,000 people, cultivated orchards, created canal systems and forts.
They did this on land that we now perceive to be the “pristine, untouched” Amazon Rainforest.
This shows that human deforestation and cultivation of forest is not final.
Left to its own devices, nature reforests and rewilds. In fact, it can rewild so much that we don’t even recognise it as previously inhabited by humans.
This must give us hope!
Yes, we have destroyed landscapes, nature and forests.
But now we can also give them the space to regrow and thrive.
The UK’s Carbon Neutral-ISH Power Station
Next Pearce approaches the complex topic of using “renewable” resources, by examining Drax power station in the UK.
Drax used to be a coal-powered station but switched to 100% renewable in 2021. It now burns “renewable” wood pellets.
So far so good.
The power station’s owners call it “the largest carbon-saving project in Europe”.
Even the UK government classifies the power station as carbon neutral so the emissions do not appear in any carbon accounting for the UK.
However, when you dig into the source of the wood pellets, it gets complex.
The wood pellets are grown in the USA. And every year, Drax imports 6 million tonnes of them.
The transport of the wood pellets are not included in the calculation to be defined as “carbon neutral”.
Pearce doesn’t go into the technicalities but I cannot believe that transporting 6 million tonnes of anything 5,000 thousand miles every year is low-resource.
What’s more, the power station is only carbon neutral if all the trees chopped down are replaced by an equal number of trees. However, the power station does not own or control the forests where the trees are grown. Therefore if the forestry goes out of business next year, suddenly all the energy being produced today is no longer carbon neutral.
I’m cautious to contradict anyone who is trying.
At least at Drax they’ve stopped burning coal and are now burning something we CAN replace. However, this is a great example of how complex these solutions are.
Trees Keep Us Cool (& Damp)
Q// A single tree transpiring a hundred of litres of water a day has a cooling power equivalent to two household air-conditioning units. Multiply that by hundreds of billions of trees and you have a lot of cooling//
(Pearce, 2021, p.24)
It was believed that trees grew in places that were naturally moist.
There is increasing evidence now that trees can actually create that moisture. They don’t just grow in rainy places, they create rainy places and keep them cool.
This was evidenced by Joseph Hooker (future head of Kew Gardens) in the 1840s who planted trees on the arid Ascension Island, in order to bring increase rainfall and it worked!
More recently there have been calls to try the same in parts of the Sahel and Sahara deserts. We know that 6,000 years ahead the Sahara was covered with lakes, rivers and lush wetlands. There was a “point of no return” when lack of rain killed the trees and then rainfall stopped but perhaps we could reverse that vicious cycle.
One question Pearce did not answer for me was “do we actually always want more rain?”
Given that climate change has resulted in mass flooding, I’m not actually clear whether we do want more rain.
However, my understanding is that climate change leads to too much rain in some parts and too little in other parts of the world. The more we can cool the planet, the less we will have these extremes.
Ultimately this book will leave you in awe of the power of trees to influence our environment for the good.
It also made me realise how little we humans know and how often we should just get out of the way of nature.
Let’s give nature more space and let it do it’s thing.
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