Wood Lit - Spring 2008
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Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis
Reports are increasing about the impact of world-wide deforestation on global warming. A correspondent for the U.K. news magazine, The Economist, for example, wrote in a special edition titled “The World in 2008” that: “The relentless felling of the world’s tropical forests may be causing one-quarter of all carbon-dioxide emissions,” much of which is the result of huge, post-harvest fires. Similar concern was expressed by scientists and delegates at the recent international conference in Bali on global warming.
With this in mind, I recently re-read a remarkable book that was published five years ago, Deforesting the Earth, by Michael Williams. The book is unquestionably a monumental achievement, a comprehensive history of how episodes of deforestation over 10,000 years have transformed societies and landscapes everywhere. The author, a professor at the University of Oxford, nevertheless notes that it “was written in the old-fashioned way...by a lone scholar trying to make sense of an enormous literature.”
Williams rightly claims that his book is not just “a history of forests and forestry.” It is much more. In his words, the book provides the “social, economic, and intellectual context” essential to understanding how the clearing of the world’s forests was inextricably linked to the society of the age in which it occurred. The book is divided into three parts, which together trace the human impact on the world’s forests from the end of the Ice Age to modern times.
Part 1, called “Clearing in the Deep Pas,”, sets the stage for his central thesis that humans have been dramatically altering forests since the dawn of history. Tracing ancient forest change worldwide, Williams presents convincing evidence that “human impact was early, widespread, and significant, and the forests of the world changed accordingly.”
The next part, “Reaching Out: Europe and the Wider World,” is a fascinating tour of the world’s use and destruction of forests from medieval times to the early twentieth century. Here he explores the many myths that portrayed forests as places of “evil and wild animals...the abode of savagery” – notions especially shaping early attitudes toward forests in North America. Detailed maps trace forest clearing throughout the world, including state-by-state statistics in the U.S.
“Scares and Solutions, 1900-1944,” is, in fact, a “scary” description of the present state of information about the rate of deforestation worldwide. According to Williams, “we are left with the knowledge that the exact magnitude, pace, and nature of one of the most important processes in the changing environment of large portions of the earth is largely unknown.”
This book is superbly crafted, well organized, and beautifully written. The text is supported with 200 illustrations, tables and maps, and upwards of 2,000 scholarly notes and references. The bibliography alone is 80 pages long. While the book is packed with quantitative and historical data, it is not overpowered by purely objective information. By skillfully weaving examples of the influence of folklore, tradition, and religion with the hard facts detailing deforestation in each historical period he examines, Williams effectively defends his thesis that we can only understand the causes and meaning of deforestation from within their social context.
In his brief “Epilogue,” Williams makes it clear that he has not attempted to propose “solutions for environmental degradation” but rather to help the reader make sense of the momentous change that has taken place in the world’s forests. The book, he states, “is an invitation for reflection, not a prescription for action. That I leave to others.” He warns, however, that “deforestation is no longer just an economic issue...it is also fast becoming a matter of humanitarian concerns mixed with long-term environmental ethics.”
For this reader, an aging professional forester, this book is more than an exhaustive study of forest history. It is a wake-up call for our profession. We are increasingly ineffective in the struggle to protect and manage the forests of the world because we have narrowly defined forestry as applied science and economics. Williams’s book is a warning that forest policy must be enlarged to encompass broader social concerns and environmental ethics if our profession is to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Carl Reidel
© 2008 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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The Singing Life of Birds
Donald Kroodsma began his life’s work while in graduate school almost 40 years ago when he tried to figure out how a Bewick’s wren learned his songs. Does he learn songs from his father or from neighboring males as he sets up his own territory? Or both? Or neither? This book details Kroodsma’s search for the answers to these intriguing questions, not just for wrens but for many other bird species as well. The most fascinating part is his interpretations of how the songs, once acquired, are deployed. By singing, some birds reveal that they know an enormous amount about each of their neighbors.
I don’t think Kroodsma imagined back then how painstaking it would be to answer those questions – or that the answer to his Bewick’s wren queries would not be at all helpful as he proceeded over the years to analyze the songs of many other bird species. Every bird seems to have a different approach to song, with variations so subtle that they go right by most of us.
Some birds match each others’ songs, which he calls “matched counter-singing.” This is when a neighbor copies a rival’s song in a give-and-take fashion, with one bird introducing a new song from time to time that, again, is copied. Other birds continually return the song sung at them; still others always sing a different tune; and there are almost as many other ways of using songs as there are birds.
The many sonograms – graphic displays of a bird’s song that show frequency changes over time – that are included in this book are very helpful in showing the finer points of birdsong. Variations that for some of us are hard to hear (there’s a CD with the book) are plain to see.
Readers get to go with Kroodsma as he goes into the prairie or forest or, in the case of the tufted titmouse, onto the roof of his own house to set up recording equipment and take detailed notes about who is singing at whom. He likes to have his parabolic reflector and recorder ready to go well before dawn – not a preferred time to climb a ladder onto a steep roof, which in his enthusiasm, he hardly seems to notice.
He makes it easy to imagine that you are with him, carrying some of the gear through the predawn darkness and listening intently for that first bird’s first notes.
The singing behavior of the chestnut-sided warbler, cardinal, bluebird, and a couple dozen other birds all are described and analyzed, each one more interesting than the one before. Sometimes it’s overwhelming – for instance, take the mockingbird: he was taped singing 465 songs in 26 minutes.
Though sedge wrens and marsh wrens are not that different from one another physically, they have a completely different way of learning songs. He and his co-workers unraveled the way these birds come up with their songs by raising babies and exposing them in their first year to a training tape salted with a confusing collection of songs, and then waiting until the following spring to see what the captives had to say.
Understandably, Kroodsma was so eager to hear the yearlings sing that he advanced the coming of spring by lengthening the daylight hours in his aviary. Thus, there was still snow on the ground when the marsh wrens began to imitate almost all the songs they had heard on the training tape. The sedge wrens, on the other hand, each sang dozens of songs, none of which had been on the training tape – they just seemed to improvise.
Kroodsma examines the elements in each bird’s life history and evolutionary trajectory that might explain why learning at daddy’s knee or from your neighbors is or is not adaptive.
Reviewed by Virginia Barlow
© 2008 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Coastal northern California, with its rainy, temperate climate and rugged terrain, is home to some of the oldest – and tallest – trees in North America. These ancient trees, mostly redwoods and Douglas firs, are often found as isolated remnants of what once were extensive forests. Most of the trees in these forests were harvested long ago, and if they weren’t, it’s because they were just too difficult to reach, even for the most intrepid of loggers.
It’s no surprise, then, that until very recently, the anomalous giants at the heart of this book – the largest of which is 379 feet tall – were completely unknown. It took a crew of passionate botanists to even dream that these monarchs might exist, let alone to complete the scientifically and physically rigorous work of locating and documenting them.
This story – of these botanists, and of the trees they discovered – is related by Richard Preston in The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring. Preston, whose science-based thrillers include The Hot Zone (about ebola) and The Demon in the Freezer (smallpox) departs from his familiar milieu of deadly viruses to explore the mysteries of ancient, lofty canopies and the hunt they inspire in a handful of oddball, vertically enabled scientists.
Principally, these scientists include Steve Sillett, Marie Antonie, and Michael Taylor, all students at the start of their respective quests to find and climb the tallest, oldest trees in northern California. Of course, their paths eventually cross, and they begin collaborating. The three pioneer, with a hybrid mixture of techniques cobbled together from the sport of rock climbing and the arborist profession, a Spiderman-like method of climbing these giants and then moving about with ease from branch to branch.
Preston weaves the tale of budding friendships with the unfolding botanical discoveries, and with the lives of the venerable trees themselves – trees that may seem like timeless fixtures of the forest from a human perspective, but which are truly impermanent, like every other biological organism. We’re reminded of this when one of these giants – named Telperion – takes an earth-shattering fall only weeks after the team makes their first ascent up its massive trunk.
Falling trees aren’t the only danger encountered by the scientists. When they aren’t suspended 35 stories in the air by the thinnest of ropes hung from fragile, twig-like epicormic branches, they’re being tossed around in their overnight hammocks during violent windstorms or pelted by car-sized deadfall from above. Their world is more mountaineering adventure than armchair botany.
At the same time, we’re introduced to the exquisite intricacies of old growth canopies, lofty Edens where, over hundreds of years, enough soil has accumulated from decomposition and atmospheric deposition to support entire gardens of lichens, huckleberry bushes, and even small trees, which in turn shelter spiders and salamanders that know nothing of a pedestrian, ground-level existence.
This drama plays out on the West Coast, but it is not without its analogue here in the Northeast. On a scale of both time and height, our trees are comparatively puny, but their canopies are yielding similar delights to those who have taken the time to look. Graduate student Heather Root climbed sugar maples in the Adirondacks in 2006 and found three species of tiny mites never found before along with a species of lichen never before seen in the Adirondacks. Mites live in the lichen mats and are food for snails and slugs, which are in turn an important source of calcium for birds – giving “old growth” a new dimension of importance for ecologists and forest managers alike.
In a world where all obvious frontiers appear to have been breached, The Wild Trees reminds us that there are indeed universes left to be explored – large, mysterious ones above our heads, and tiny, equally unfathomable ones right under our noses.
Anne Margolis
© 2008 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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