The Death of the Trees

From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight:
Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

—KARL MARX (1818–1883), DAS CAPITAL (1867)

WHEN I WAS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, WE WERE TAUGHT THAT the oceans and the forests were the chief sources of oxygen for the planet. It turns out that, at least for those animals that breathe air, this is only partially correct. The oceans account for less than 8 percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen, and that is dropping rapidly: there are now millions of acres of ocean that are dying from the dumping of toxic wastes or changes in water temperature, and they therefore have become net consumers of oxygen.

Trees, it turns out, are the major source of recycled oxygen for the atmosphere. They are our planet’s lungs. A full-grown pine or hardwood tree has a leaf surface area that can run from 0.25 acre to more than 3 acres, depending on the species. Rain forest trees have leaf surface areas that run as high as 40 acres per tree. Throughout this enormous surface area, sunlight is used as an energy source to drive the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen and plant matter (using the C, which is carbon). Trees literally breathe in the CO₂ through that enormous leaf area after we exhale it as biological waste, and they exhale oxygen as their own waste. Without trees our atmosphere would most likely become toxic to us; and because rain forest trees have such a massively larger leaf area than our common trees, the rain forests of the world provide much of the oxygen that you are breathing as you read this page.

While this is common knowledge, it’s really among the least important functions that trees play: other details about trees’ role in our survival are less well known.

The Root System “Water Pump”

A rain forest tree will draw 3 million gallons of water up through its roots and release it into the atmosphere as water vapor during its lifetime. While it may seem that this would deplete the soil of water, actually the reverse is true: trees draw water into the soil, the first step in a complex cycle that prevents land from becoming desert.

Without forestland pumping millions of tons of water into an area’s atmosphere, there’s little moisture released into the air to condense into clouds and then fall again as rain. The result is that just downwind of the place that was once forest but is now denuded, the rains no longer fall and a process called desertification begins. This has happened over much of north and eastern Africa, leading to massive famines as the rains stop, crops fail, the topsoil is blown away, and what is left is desert.

Most rainfall on nonforestland is either absorbed and becomes surface ground water or is transported along culverts, ditches, sewers, streams, and rivers, eventually reaching the ocean. On our continental landmasses, only trees effectively cycle large quantities of water back into the atmosphere. For comparison, think about the evaporation from a 40-acre lake. That may seem like a lot of water to be evaporating into the atmosphere, but those 40 acres equal the evaporative leaf surface of a single large tree.

As of this writing, more than 1,500 acres of land are becoming desert worldwide every hour, largely because of the destruction of upwind forests. The total amount of rain forest left on the planet is about the size of the continental United States, and every year an area the size of Florida is cut down and permanently destroyed.

Reseeded Saplings Can’t Pull the Water Down

The timber industry’s ads that show loggers planting seedlings after stripping trees from a forest are utterly misleading with regard to water. They may well be replacing trees, but they’re creating a decades-long gap in the water cycle.

Another problem is that they’re setting up an ecological disaster by planting the same species throughout a deforested area. When an entire forest is all made of the same species of tree, and they’re all the same age, it becomes an irresistible treat for tree-eating caterpillars, beetles, and fungi, as we’ve seen in numerous forests in North America and Europe.

Taking thousands of tons of biomass (fully grown trees and habitat) out of a forest and replacing it with saplings that weigh a few ounces will do little for the downwind areas that need the atmospheric moisture to produce rainfall. Even by the time the trees regenerate, the ecological diversity and the natural fauna and flora of the region have been decimated, as the diversity of numerous plant species are replaced by the single-species seedlings used by the loggers. But it’s not just the timber companies who are responsible for the destruction of the planet’s forests.

Trees for Beef: Slashing Rain Forests So Americans Can Have a 99-Cent Burger

According to a 1996 report by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, funded by the World Bank and the United Nations, 72 acres of rain forest are destroyed every minute, mostly by impoverished people working for multinational corporations, who are cutting and burning the forest to create agricultural or pasturelands to grow beef for export to the United States.¹

This 38-million-acres-per-year loss will wipe out the entire world’s rain forests in our children’s lifetimes if it continues at its current pace. The end, literally, is within sight.

A spokesman for the World Bank said that the study pointed out poverty and overpopulation as the primary factors leading to the destruction of these forests, which are so essential to maintaining human life on the planet. He conveniently overlooked the role of huge agricultural corporations.

Recently, a friend of my son’s complained to me that one of the giant fast-food hamburger chains was responsible for the destruction of many of the rain forests in the Americas. I didn’t understand what he meant: the assumption I’d always had was that the rain forests were cut by timber companies eager to sell rare woods to Japan and Scandinavia for manufacture of furniture and specialty items. If the fast-food chains were killing off the rain forests, I thought, it must be because they were buying cheap wood for paper to wrap their burgers in, or that their plastic packaging was somehow damaging to the rain forests.

It turns out, however, that I shared a common misconception, one that I’m sure the American fast-food industry is probably quite happy keeping intact.

While these rain forests that have taken centuries to grow are often logged and the wood is sold, they’re just as often simply burned and not reseeded, particularly if they’re in places where it’s inconvenient to take the wood to market. The “free” wood is usually only an added bonus, a quick buck for a peasant farmer to use to buy some breeder cattle.

The most common reason why people are destroying most of the South and Central American rain forests is corporate greed: the American meat habit has provided an economic boom to multinational corporate ranchers, and it is the primary reason behind the destruction of the tropical rain forests of the Americas. Poor farmers and factory farmers alike engage in slash-and-burn agriculture, cutting ancient forests to plant a single crop: grass for cattle.

As John Robbins points out in his book Diet for a New America, “The United States imports 200 million pounds of beef every year from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama—while the average citizen in those countries eats less meat each year than the average American house cat.”²

This deforestation of Latin America for burgers is particularly distressing when you consider that this very fragile area contains 58 percent of the entire planet’s rain forests (19 percent are in Africa and 23 percent in Oceania and Southeast Asia).

Deforesting Removes Roots, Affecting Groundwater and the Water Cycle

Another problem related to deforestation is the loss of drinkable groundwater.

Drinkable water falls from the skies as rain and soaks into the ground.

At deeper levels, the water has often acquired (from the soil) high concentrations of dissolved minerals, particularly salts. Trees reach deeply down into the earth and draw up moisture from just above this salty water and pump it up into the atmosphere, using the minerals to harden the wood of the tree. This removal of water from the soil creates a downward draw, into the soil, for the fresh water raining down from above. This circulation keeps the soil healthy.

When forests are cut, however, the more saline subterranean water begins to creep upward, infiltrating into higher and higher levels of soil. When this salty water hits a level a few yards below the surface, the remaining trees become immune damaged, just like an AIDS patient, vulnerable to parasitic infections. We see the result of this in beetle infestations and fungal infections such as “rust,” which are wiping out trees around the world.

People often think that beetle, caterpillar, moth, and fungus infections are external agents that cause forests to die, so they react with mass sprayings of insecticides or fungicides or by shrugging their shoulders and saying that nothing can be done. But in a healthy forest, such infestations are rare, just as in a healthy human opportunistic infections are rare. One reason why even multispecied, varied-aged tracts of forest in Europe and the United States are dying from these conditions is because they’ve already been weakened by humans’ pumping out much of the surface water, pouring down acid rain on them, and destroying surrounding forests.

In Europe the percentage of land that is forest has been reduced to 27 percent. In Asia it’s 19 percent. In North America (including the vast forests of Canada), it’s at 25 percent. The worldwide replacement of forests with pastureland for cows has become so pervasive that wood-poor England is now, in some communities, using charcoal made from burned cow bones instead of the traditional wood charcoal to filter city water supplies. Reacting to protests from vegetarians in Yorkshire, England, the Yorkshire Water company pointed out that the bones were imported from India because the company couldn’t afford the cost of wood-made charcoal and, the Associated Press quoted an official as saying, “We can’t undertake to supply water which meets individual dietary needs.”³ As of 1997 cow-bone charcoal, cheaper than wood charcoal even after including the cost of shipping it from India, was being used in 10 water treatment plants, and the company planned to add it to six more.

When the salty water continues higher and reaches a foot or two below the surface, crops begin to die. And when it hits the surface, the soil becomes incapable of sustaining vegetation and desertification sets in.

To deal with this growing soil salinity crisis, farmers from California to Europe to Australia have begun installing deep-water pumps to remove the salt-contaminated water that the trees would have once drawn down deep below the surface. While this works as a short-term solution, over the long term it only makes the problem worse because that undesirable water is not being cycled back up into the atmosphere, as it would be by a tree, but instead is dumped into waterways, which it poisons on its way to the sea. The result is further downwind desertification as well as the poisoning of rivers and lakes.

The loss of trees means not only the loss of current topsoil because of salination and desertification but also the loss of future soils. The roots of most plants anchor only into the topsoil, using it for mechanical support and as a medium from which to derive nutrients and water. Trees, however, have deep roots that break up lower levels of rock, slowly bringing them to the surface, and shallow roots that break up surface rock. They also draw minerals up into the tree itself to help make the plant matter. When the leaves are shed, they form an essential component of soil.

The result of this action by the roots of trees is the formation of new topsoil. It takes, on average, about 400 years for a forest to create a foot of topsoil that is capable of sustaining crops. Without a forest there is almost no topsoil being created at all. (Some sand is formed through air and water erosion of rock, but that is not soil.) This also shows how slash-and-burn agriculture, where a few feet of topsoil are exposed by burning a forest and then used up by agriculture over just a few years, is so shortsighted.

Given that without soil we can have no crops, it would seem that we’d be concerned about both the loss of our soil-creating trees and the loss of our current soil itself. Instead, more than 300 tons of topsoil are lost worldwide every minute as governments and the agricultural corporations that produce most of America’s crops look the other way.

Because of rising average temperatures from global warming, the life cycle of the bark beetle in Alaska has been cut from two years to one for reproduction. This has led to a near doubling of the population of bark beetles, which have devastated several million acres of Alaskan forests.

Forests are imperiled worldwide.

Hardly anything illustrates the rich, complex, interdependent nature of our environment as well as trees do, but they continue to be cut and burned. The result aggravates our situation in these last hours of ancient sunlight: we have less oxygen-releasing leaf surface, less circulation in the water cycle, and increased desertification, while at the same time the burning puts more carbon into the atmosphere. These facts make it appear that humans (at least the humans who control such matters) have no concept of their role in the ecosystem.

From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, © 1998, 1999, 2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.