Only God can make a tree, but
anyone can ruin a prairie. Consider the celebrated 19th century
journalist Julius Sterling Morton. On moving to Nebraska from
Michigan in 1854, he found he didn’t like the way nature had
designed the Great Plains. Accordingly, he summoned forth “a great
army of husbandmen… to battle against the timberless
prairies.”
In 1885, Morton’s birthday became a
state holiday we all just noted called “Arbor Day.” A statue of
him, paid for in part by the pennies, nickels and dimes of school
children from all over the world, now stands in Nebraska City.
Arbor Day is celebrated throughout our land, and when you join the
National Arbor Day Foundation you get 10 free tree seedlings that
may or may not belong in your area.
There are or were
prairies in most of our nation, not just the plains states.
Prairies used to dominate the San Francisco Bay region, but as
Arbor Day euphoria swept west, locals planted trees —
including eucalyptus, America’s biggest weed — thereby
wiping out native ecosystems. By 1949, the trees had killed off the
remnant population of the prairie-dependent Xerces blue butterfly,
making the Presidio of San Francisco — an old Spanish
garrison — the site of the first documented butterfly
extinction in North America.
In 2002, American Forests,
the nation’s oldest conservation organization, and its
“Global ReLeaf” partners, which included such spewers of
tree-killing and greenhouse gases as Conoco, Arco Foundation,
Baltimore Gas and Electric, Edison Electric Institute, Metropolitan
Edison, Texaco, Octane Boost Corp., and Pennsylvania Electric,
reached their goal of planting 20 million trees across the United
States. There was little thought about what species belonged where
and no recognition that lots of places had too many trees already.
Sandra Ross, director of the conservation group Health
& Habitat of Mill Valley, Calif., wanted to sign up for Global
ReLeaf but couldn’t extract a promise from organizers to
plant only indigenous trees, and only in areas that used to have
trees.
“I have trouble talking to these people who have
this wonderful enthusiasm for planting trees,” she told me. “Most
of them don’t have any idea of site-endemic situations.
‘We’re gonna plant trees!’ they’ll say, and
I’ll ask what kind. And they’ll say, ‘I
don’t know; they’re in little pots.’ Mill Valley
(in the Bay area) doesn’t need a tree-planting program. It
needs a tree-removal program.”
Just such a program is
under way at the 3,334-acre Union Slough National Wildlife Refuge
near Titonka, Iowa, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is
trying to restore a tiny piece of tallgrass prairie, a globally
endangered ecosystem supporting 300 plant species per acre and
critically important to vanishing grassland birds.
But
when managers suggested cutting and burning invasive trees, the
public accused them of “playing God” and initiating “a scorched
earth policy.” School kids blitzed them with e-mails, begging them
to desist from arboricide. With the kind of courage that
doesn’t get recognized enough in federal service, the staff
forged ahead, cutting, burning and educating where it could.
Although the locals have more or less quieted down, the refuge
finds itself strapped for money and manpower.
“I’m
frustrated,” declares federal biologist Tom Skilling, who reckons
that only 10 or 15 percent of the trees have been removed from the
project area.
There’s a notion, old as the Oregon
Trail, that trees prevent erosion in prairie habitat. “Not true,”
says Rich Patterson, director of the Indian Creek Nature Center in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “As a general statement, dense growths of trees
reduce the ground cover of sedges, grasses and forbs, and there’s a
lot of sheet erosion in the woods. These ground-huggers do a better
job holding soil than trees.”
For his radical notions,
Patterson used to get pilloried by tree lovers, including state and
federal bureaucrats who had devoted their careers to planting trees
for “conservation.” Now, after 29 years of cutting, burning and
educating, he’s got everyone pretty much behind him.
Still, the old mindset dies hard. Even today, the Farm
Bill’s Conservation Reserve Program impedes prairie
restoration. It requires landowners wanting to enroll marginal
riparian pastures to plant trees and shrubs.
Depending on
where and how it takes root, a tree can be lovelier than a poem or
uglier than a road-killed coyote. I’ll withhold comment on
Joyce Kilmer’s verse except to say I prefer the words of
Ansel Adams, worth perhaps more than one of his photographs, and
with which he helped quash a Boy Scout tree-planting project on
California’s Marin headlands: “I cannot think of a more
tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless
area,” said Adams, “and to impose an interpretation of natural
beauty on a great landscape that is charged with beauty and wonder,
and the excellence of eternity.”
Ted Williams
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado.
When not roaming the West as an outdoors writer, he lives in
Grafton, Massachusetts.
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