Tree Porn

A few months ago, the local papers reported the kind of story I love to read– a delightful item about the Minneapolis street widely regarded as the finest example of an old-fashioned Twin Cities avenue. The salient distinguishing feature was the street’s towering American elm trees which had somehow survived numerous plagues of Dutch elm disease.

Then in October, I learned that Minneapolis had a rough year for Dutch elm. The park board cut down 4,000 elms in 2002. Among them was “the Sentinel,” a huge streetside attraction on Stevens Avenue near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The passing of this remarkable tree was commemorated by a white sash, a poem, and a memoriam in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities.

Now this morning in the Strib, I see where a farmer in Le Sueur county has been granted the rare distinction of owning the state’s finest American elm. The 87-foot tall tree was cited by the DNR, who keep track of more than 50 species of trees in their “Big Tree Registry.” The Strib also reports that the largest tree of any species currently in the logs is a cottonwood tree almost 130 feet tall. (The DNR has a three-point system that takes into account height, circumference of trunk, and canopy size. This particular cottonwood has the highest score of any species.)

Aside from the bizarre government impulse to record these kinds of “size matters” stats, it’s provocative to me that the Strib chose to lead this interesting story with the news about Monty Braun’s elm. Why not the state’s tallest white pine? How about its biggest poplar? I chalk it up to their desire to create a hook most readers will instantly want to read. Oddly, elms sell better than cottonwoods.

This is not as petty as it might seem; it goes to the heart of an important conversation about how we see our environment, or more accurately, what we see in our environment–and what we don’t see. More and more, environmentalists and scientists are warning us that our preferences are leading to biological monocultures. This is a fancy way of saying that we love those American elms so much, that we neglect the other species.

There is, of course, a price to be paid for this monomania. When Dutch elm disease thrived in the 70s and 80s, the whole face of Minnesota was scarred, because of a prejudice for these beloved shade trees. In 1977, 50,000 were cut down in the Twin Cities alone. That tells you not that Dutch elm disease was so much more virulent back then; rather, it tells you just how biased our arboriculture was until the 80s.

One wonders if this is the kind of phenomenon we can expect to see more of in the future. Is nature, biologically speaking, trying to regain its own balance in spite of its human stewards? This is where ethics and biology intersect. The growing gospel of ecology and the interconnectedness of all life throws cold water on some age-old philosophical and scientific questions. For example, if we somehow managed to eradicate small pox–because it was a scourge to human beings–is there some other price to be paid elsewhere on the circle of life? If we successfully killed all the mosquitoes, how long would the dragonflies survive? And then the songbirds? And so on.

This is tricky territory, of course. One can come dangerously close to making repellant, Malthusian kinds of pronouncements– that plagues of disease and famine are “nature’s way” of responding to overpopulation and its imbalances. It would be inhuman to believe that, particularly since the weak, infirm, and impoverished are inevitably the first to expire. This is a truism for all species, but we like to believe that humans–ethical ones, anyway–will take care of the neediest first.

If these kinds of change are, in fact, the planet’s way of trying to regain some sort of balance, then it might be wise to consider what we can do to help, rather than hinder. In recent years, the environmentalists have been touting the esthetic of biodiversity as a good first step. This line of thinking argues that if we want nature to thrive (so that we might survive), we should try to make sure that the widest possible range of the natural is given the opportunity to renew itself.

This seems like sound advice in any case. No matter what you might believe about “the greenhouse effect,” it certainly won’t hurt the planet to entertain the idea that it is changing, and that we may have a hand in it, for better or for worse. The alternative–to go on pretending that environmental problems like global warming are the fictions of those who only want to damage American business–is to risk considerably more than just our “way of life.”

Here in the Twin Cities, the old monoculture of public plantings is hopefully a thing of the past. We learned the painful lesson of Dutch elm disease, when hundreds of thousands of our stately streets were razed by a simple little beatle. A healthy mix of trees, including old favorites like maple and oak, along with modish species like ginkgo and linden, would have saved us the sorrow that we now prudently bank against.

Veneration of the “stately elm” is, to be sure, one of the prerogatives of our pride of place. The elm is as central to the Minnesota identity as lefse, Lake Wobegon, and driving in the left lane. As with so many other things in life, though–politics, art, society, biology–we must evolve to embrace new realities, or our traditions will end up in the wood chipper.