Trees, Do We Need Them?
By Anitha S
11 April, 2013
Countercurrents.org
It has been all about trees since the heat rose this summer. Questions from all over. The Collector of Palakkad district declaring that people stay inside and not face the heat!! Trees being cut, trees being listed, amazing stories and poems on trees being shared, questions and doubts about trees.And then the never ending question –Do we need trees? We means the entire human race? Or does it mean Trivandrum city where I live? Or Kerala, the southern most state in India- clean and green.
Or is it does the Earth need trees? Or do trees need each other?
The questions came like an avalanche as me and a friend walked the streets familiar since my birth in my home city of Trivandrum in Kerala.
The first question was
Do we need trees? Yes of course we do- it gives food, fuel, fodder, furniture – all of which we can put a value to.
They cut down hundred feet trees
To make a chair
I am six foottwo
When I sit on the chair
I am four feet one
Did they really cut down hundred feet trees
To make me look shorter
(Spike Milligan)
It also gives shade, shelter for many organisms other than us humans and of course ( with a condescending nod) it is an ecosystem.
Do we humans really need trees?
The pie charts and all that rubbish statistics (courtesy Lois Gibbs) say that we really do not need them- our real tall neighbours. A hoarding that came up announcing the building of an apartment complex announced –“ Very soon you will have a tall neighbour” This stood next to a huge green Elanji tree which very soon got cut.
I think I shall never see a billboard as lovely as a tree. Perhaps unless the bill boards fall, I will never see a tree at all wrote Ogden Nash.
The recent one in my city proclaims “ Like forests needs trees so do cities need roads” Knowingly or unknowingly the message is that cities really need roads more than trees.
But then how did we let more than 10 million hectares of the world’s forest cover be lost in a decade (1990-2000) or sit back and read a report that says we are losing 3 billion – 6 billion trees per year.
We are doing it so easily because just outside the comfort of our artificially cooled and lighted home we are losing 100 trees.
Yes we are to lose more than a 100 trees in the city very soon.For a small city like Trivandrum with an area of 214.86 sqkms and a population of 95,7730 it seems a bit absurd that more than 42.06 kms of roads will be developed soon or have been developed.The most terrible prize for this has been our green cover. The above mentioned hundred trees are being removed from just 2 of the roads that are to be developed as part of the Trivandrum City Road Improvement Program. So do we really need trees ?.It has been decided that no fruit trees should be planted as the fruits and their seasons will pose a threat to safety on the roads. The trees with lush and green branching should be avoided as their shade and canopy might hinder the electric lines. So what do we need trees for?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it is gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it is gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot…
So sings Joni Mitchell in her meliflous voice in the 1970s. The residents of many an area in Trivandrum which was to lose its shade responded thus when the Opinion Kiosks were set up in 2009. We need to have cleared and clean pathways and roads with no obstruction. Trees. Footpaths, street vendors and beggars are eyesores in this paved paradise. A woman vendor under the tree in Ayurveda College Junction has been here for more than 30 years and remembers the Polyalthia as a sapling.As the road widens she will lose also the small space that sustains her family and her life. The serious bespectacled vendor at Museum- LMS road was anxious that her popular lime juice sales will be gone when the trees go .She was so grateful when the midnite vigil saved the huge Peltoforum on the road under which she has her make-shift shop. But the lady next door holding her car keys on the way to the shopping mall may not want trees whose branches might fall on her car or the guy with his IT badge may feel fruits and birds will spoil his BMW.So we end up with a road like Vellayambalam- Sasthamangalam shaved clear and with the weak stemmed Bauhinia planted that does not give shade or spread coolness.
Does the Earth needs trees?
Ofcourse it does- or else how could she have covered more than 30 % of her area with more than 100,000 varieties (human knowledge) of trees. How else can the tree diversity in a primary forest be 50,000- 100,000 trees per square kilometer? Or a rainforest in Peru have 300 trees in a 2.5 acre plot?
The Earth calls out to cover her with more trees.Walking in the Museum compound one evening recently, we saw the Hopea tree with hundreds of winged seeds at her roots, the white pine in the Tagore theater complex that has her seeds just bursting with life, the small Cletoria, the Ochnas and Quasia amaras in my own garden which has sprouted in gay abandonment as if to say
Cover my mother earth
Four times with many flowers
Fill her soil pores with the roots
Hundred times over
Cover the heavens
With high piled clouds
Cover the earthy with great rains
Cover the earth with lightning
Let thunder drum over all the Earth
Let thunder be heard
Over all the six directions of the Earth
(Anonymous)
Do trees need each other?
Sure they do. Or else how could the huge Alstonia scholaris and Ficus grow with such comraderie on the road that is to be widened in Vanchiyur? . Or the creeper laden with yellow flowers find refuge in the strong embrace of the Alstonia’s branches in Museum junction? The most obvious friendships between trees could be the ambience and coolness of many a paths in our city.It is surprising to know that there are still 15 sacred groves in the city.Remember the coolness as we passed the Kowdiar palace area a few years back or the soft rains that used to fall only in the road sloping from Museum to Nanthancode?
Little did we know that this was microclimate and the associations between plants were needed for maintaining it. Now we live in an era of change- Climate Change. Yet our planners say that this is a hoax and trees have nothing at all to do with mitigation and amelioration.
A very brief assessment of the variations in temperature in areas where trees grew and outside by a friend revealed this
As we walk the streets of Trivandrum or many a city roads, we realize the loneliness of some trees who have been left alone after their friends have gone.I sense it in the Spathodea that stands lone on the LMS –Mascot Hotel section on the left where atleast 5 trees were removed overnite a few years back. So too the cobbler who for years sat under those trees disappeared.
How can I not share this too as we speak of whether trees need each other?
The trees of Siberia
Know when the axe falls in Oregon
Gone now the sacred druidic oaks
The Selwargewald, the cypress
All trees touch
Forming a single vegetal mat
A circumglobal
Circuit board
Of the intertwining roots of oak and aspen
Manzanita and red wood-
Or linked at great distance
By the designs of mycorrhizal lace
Gone the southern hard woods
Gone the unbroken mantle
Of tropical rainforest
All trees standing
Know the pain of the trees that fall
To the snow
Information chemically coded
Is passed through flesh of the soil
Or transmitted through subtle electric surges
Pulsing down fungal filaments
One plant to another
One forest to the next
The trees of Siberia
Know when the axe falls in Oregon
Gone the solemn council of elder firs
Gone the botanical lessons
Of perseverance and place.
(Lone Wolf Circles)
Do we need trees?
Yes we do- atleast some of us do. But we rarely ever see the trees and once you start seeing they are there all the time for you. Last evening while walking in the Museum compound we stood by the Kudakapala that had flowered profusely with undeniable visibility. Many passed by and started looking at it seeing us standing there and enjoying the sight. We know how people in Bangalore city got together in a last attempt to save the trees that were being axed mercilessly ( Hasiru Usiru hasiruusiru.in ).The Carmichael Road Walkers Association in Mumbai city has put up striking boards that say –“Quiet-Birds are singing”. The organization Nizhal in Chennai has been conducting regular Tree walks to know more about the green lungs of the ever-expanding city.
We do need trees
As Josef Beuys, one of the most striking and controversial artists (German,1921-1986) said when he announced his 7000 Oaks project
“The intention of such a tree-planting event is to point upto the transformation of all of life, of society and of the whole ecological system”
Spike Milligan’s one man crusade to restore the 900 year old Elfin oak stump in Kensington Garden in London in 1996 is ever remembered in the context of many poems that he wrote about trees.
Does the life of 23 year old Julia Butterfly Hill who sat atop the Californian coast Redwood ( from Dec 10,1997- Dec 18, 1999 on a 180 foot tree) amaze us with the determination, vision and purpose of reaching the message of conserving the tree and its ecosystem ?
Yes we do need trees and we do need to plant trees
What do we plant
When we plant a new wood?
Boats in which waves
Can be safely withstood
Masts with strong rigging
To hold up the sails
Sturdy and steady
To weather all gales.
What do we plant
When we plant new trees?
Broad wings to glide on
With grace and ease
Pencils and rulers
Notebooks and pads
To be taken to school
By girls and boys
What do we plant
When we plant a new grove?
Thickets
Where foxes and badgers
Can rove
Thickets
Where squirrels
Can play hide and seek
Where the wood pecker taps
At the trees with his beak
What do we plant
When we plant a new seed?
Leaves on which dew
Will fall in bright drops
Cool and fresh air
Fragrance and shade
Rivers in which
We can paddle or wade
Woods that make life
More healthy
That is what we are
Planting Today.
(Anonymous)
The planting has to start today for all of us… before we live in paved and scorching paradises!
This was written as news came in that 16 trees in Trivandrum city has been axed for road and gutter development and another 8 will go in the Public Library campus where there is a Summer school for children now.
Anitha.S
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