Another Remembrance Day

Boy-scoutVeterans Day came round again last week. It brought to mind a boy standing in the drizzle beside a war memorial near London on what is called Remembrance Day over there. I have a black and white picture in my head of the 1st Farnborough boy scout troop on parade.

We marched on November 11 (or the closest Sunday) from the George & Dragon pub car park to the cemetery at Saint Giles Church where we assembled in serried ranks beside girl scouts and opposite rows of veterans from two World Wars. The men stood stiffly to attention, some needing help with a cane. Almost all wore a dark gabardine mackintosh with a poppy in their buttonhole and bright medals dangling from ribbons. We were in scout uniform, which in those days meant short pants and a green beret pulled over an ear so the rain drained on our shoulder.  Cold, wet, and unnaturally subdued for boys, we had to show a stiff upper lip because our fathers were there.

St. Giles' Church
St. Giles’ Church and war memorial, Farnborough

We waited for a roll call of the fifty names engraved in the granite memorial, followed by the Ode to Remembrance.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

The assembly repeated the last line before a two-minute silence. Then a bugler on the memorial steps called the Last Post (Taps in America).  We then filed into the church through the narthex to the back pews where we fidgeted on the hard wooden boards for the next hour. The rector stepped up to the pulpit in a black cassock and white surplice, probably still wondering in his bowed head how to preach about the unspeakable.

Our parents and grandparents in front of us were remembering comrades, friends, and neighbors whose faces and voices still rang in the halls of their memory. Our family had lost some members, but that was long ago. How could a boy share the same emotions as his elders? How could he remember someone he had never known? The best he could do was to stay awake during the sermon, try to imagine the horrors of war, and resist his attention from drifting to the girl scouts nearby.

I guess it is easier today for American youngsters to have a fuller heart than we had for our veterans of the World Wars because they are likely to know someone who has served in war zones. A personal connection puts flesh on the statistics of conflict, as I appreciated when I saw a brawny young man in a wheelchair with his legs sawn off above the knee. I was tempted to ask, “Was it an I.E.D.?” I should have simply said, “Thank you,” but for me he put a human face on the sacrifice of war which helps me remember when stars and stripes are fluttering again in churchyards and beside mailboxes at this time of year.

While I was musing that personal connections help to make remembrance more heart-felt I wondered about all the other people I have never even paused to think about and all the things that I take for granted in daily life. It doesn’t seem such a big sacrifice to unclutter the mind for just two minutes of meditation once a year for them, although there is the excuse of an endless thank you list that would tax the brain. But I am getting started, and although my choice seems odd I hope the reasons are clear by the end of this post. I am thinking of TREES!

Loblollies
Loblolly pines

No memorial day is set aside for them, although there is a National Arbor Day when planting and caring for trees is encouraged. If there is ever a day for remembering the bountiful forests and our continuing dependence on them Joyce Kilmer’s Trees will probably be its anthem:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree…

Some trees are so magnificent that they can even stir the heart of a lumberjack who makes his living by clear-cutting forests to the horizontal, like machine-gunners who admired the enemy’s courage even as they slaughtered at the Somme, Passchendaele, and Marne. We say we love trees, yet our actions speak otherwise. A storm of yellow and red leaves out of a maple tree in the fall is mesmerizing, but then we complain about clearing them from our yard. Trees do not just embellish the landscape but are emblematic of all that is grand and worth preserving in nature.

Forests were where most people lived before they were cleared for lumber and to make way for farms, concrete and asphalt. Saint Giles himself was a 7th Century forest-dweller. For untold centuries they provided nutritious food and wood for heating, cooking, tool-making, and furniture, and they harbored an astonishing biodiversity. They still do. Our ancestors felt much more connected with trees than modern man as they dreamt of (and sometimes worshipped) tree spirits—dryads in Greece, kodema in Japan, Ah’ret in Cambodia, and green men in England. The spirits were defenders of the forests and could sway human destiny. It was vital to preserve the sylvan environment for posterity. But when people moved to towns and cities the caretaking spirit was forgotten and timber just a way of making a living and another table.

“The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief…” (John Muir).

Perhaps we are coming round at last to thinking about the great forests in a fresh way, if only because we are alarmed at the prospect of a world without them. We know that they are the lungs of the atmosphere and buffer the rising levels of carbon dioxide, but this realization came late and action to care for forests around the world, and particularly in the tropics, is still ponderous, patchy and often short-sighted. Like the parable of the blind man in Bethsaida who only saw people “looking like trees walking” until he was fully healed, when we look at trees we only see dollar bills and people with wants and needs.

Giant_sequoia
Sequoia grove in California
“Any fool can destroy trees…” John Muir

To meditate on trees it helps to take a trip to see the giants. It is as impossible to avoid looking up in awe at a grove of sequoia in California as to turn aside from looking down in amazement from the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. You never forget. On the other side of the country children have fun holding hands in a ring to measure the circumference of the biggest yellow poplar. The stories they take home are lasting.

yellow poplar
Measuring a giant yellow poplar.
Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, NC State Universities Libraries

This last tract of virgin hardwoods containing giant poplar trees in the mountains of North Carolina has been protected by the US Department of Forestry since 1936 when it was named after the poet, the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  Outside the preserve every large tree was taken down because they all had a price on their boles. The titanic American chestnut trees that once dominated the forest canopy even over the poplars had a different fate since they fell everywhere to a malignant blight, and few people are alive today who can remember them. But to stand among the surviving giants can feel like being among veterans sharing a solemn remembrance of the fallen, including Joyce Kilmer himself who lay down among the trees that died the same day on the Marne battlefield not long after writing his poem.

Paul Nash
We are Making a New World. Paul Nash 1918.

Next post: In a nutshell

Green Fire

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view” (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949).gray wolf

As a forester in the South-West, Leopold’s job was to control predators for protecting game species.  But one day after shooting a wolf he had something like a religious conversion experience: an ineffable change of heart. He started questioning policies and cherished beliefs about managing wildlife populations. He guessed that when wolves and cougars were extirpated the deer and elk populations would boom, the genetic stock would deteriorate as less fit animals were no longer weeded out, and overgrazing herds could eat out their food supply and starve. He had realized that when a keystone species is eliminated the ecosystem gets out of whack, although he didn’t live to see proof of his theory when gray wolves were reintroduced to the Yellowstone National Park.

Leopold, exchanging his rifle for a pen, drafted a Land Ethic from his Wisconsin farm at the end of life. When I read the passage that, “conservation is a state of harmony between men and land,” I wondered about my own backyard.  Is it as harmonious as I assumed, or had I been hardening an ecologically dissonant landscape?

After a hurricane ravaged our acreage we brought in topsoil, planted trees, seeded lawns, and laid out flowerbeds. It was patient work and now, nearly a decade later, the yard looks mature and the new growth provides welcome shade from Virginia’s summer sun. A landscape designer planned the attractive setting for our home, something that neighbors and visitors could admire and I could imagine featuring in a glossy garden magazine. But in making landscape appeal the goal we paid no heed to the interests of critters who shared the land with us. Perhaps I was delusional in thinking I was acting as nature’s physician, healing the wounded land by turning it into a garden of neat lawns and cheerful flowers. I know how appearances can be deceptive, like assuming that a ruddy human face always means a healthy body.

Energy pyramid
Energy pyramid

Healthy bodies don’t need a physician because they can fight off some threats and repair wounds.  We have allostatic mechanisms that return stressed bodies to a stable state. Likewise in the oak-hickory forests that existed here before European colonization, there was a self-regulating biome in which the bottom of an energy pyramid fed by products of decomposition and photosynthesis provided nourishment for a rich variety of herbivorous animals which, in turn, fed carnivores and top predators. After a wildfire or storm the landscape was gradually restored by a succession of larger plants and trees, like scabs healing over a skin wound until the canopy closed over again. When Teddy Roosevelt wrote about the Grand Canyon, “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it,” he might have been thinking about the great eastern forest of America, but it was already fragmented. It had taken only a few generations to undo what eons of evolution had created.

A land as bountiful as Virginia’s was never going to be left to nature. The Peninsula is now a mosaic of farms, gardens, and woodlots. It is picturesque, even romantic (Virginia is for Lovers), but no longer in harmony with nature. Even nature preserves that look “natural” to our eyes need help in their struggle against invasive animals, plants, and diseases introduced from Asia and Europe: bamboo marches, kudzu smothers, cankers kill, and Japanese stiltgrass blankets the forest floor. Gardeners and farmers wage incessant war on alien plants and epidemics of tent caterpillars, Japanese beetles, ticks, and cloven-hooved locusts (deer).

kudzu
kudzu vines

Despite spraying lakes of herbicides and pesticides, the insurgents keep coming back. In trying to dominate nature and grow for our own needs and pleasure we are eliminating, often unintentionally, some critters at the top of the pyramid that are most beneficial as pest consumers (birds, bats, amphibians, and reptiles) or control deer herds (wolves). At the bottom of the pyramid our impact is mostly feeble or temporary (invasive and disease-bearing plants, fungi, and microbes). We would like to turn the pyramid on its head, but that is biologically impossible. Being mainly an urban species now, most of us are unaware of how much havoc human ecology has created and our continuing dependence on nature.  Some species of formerly common birds have declined by over two-thirds since the 1960s; many butterflies and bumble bees that do magisterial pollination services are vanishing; forty years ago you had to raise your voice to be heard here above the din of crooning frogs, but no longer. Poisons and starvation are depleting the landscape of wonderful creatures and some of our best friends.

Japanese stiltgrass
Japanese stiltgrass is even eschewed by deer

Before I read Leopold’s book I was already tapering off my use of chemicals in the yard, applying Roundup only for spot treatment of weeds. But now I realize that my change of heart was far too tepid, and that pretty flower borders and lawns look like sterile deserts to the critters who used to live here. Most of the plants we buy are aliens that evolved in quite different environments, and without their natural herbivores they grow profusely, sometimes out-competing the natives.

If these foreigners are unpalatable to caterpillars and grubs it would explain why butterflies, bugs, and creepy-crawlies are so much diminished, except for the hardiest ones which can boom when they have fewer competitors and predators. To test this hunch I checked if insects prefer our native plants.

I collected bundles of leaves from many different species in our yard to count the percentage that had been nibbled. This wasn’t a perfect study, but I didn’t need more data to convince me that natives (green color) were the preferred food plants by a huge margin. Most aliens (red) were ignored by the diners.

leaf survey
Leaves nibbled by insects

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Apart from a few insects that are not fussy about their veggies, most are particular about their food plant which they are adapted to chew and digest because they evolved in the same habitat. We have provided an inedible landscape.

phragmites
phragmites

Animals can adapt to graze a species that is new to them, but require thousands of generations. Take for instance phragmites (“phrag”), an aggressive reed that is overrunning wetlands and shorelines up and down the East Coast. In its homeland on the other side of the globe it is a food plant for 170 species of herbivores of all kinds, but since it was introduced to North America three centuries ago there are still only five species that will eat it. The mill of evolution grinds slowly.

Doug Tallamy’s book helped to bring home these thoughts (Bringing Nature Home). He is an ecologist at the University of Delaware whose vision is a garden revolution for a more sustainable relationship with nature. It is too late to preserve more wilderness areas here, but there are lots of “spare” land in backyards, and 40 million acres of lawn in the US. He urges us to cast aside esthetic preferences to cultivate more native plants.

This doesn’t mean turning back the clock to the original forest—which has gone forever. But we can have a healthier land, and need it as desperately as a patient fed by tubes, wires, and drips in the ICU needs organ and stem cell transplants to recover.

But when Tallamy explained that native plants help to restore the numbers of insects I paused.

Yikes! Is he crazy? What will my family and neighbors say?

“Don’t we have enough bugs already, Roger?” I hear someone say. “Remember the yellow jackets that chased me inside? And didn’t you complain about horseflies?”

“Yes, dear.”

It’s hard to defend bugs and creepy-crawlies, apart from butterflies and bees. It’s easy to point fingers at industries that pollute waterways and developers that scorch the ground for new shopping malls. But responsibility also rests on our shoulders, and especially gardeners and farmers as land stewards.

With a pricked conscience I raised my lawnmower blades to their maximum height so that white clover flowers beloved by pollinators are not decapitated. I’m now convinced that clover is more attractive than fescue, staying green all winter, and more beneficial, providing soil nourishment by nitrogen-fixation in the roots. Clover is not a native here, but I’ve found commercial growers that supply native plants for a butterfly garden: milkweed for monarchs, spicebush for swallowtails, and violets for fritillaries. I also have a new “immigration control” policy for alien plants, and am growing native redbud, dogwood, crab apple, Rudbeckia, sneezeweed, joe pye weed, wild asters, and possumhaw. They are no less beautiful, and if their leaves are grazed more by insects I feel a green fire of satisfaction that critters will feast on them.

Next Post: Re-baselining

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