Happy New Year! Now Think Like a Forest.

A view of Doan Creek flowing through Iosco Natural Area

It is conventional to think of the change from one year to the next as the end of old things and the beginning of new things. But if you take a walk in the woods, you see this happening all the time, not just at the end of humans’ calendar year. When a tree falls in the forest – if left alone – its death is not the end but the beginning of abundant new life on the forest floor.

Which causes me to recall Ben Rawlence, a native of England who has lived in the Black Mountains of southeastern Wales where he cofounded a nature-based college focusing on climate change with the premise that the solutions to climate change are found in our “reconnection to nature” that “will only come when nature itself is the classroom.” He says, “More than any previous generation, the lives of children born this century will depend on how it goes for the nonhuman world…We all need to learn once again how to think like a forest.” 

In The Treeline – The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, Rawlence asserts that the Earth’s “lung” is the nearly continuous boreal forest which circles the globe’s northern hemisphere. After the ocean, this is the planet’s second largest biome (living system). As the boreal forest continues its drift northward, the health of the whole planet is imperiled. 

Rawlence tells the stories of six tree species -- three conifers and three broadleaves – that are the markers of the boreal forest: the last to go during each Ice Age and the first to take hold when the ice recedes. “They are uniquely adapted to climate change. They have been riding the tides of climate change for millennia.”  They are Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandinavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland. 

But “riding the tides of climate change” does not guarantee survival of these species. In fact, Rawlence’s discussion of the loss of the permafrost in Siberia and Alaska is an especially depressing and worrisome warning of what’s happening. “Alaska,” Rawlence writes, “represents in microcosm the tragedy of modern industrial society. Despite the best efforts of the richest country on earth to do the right thing on conservation and indigenous rights, the enduring commitment to the third demand hydrocarbons – is undermining the viability of the rest.” 

The author describes the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) which “awarded” Alaska’s original inhabitants billions of dollars and 44 million acres of land in exchange for giving up any further land claims, and also setting aside another 80 million acres as “national interest lands” which eventually resulted in 32 million acres of new national parks – “arguably the largest, most progressive bargain with indigenous people in history; an attempt to square the competing demands of the twentieth century: oil, conservation and the end of the colonial era.” But from the data presented in The Treeline, this appears to be a rare and only temporal victory for the Earth’s lung.

There’s much more to learn and digest from this volume, but especially that humans need to think like a forest as we live our lives and, I would add, plan for our deaths. What can humans do to assure that our deaths create new life? 

For example, I should be preparing more thoroughly and thoughtfully now those specific documents that will provide explicit instructions that assure, upon my death, that there is designated funding of new life…including second chances for the natural world, such as funding to expand permanently protected nature preserves and reforestation and pollinator projects in our region and state.

Fortunately, the Mid-Michigan Land Conservancy can help landowners through conservation easements and can direct donors to estate planning vehicles to assure that land conservation and stewardship projects and habitat protection will endure long beyond our lives.  

 Written by John E. (Jack) Roberts, MMLC Board Member