Ask the trees


Oliver Rackham has a new book with a practical view of forests
Sometimes established thinking is wrong. Especially when it comes to the environment.

I was lucky to be at Rackham’s debut, at a conference 30 years ago. He was a shy young Cambridge botanist then, and was addressing the seemingly uncontroversial subject of The Oak Tree in Historic Times. But his paper turned out to be a bombshell, a clinical demolition of foresters’ paternalism and an awesomely evidenced account of the fact that, for most of human history, trees had been regarded and used as a self- renewing resource. He described how he had measured all the main timbers in the original part of his college, Corpus Christi (there were 1,249, mostly small squared trees about 7ins in diameter), and calculated how frequently such a building could have been created from the renewable oaks of an ordinary Cambridgeshire wood. He blew away the notion that felling trees destroyed woodland.

In the half-dozen books he has written since, he has revolutionised our understanding of historical ecology. In sharp and exquisite English, and with a historical intuition as strong as his scientific rigour, he has laid waste the conventional wisdom of foresters, the ideologies of theoretical naturalists, the “pseudo-histories” of historians. His simple — and to him sacrosanct — precept is that the final arbiter in all arguments about woodland must be the trees and woods themselves, in all their dynamic, mutable, particular detail.

In the foreword to Woodlands he lays out his credo — that trees are not “merely part of the theatre of landscape in which human history is played out, or the passive recipients of whatever destiny humanity foists on them . . . (they are) actors in the play”, with multiple interactions with time, and all other organisms, including people — then concludes, disarmingly, “For good or ill, I have no particular theory to promote.” Well, if that is not a theory, or at least a manifesto, I do not know what is.

Bingo!

There is a particular paternalistic attitude in the environmental movement. Somehow, only human actions matter. Only humans can doom a species. Only humans can save the Earth. It's our fault if we don't act now.

Humans should accept that we are not the only life on the planet. Our notions of right and wrong may not translate.

For example, there is little doubt that public land mismanagement has made wildfires in the Western US much worse and much more devastating. If the deadwood had been cleared out, if the forests had been thinned, the fires wouldn't have been all that dangerous. In fact, part of the "natural" cycle is for the wildfires to periodically burn out the land.

But it is not very environmentally correct to say so.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - December 30, 2006 at 06:27 PM  Tag


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