“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering
What is the function of a tree?
At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed.
I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they’re meant to do.
Of course, trees don’t need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is.
THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE
Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it’s in every single culture. It has reached the level of quixotic instinct because even now, we know we’d be screwed without fire.
Evidence today points to the fact that it wasn’t even us; it was a cousin Homo Erectus way before us. Or at least one band in a cave in South Africa, lighting cooking fires between 1.5 and 2 million years ago. Homo sapiens got in on the fun about 125,000 years ago.
That’s one way to look at it: humans tamed fire. Here’s another:
HUMANS DISCOVERED A NEW USE FOR TREES: BATTERIES
Why is fire always the star of the show? We got fire and then we got cooked food, and then we invented steam engines, and then we went to the moon. And it’s always about fire.
It wasn’t burning energy that changed everything; it was access to stored energy that changed everything. It was the wood that was the important part.
Until that point, all plants and animals had very limited energy storage options. The sun shone down on plants which used it to build themselves by creating bonds between carbon atoms in CO2, hydrogen in water, and minerals in dirt. Then they breathed out the oxygen left over.
Humans ate those plants (or ate the animals that ate those plants) and broke down those bonds between carbon atoms to use the sunlight (and breath out the carbon hooked back up to the oxygen, which plants would take back and the whole thing started again.)
There was a small amount of redundancy built into that system. Plants stored enough water and enough sunshine to get through a dry day or a rainy day. Animals stored similar amounts of water and fat to get through a bad season.
Outside of our own bodies, options are few. Squirrels hoard nuts. Bees hoard vomit. There are small examples all over the animal kingdom of stored energy. But for the most part, the energy shining down on them today or the very recent past is all the energy they have access to.
Enter trees: years and years and years of sunlight, trapped between those carbon molecules, just waiting to be released.
Suddenly we could predigest our food (known by the more palatable name of cooking) and have access to far more calories for far less work. Suddenly we could keep warm without having to even ingest a bunch of energy and burn it ourselves. We didn’t have to eat anything at all. We could just sit there and all that stored sunlight would burst to life again with all that light and heat whenever we wanted it.
It no longer mattered whether it was day or not or where in the world we lived; we could summon daylight whenever we wanted it. Trees are still the main source of heat and light in most rural areas of the world.
THEN WE DISCOVERED ANCIENT TREES
The discovery of oil (coal, natural gas, etc) was a similarly momentous occasion for our species – suddenly, we weren’t limited by the sunlight of the immediate past, stored in recently dead trees.
We had access to millions and millions of days of sunlight, available whenever we wanted them, and we weren’t limited to predigesting food and keeping ourselves warm. We could use it to augment our muscles and go faster and faster, even fast enough to escape gravity. We didn’t have to use our voices to shout at each other – we could take that energy and throw our voices across the world.
We didn’t have to store all the information we learned in our huge brains; we could put it on paper (ANOTHER use for trees: storage!) Or etch it into a chip so we didn’t even have to be there when our voice traversed the world.
And we could do totally “useless” things with that energy like sing and dance and write stories and run nowhere. Can you imagine? Expend a huge amount of energy to run as fast as humanly possible…in circles.
Just burning up sunshine.
I know it’s not just trees, or even mostly trees. There were significant amounts of ferns and algae – but nobody has ever stared at ferns contemplating infinity or written poems to algae. It’s the metaphor of the thing.
HERE IS ANOTHER FUNCTION OF TREES: FILTER
Trees split CO2 into carbon and oxygen, use the carbon to build themselves with sunlight, and spit out the oxygen. We take that, bind it with carbon, and spit out ourselves. It’s a beautiful system.
This process doesn’t end when trees die; they sink into the ground and shelter any leftover carbon from mucking up the system, sometimes for eons on end. But what happens when you burn your filter for fuel? Not only do you get the sunlight, but you also get the waste that was happily sequestered and pretty to look at. And what happens when you burn ridiculous amounts of ancient and current trees every day? You cook the world.
HOW PRIVILIGING ONE FUNCTION LED TO US COOKING THE WORLD
One might call climate change a tree problem. It’s one of the reasons we haven’t solved it yet: we haven’t made the shift in our minds about the function of plants: from fuel to filter.
And we don’t have nearly a good enough battery ready to replace the energy we can no longer touch. I get it; we don’t want to go back to the days of razor-thin margins when the only time we have heat and light is when the sky is clear.
We talk a lot about whether this problem is real or what the solution is. Looking at function helps surface one explanation: We need vastly more trees (ancient and current) as filters (or we need to invent our own stat) and vastly fewer trees as batteries – which means we definitely need to invent those even more stat.
I can’t overstate how huge this species-wide mindset change is. The story of fire still looms large in our imagination. It’s a part of our identity. We are the ones, the only ones, who tamed fire. And now we have to be the ones to Put. It. Back.
OTHER FUNCTIONS OF TREES
Shelter (wood), information storage/communication medium (paper), fuel (wood stoves), literal food (bananas), decoration.
Humidifier: Did you know trees sweat? And that they are significantly involved in cloud production?
Erosion prevention: A recent lowlander moved to the woods where I lived. I should specify the woods are on large hills. They brought their cherry-picked builder from their old, flat, home and had to spend a significant amount of money shoring up the hillside so their house didn’t fall down it because they cut down all the trees to have a better view. Let’s just say their functional fixedness did not let them consider the implications of roots. That’s a tiny example, but it happens all over the world on a huge scale. If you want dirt to stay where it is, don’t rip up the trees.
Fertilizer: once they die, they provide food for insects, and other animals, and nutrients for soil for the next generation to use.
Sanity perseveres: we like trees. I don’t know if that’s a genetic thing passed down from the days when we slept in trees and we automatically associate them with safety, but they feature in our art and popular imaginations at astonishing volume.
Plus, we’re not the only ones using them! For other animals, they are also homes, food, temperature regulators, safety from predators, ladders, shade, and playground.
What have I missed? My mother makes baskets out of pine needles. (Needles are long and flexible) My father carves furniture out of it. (Pine is stiff and strong enough to sit on.) A local artist uses bark as a painting canvas (bark is smooth and flat.)