Killing Trees, Planting Trees

DURING THE PAST several years, it is estimated that roughly one hundred twenty million trees have died in California, from beetles, wildfires, and drought, a veritable array of destructive forces sure to kill trees in prodigious numbers. A drop in the bucket, really, for there are billions of trees in California, and as many as three point five trillion world wide. Alarming nonethelss, because at the dawn of neolithic civilization there were an estimated seven trillion trees on the planet, and since roughly ten billion a year are being destroyed, net, the future is tree bleak, not sustainable. You hear crazy things about trees, the craziest being that the number of trees in North America is actually greater now than it was when the United States came into existence. Misinformation is a staple in modern life. The most obvious true fact is that there is absolutely no rreasonable reason for the human species to slowly destroy all trees on planet Earth, just as there is no reasonable reaon for humanity to suffocate the world in added atmospheric carbon. All along, we could ahve been planting more trees than we have been destroying. we still could. We could begin to do so today, and the optimistic sign is that in many places, including African nations, this is precisely what is beginning to be done. Take California, for instance. I recall hearing about California wildfires twenty years ago and more, about how each wildfire season the fires were becoming more intense, larger, more frequent, flaring up during most times of the year, not just the traidtional late summer fire season. The current refrain about wildfires is not new; its several decades old. I wonder what the areas devasted, sweept clean by wildfires twenty yeras ago look like now. By now, they should be back to their original appearance, shouldn't they? Twenty year old trees are largely, essentially full grown. Grass and underbrush and wildflowers take far less time to return to a burnt landscape than do trees. One would think that areas which were scorched by fire ten, fifteen, twenty and more years ago would by now be largely indistinguishable from virgin forests, and they probably are. That is the good news. That is our hope; that everything burned to the gourund by wildfire is renewable, and will renew, unless the scorched land is "repurposed" as a housing subdivision or parking lot mall combination, as some of them probably have been. The bad news, as always, is homo sapien sapiens, and its behavior, its wanton destruction of the environemnt whcih sustains it and makes life possible. But, what else is new?