Oak Savannahs: “Making Green Space Great$ Again” - PURIFY
Before ranting about the benefits of leaving trees alive in forest restoration projects let me first say: Deadwood is an ecosystem: The amount of firewood & timber$ taken out of the people’s parks and natural areas under the pretense of restoration and/or payment of volunteer wages is disgraceful. And needs to stop.
And now the rant,….
The Holocene epoch is over. Things on earth will NEVER be what they were EVER again. The earth has fundamentally changed. We change everything or we die along with everything else.
Restoring or re-wilding our green areas can no longer involve the same thing. You can NOT restore a green area to its pure pre-“blighted” state without changing the planet’s atmosphere it’s bathed in back to it’s pre-“blighted” state. Only then does the pre-“blighted” state of the green area make sense. Think of it as even open-air museums are exposed to the elements and if this open air museums’ exhibits are dependent upon a set of elements that have changed the exhibit loses.
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Increasingly it is becoming generally accepted that the death of the Holocene epoch is being punctuated by an epoch aptly described the Pyrocene. Fire. Wildfires including forest fires. And then there is the Mass Extinction of plant and animal life. Proving to be one of the worst of 6 such extinctions in our planet’s 3 billion plus years. Yet human development and agriculture continues to grind on.
Truly the global environment is in an unprecedented and unnatural crisis unfolding at a deadly fast pace. The insect Armageddon is in full swing. The giant sequoias were recently wrapped in foil in an effort to keep them from burning down. Billions of other plants didn’t fare as well.
Kathy and Tom Brock Foundation – Pining for the good old days using a chain saw:
This is the backdrop for purifying a wild area back to an Oak Savannah by cutting down countless trees representing species that are indigenous to the greater area. Many of these trees Poplar, Hackberry, Walnut, etc. cut down to achieve a bygone forest composition have insect species that actually bear their same name to emphasize their symbiosis. Other trees are cut down because they are fruit trees from a bygone human use. They bloom for pollinators and bear fruit for other wildlife to eat. All are cut down in favor of a rare relative monoculture of trees that once existed when the planet’s atmosphere once compelled it. Those trees indigenous to the greater area are sold off for a profit.
Let’s be clear, in today’s world green anything is under threat. And what’s arriving beats no resemblance to anything that a species of plant or animal may have had a chance to accommodate in its latent genetic make up during the evolution of its physiology. If you think a green space’s best chances going forward are to return it to a now obsolete pristine shape you are wrong. It all burns. You may have a better chance at preserving biodiversity by having many representatives of many species represented in as many areas as possible in the hopes at least one area might be spared not only from fire but drought, floods, storm, disease. and illegal logging. Complete extinction is achieved by linking together many contiguous sites of local extinction. Extirpating a species from an area with a chain saw doesn’t help.
California is creating an ark for it’s species. We can damn sure as well leave trees that belong in the Midwest & beyond (and even those species of tree or shrub that may technically be non indigenous, but relatively nonaggressive) alone in an Oak Savannah restoration as the climate of latitude and longitude of the past gets scrambled and a mass extinction takes it’s toll. Elm, crab apple, white pine, maple, birch, linden, hickory, willow, choke cherry, ash, etc leave it or contribute to losing it and much, much more. Much of the world is planting trees.
In closing, the argument that a tree in nature was cut down and removed because its branches and trunk didn’t have him it a “desirable pattern of growth” is a luxury we can no longer afford. If you remove the aggressive/destructive trees and shrubs (e.g. buckthorn and honeysuckle) from an area and still want to take a chain saw and purify it back to the state of a bygone ecosystem don’t - get help instead. Finally, the excuse that your clear cutting to an Oak Savannah to help pollinators doesn’t fly when you have immediately adjacent fallow farm fields that you could be restoring to prairie.
Perhaps no one more than me wishes the environment hadn’t change but it has. And if we want the politicians-business decision makers to change the way the prefer things to ensure something survives, then we can set an example and give greater biodiversity a leading role in restoration projects. Oak Savannah’s are a relic of the Holocene and you pursue them now at your own peril.
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