I remember the day that ecology became more than just a set of abstract concepts to me. It was 1972, and I was 14 years old. I had been studying the principles of ecology in school and while working on a badge in the Boy Scouts. But although I was (and remain) someone who deeply loves the outdoors, I really didn’t connect what I had learned with my lived experience until one day on a camping trip in the Crab Orchard mountains near my home in East Tennessee. I was wandering around near our campsite and I came across a downed tree. I no longer remember what kind of tree it was, but it was very large, and it had been dead and decaying for quite some time. However, it was obvious that even in death the tree was still an integral part of its ecosystem. It was hosting a flourishing community of fungi and moss. Other small plants were growing in and around the hulk of the tree. Insects, spiders and other small invertebrates were darting around, taking care of whatever business they had. Although I could not see them, I knew that microscopic organisms were also hard at work, returning the nutrients and other chemicals in the tree to the soil. I had been studying these processes, but I was just a kid, and it was just a bunch of facts and figures up to that point. In that moment, encountering that tree and its surrounding was extremely powerful. I still remember the way the light filtered through the canopy, the smell of life and death in the decay of the tree, and the sound of birds and the light breeze. It was an overwhelming moment, when I felt the force of the forest’s living presence. Suddenly, my relationship with these woods and my part in the greater symphony of life became blindingly obvious, and I felt for a moment a kind of numinous kinship with the world (although numinous is not a word my 14-year old self would have known or used).
I have had similar experiences since then, but nothing as powerful and direct as this one. In that moment, I knew that the forest was not only alive, but in a very real sense, was both wiser and more powerful than I could ever be and that far from being a static collection of separate organisms, the forest was a dynamic, breathing, living community. Thomas Berry wrote in his book The Dream of the Earth that in such encounters, “we experience the reality and the values that evoke in us our deepest moments of reflection, our revelatory experience of the ultimate meaning of things.”
Forests change and adapt. A few years later, a patch of woods in the same general vicinity was the site of a major wildfire. It was a tragedy for the individual organisms affected, but within weeks, a new ensemble of plants began to pioneer the burned area, and over the coming months and years, waves of succession created a new, subtly different ecosystem. Given relatively stable environmental conditions, a forest can grow and evolve for thousands of years. But in recent centuries and decades human disturbance have stressed forests in ways that tax their abilities to survive.
It has been estimated that at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 6 billion hectares of land were covered by forests, representing 57% of the land surface of the Earth. About a third of those forest lands have now been cleared…about half of that happening in the last century. In the eastern US, most of the old growth forest was cut down before 1920, although in recent years, forest acreage in the US has begun to grow again. In Kentucky where I live now, nearly all the old growth forest was logged in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is striking to encounter the remaining old growh woods, such as those found in Harlan County’s Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve, and think about what Eastern Kentucky must have been like 300 years ago, when some of the trees in that forest were saplings.
Logging is only part of humanity’s mismanagement of forests. In the Western U.S., perverse fire suppression doctrine resulted in a highly unnatural state of dense fuel loads, which, paradoxically, has contributed to the highly dangerous wildfires that periodically occur. For many years, pollution from factories and coal-fired power plants caused acid rain, which damaged many eastern forests, although new regulations late in the 20th century began to reverse some of the destruction. Invasive species of insects and microbes, inadvertently introduced into forest ecosystems, have caused major damage. In the Great Smoky Mountains near my childhood home, the accidental introduction of the balsam wooly adelgid has resulted in the death of thousands of fir trees at high elevations, and visitors to the park are jarred by the “skeletons” of those dead trees poking up through what’s left of the canopy.
But the largest human threat to US forests is anthropogenic climate change. The U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, points to two major trends unfolding now:
- It is very likely that more frequent extreme weather events will increase the frequency and magnitude of severe ecological disturbances, driving rapid (months to years) and often persistent changes in forest structure and function across large landscapes. It is also likely that other changes, resulting from gradual climate change and less severe disturbances, will alter forest productivity and health and the distribution and abundance of species at longer timescales (decades to centuries).
- It is very likely that climate change will decrease the ability of many forest ecosystems to provide important ecosystem services to society. Tree growth and carbon storage are expected to decrease in most locations as a result of higher temperatures, more frequent drought, and increased disturbances. The onset and magnitude of climate change effects on water resources in forest ecosystems will vary but are already occurring in some regions.
Since this report was published, the IPCC has released the three working group reports for their sixth global assessment, and the information in those reports indicates that the danger to forests both here and throughout the world is even greater than what the US scientists reported just four years ago. What’s at stake? As noted above, forests store carbon in ways that help offset greenhouse gas emissions. They shelter and protect water resources, and, of course, they provide various wood and paper products. Interestingly, if forests were managed sustainably, it is possible that the world could produce more timber products than it does now while at the same time slowing or halting the trend toward deforestation. Unfortunately, that’s not what we are doing. We are currently cutting trees down at rates far higher than what the world’s forests can regenerate, both for wood products and to clear land for agriculture.
The third key message in the National Climate Report’s chapter on forests is a stark reminder that what happens is, in large part, up to us:
- Forest management activities that increase the resilience of U.S. forests to climate change are being implemented, with a broad range of adaptation options for different resources, including applications in planning. The future pace of adaptation will depend on how effectively social, organizational, and economic conditions support implementation.
We have all heard about various individual actions that we can take to help combat climate change and the panoply of other major environmental problems we face. These are very important. But to actually fix these problems, massive political and social changes are desperately needed. We have already seen that at the national level, it is highly unlikely that the current Senate will take any steps, no matter how small, that will divert us from our current trajectory. The so-called “Build Back Better” bill would have been insufficient, but better than nothing. It is all but dead, largely thanks to unified Republican intransigence. If the pattern of past mid-term elections holds true, the next Congress will be even more hostile. But it is probably not an exaggeration to say that whether our civilization will survive more than a couple more decades hinges on what we do today. For that reason and others, it is vitally important that we vote as if our lives depended upon it.
As I remember my encounter with that forest near Frozen Head in Morgan County, Tennessee in 1974, I wonder about the likelihood of other young people in coming decades having similar experiences. Many of the young people I know today are extremely concerned about climate change and other environmental issues. But paradoxically, many seem to be emotionally disconnected from the ecosystems that support them. I do not know whether that’s just selection bias or whether it’s representative of a larger social trend. But I’d like to think that if more of us were open to the kinds of experiences with the biosphere that I stumbled onto years ago, we’d be in a different place today.