October 1 2016
EXPECT TREE-MENDOUS TRAGEDIES
Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer.
I too can be a fool and make a little tree poem such as:
While only God can make a tree
It’s up to me for it to be.
The Bible starts with a tree, it ends with a tree, and in its center stands the Calvary Tree on which Jesus died. Before the divine blood reached the earth, affirming its holiness forever, his flesh and blood were pounded into the tree, forever making trees holy.
Trees play a dominant role in the Bible. There is the Tree of Life which featured prominently in the Garden of Eden, so prominent that it can truly be said that the Tree of Life stands for the eternal truth that the Tree signifies Life. Without trees we lose an important source of oxygen, something we need every minute of our lives. We all know that trees can live without us but we can’t live without trees.
So, since we are so concerned about our own life and our own wellbeing, how come we have not done everything in our power to make trees a central part in our lives, and preserving them a priority?
Good question.
Then there is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, also having an important place in paradise, the tree whose fruit Adam and Eve ate, doing exactly what it promised: exposing them to evil.
I wonder what that tree means for us today. Could it be that by our random cutting down of trees for the sake of profit, we commit the ultimate evil act because we deprive all humans of the ever-needed oxygen? Already there are reports that there is less oxygen in the air. We know that trees inhale CO2, the very stuff we produce in abundance, and exhale the pure oxygen we need. The burning of carbon fuel in our beloved automobiles needs oxygen to work, and with billions of engines firing on all cylinders all the time all over the world, pollution continues unabated. That’s why we always need more trees, and also need unpolluted and chilly oceans to absorb all that Carbon Dioxide which we pump into the air every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
Yes, we need more trees, millions more, but the opposite is happening.
The trouble is that trees are disappearing at an unprecedented pace. They are cut down to grow soybeans to feed cows for meat consumption, cows that cause more methane emission than any other animal, cows whose meat cause cancer and heart disease. Trees are in trouble, everywhere. In Hawaii there are signs of a mysterious disease that has ravaged the US’s only rainforests – and is just one of the plagues that also are devastating American forests across the west.
On the eastern tip of Hawaii’s big island the seemingly ubiquitous ohi’a trees were dying at an astonishing rate. The leaves would turn yellow, then brown, over just a few weeks – a startling change for an evergreen tree. “It was like popcorn – pop, pop, pop, pop, one tree after another,” one observer said. “At first people were shocked, now they are resigned.
“It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem,” somebody else remarked. Nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it.
A researcher in plant pathology at the US Department of Agriculture said that when she analyzed the disease “right away Dutch elm disease popped into my head. I’m not sure if there’s been anything else like this in the world,” she said. “The potential is there for major devastation.” The disease hadn’t yet spread to crops, like coffee, but it threatens a whole family of metrosideros trees and shrubs found mainly in the Pacific.”
But the plight of the ohi’a is not unique – it’s part of a quiet crisis playing out in forests across America. Drought, disease, insects and wildfire are chewing up tens of millions of trees at an incredible pace, much of it driven by climate change.
Oh that dreaded word again: Climate Change!
Our oceans provide us with most of our oxygen. But they are in trouble too. While I am writing this a blob of superhot water is moving north in the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska and, you guessed it, to the Arctic, the last place where hot water is needed. Yes, there is a saying: “we are in hot water”, meaning that trouble is brewing. For oceans to release oxygen they need to stay cool.
No wonder both forestry officials and oceanic scientists are increasingly alarmed, and say the essential role of trees – providing clean water, locking up carbon and sheltering whole ecosystems – is being undermined on a grand scale. California and mountain states have suffered particularly big die-offs in recent years, with 66 million trees killed in the Sierra Nevada alone since 2010, according to the Forestry Service.
In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys”, rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis. “We’re talking millions of trees killed, whole mountain sides dying.”
Drought kills.
“Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US”, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. “Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.
“The outbreak is “something like 10 times bigger than normal,” Six said. “Basically a native insect is acting outside of the norm, because of climate change.”
Boosted by Climate Change, various beetles and the fungi they carry have already wiped out millions of acres of trees, and Six and Rizzo both warned of cascading effects. In the redwoods, Rizzo said, the loss of tanoaks and their relatives would strip away nut-producing species, leaving birds and mammals that rely on them without food. “The loss of mountain pines”, Six said, “threatens grizzly bears and the critical snowpack that supplies water to life below. There’s virtually nothing we can do to stop the beetles, either, unless they’ve killed everything and run out of food. Or unless the climate cools, and I don’t think anyone’s expecting that anytime soon.”
In Hawaii, warming temperatures have helped spread four types of beetles that bore into ohi’a bark to feed. The beetles carry disease spore on their wings, in their guts and in the sawdust of burrows, spreading it from tree to tree. The beetles are part of scolylinae, a “very destructive family” that is also decimating trees in California, according to Curtis Ewing, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii. “They are exploding around the world due to global warming,” he said. They appear unstoppable: spraying each tree with insecticide would be time-consuming and made futile by rain, and pheromone-laced traps also appear ineffective.
The university’s arboretum has started collecting ohi’a seeds in the face of a doomsday scenario that was recently unimaginable for such a common tree.
Is this really a DOOMSDAY Scenario?
To be or not to be.
While only God can make a tree
It’s up to me for it to be.
God gave us the earth to manage. For us to live long and healthy he gave us the trees and the power to have them be or not to be. The tree joins heaven and earth together. It connects time and eternity. Its sap, its life-enhancing fluid is sucked out of the earth, from wherever its roots travel and invigorates the leaves and all the tiny branches. Also its capillaries deep in the ground intertwine with other root structures and warn its neighbors of impending dangers. Trees, like we, are communal creatures.
The tree appears on the first page of the Bible, and again on the last page. The Tree of Life is the symbol of the mysterious connection between life and death, of eternity and fertility, of the relationship between God and us, of the unity of us and the earth, and especially of the cosmic totality of all that lives. The tree carries the world in which we live: it is the axle of the universe. By killing trees, we kill ourselves. That is the DOOMSDAY scenerio we facing.
In the cross of Calvary the tree joins the Alpha and the Omega together, the past and the future, the beginning and the end. As such the tree of the Cross in the Bible stands between the Tree of Life in Paradise and the Tree of Life of the New Creation, where in the very last chapter of the Bible we find these beautiful and comforting words: “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations”. Yes, miraculously, the tree that was instrumental in the fall of humanity also is the very source of our restoration. That’s one reason why Jesus died on the
Tree, the tree that, as first of all creatures, was impregnated with the flesh and blood of the Savior. For Jesus the cross was extra painful because hanging above the earth separated him from the earth he loved so much. (John 3: 16)
Yes, the tree is a symbol of the earth: just like our planet has a thin layer of soil, miniscule as it is, on which we depend for our food supply, the tree too has a tiny veneer below the bark where all its life elixir moves. Make a circular cut around its trunk and the tree dies.
Oh we stupid and short-sighted humans. We have chosen trees not to be. Not honoring the life of trees spells doom, signals tree-mendous tragedies.
Already in Indonesia, on the forefront of tree-destruction, thousands of people die due to poisonous smoke inhalation. Worse: nine out of ten people globally are breathing poor quality air, the World Health Organization said last week, calling for dramatic action against pollution that is blamed for more than six million deaths a year.
The problem is most acute in cities, with poorer countries having much dirtier air than the developed world. But pollution affects practically all countries in the world and all parts of society. Already the death of rainforests means changes rainfall patterns, soon playing havoc with agriculture and threatening our precious cup of coffee, the world’s main addictive bean. Water supplies in crucial sections of the world – California comes to mind – will in the coming years make large sections of the world inhabitable, while uneven distributions of rain in ever more violent forms will drown cities here and starve other elsewhere.
We, as a human race have been blinded by greed, by, yes, SIN, to pursue the accumulation of money at the expense of the TREE.
Where will it end?
We know, without acknowledging it. That’s why thousands of people, especially the young who see no future, revert to deadly drugs: for them a brief respite into delirious delight before sinking into oblivion, a sure escape from a future that has no future for the human race anymore.
EXPECT TREE-MENDOUS TRAGEDIES.
The suffering and death of trees is a sure prelude to the suffering and death of humans. Already we see multiple signs. No matter who wins the presidential election, the momentum of global decline and the resulting hardship cannot be avoided. Trump will merely accelerate the process a bit more.
Luther said: “If I knew that the Lord would return tomorrow, I’d still plant a tree today.” Would you?