Why Don't You Go Make Like A Tree

"Inefficiency and friction is a big part of thinking."

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TRANSCRIPT

Oh, hello.

The other day I went to the woods at the edge of town here in western Scotland, around an hour away from home. It had been absolutely belting down with rain, but when I arrived the sky cleared a bit. Hooray, I thought, I’ve got lucky, and started recording the piece I’m going to read for you today.

But - I hadn’t got lucky. For some reason, maybe the nearby communication tower at the top of a hill, there was an awful ticking noise across the three recordings I made - you know, one recording, and then a couple of backup recordings in case there was any weird noise. I listened back to all of them today, and the ticking was on all of them.

So instead, I’m recording just outside the entrance to my apartment, as outside the remnants of Storm Dave rage outside as it finishes tearing through Scotland with a chaotic fury that I wouldn’t normally associate with the name “Dave”.

(No offence to any Daves out there.)

The woods I visited the other day were ancient - that term in Britain that designates woods that are at least multiple centuries old. In this case, there are archaeological sites going back to both the British Iron Age and Bronze Age, which means at least 3,000 years, and at another site a few dozen miles away there are flint artefacts dated to over 14,000 years old.

That’s a lot of archaeology in a small area, and the locations of sites usually have something to say about access to raw materials, so I bet these woods have been useful for a long time - and also the coast, which is only a few miles away.

From what I can gather, almost all the trees are three varieties: Elm, which is Ulmus minor; Ash is Fraxinus excelsior (what a great name that’d make for a spell), and Larch, which is Laris decidua.

Most of those trees are older than me, and some of them even look it - Ash and Elm can grow for 300 years, Larch for 600, so maybe a few of these trees could have been alive at the time of the Aztecs, or before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This is one of the great gifts to us humans from trees - their incredible age. Not to get all spiritual about this, but I bet you’ve experienced something like this around trees - that weird relief creeping into your bones, making you feel that yes, some of all this confusing, infuriating awfulness in the news will pass at some point to be replaced with hopefully something a bit better, and in the meantime, like trees, we can just look for a way to sink our roots a bit deeper so we can stand our ground to get through it. Trees can be very reassuring metaphors of that process.

But there’s also what trees become, if they’re given enough time.

The other day, I was leaving my apartment and I noticed some new shoots coming up in a couple of big plant-pots I’d left empty over the winter. I took a photo with my PictureThis app, and it told me they’re sycamores (acer pseudoplatanus).

It seems that late last year, a few of the helicopter-blade-like seeds from the big old sycamore tree in my garden whirled down here and then got to work, and now I’m growing 6 or 7 baby trees.

If I took them somewhere and planted them properly, they’ll get busy doing what they’re best at doing: becoming the tallest plants on the block. That’s partly what a tree is: it’s a perennial plant with one really neat trick - to be able to grow higher than all the other plants and hog the most sunshine so it can put all that energy to work in becoming the biggest plant it can be.

Well, actually - that’s what I used to think, but then I learned about Professor of Geography Donald Rusk Currey.

In 1964 he was a graduate student in Nevada, and he was taking core samples from trees in order to date them with dendrochronology, which most people know as “counting the rings”, although it’s a bit more complicated than that. One day, he took his expensive drill and began screwing it deep into one particular tree, a bristlecone pine growing in what is now Great Basin National Park. But for some reason, he was finding this really hard going - and then, according to one version of this story, *ting* - the drill bit broke off.

This was a disaster for Currey, this was a specialised bit of equipment called an increment borer, it cost him quite a bit of money and he only had one of them, so if possible he wanted to get it back. He asked the Forest Service for permission to cut the tree down, and they gave it, so Currey to work with a chain saw.

Now, there are conflicting reports about the facts of this story - we can’t ask Currey himself because he passed away in 2004, but he later said he already suspected the tree could be old - some of the other cores he’d taken from trees in the area, over a hundred of them, showed bristlecone pines could be well over a thousand years old. That was the purpose of his research.

When the tree came down, Currey chopped the trunk into thin slices to take home and study, and a week later, he had his answer. This tree, which is now nicknamed Prometheus, was over 4,900 years old when it was cut down, meaning it started growing before the stones went up at Stonehenge.

This is still the oldest single tree known to have existed on this planet - and you can imagine the uproar when this story broke. (Thank god social media didn’t exist back then, or, you know, the Daily Mail.)

But despite that, Currey was still hounded by reporters and people wanting to hear his story, and he was having none of it - he kept his head down, he published his findings, he went on to have a well-respected career as a researcher and professor, but he generally refused to talk about the whole thing publicly.

In the mid 1980s the area gained National Park status and bristlecone pines became a protected species, and it’s telling that Currey himself went to Congress to speak in support of the park’s creation.

As I’ve written about before, Prometheus certainly isn’t the oldest organism on Earth, and it’s not even the oldest tree - that honour seems to belong to a clonal forest of quaking aspens in Utah nicknamed Pando with a single massive root system that has created over 47,000 genetically identical trees, which is regarded by scientists as one organism covering 42 hectares. Absolutely wild.

But Prometheus was incredibly old - even though it wasn’t incredibly big. It wasn’t the size of a redwood - it was only about 5 metres high, what any of us would call a moderately-sized tree. Before I learned this, I figured there was a fairly straightforward relationship at work here: the bigger the tree has gotten, the older it is. I was mostly wrong - it turns out the species has a lot more to do with it, and possibly other facts, instead of just its age.

I hope there will be a lot of that in this new season of Everything Is Amazing - a lot of moments where I thought I knew a thing, and I absolutely didn’t. This time round, we’re looking at what now gets called ‘The Great Outdoors’…

Season 7 Is Done! What's Next? [Part Two]

…or perhaps we can call it Nature, you know, that term we’ve come up with to draw an entirely arbitrary and you might say foolish line between ourselves and the world we live in. And it’s about looking at the cutting-edge science about what being quote unquote outside, in places like the woods I visited yesterday, is doing to our mental and physical health.

But what I don’t want to do is assume there are easy answers. Answers like: “oh, it’s a small tree, so that automatically means it’s young.” That was wrong, and now I’m wondering what else I can be wrong about.

For example, here’s something I’ve seen in a lot of online conversations in recent years. Climate change is very worrying - especially to young people, who I couldn’t blame for being increasingly furious about it. The main driver of climate change right now is carbon dioxide. But wait - don’t we already have a great way to get CO2 out of the air? If we cut back on deforestation and plant a hell of a lot more trees, can’t we drag a lot of that carbon out of the air where it’s creating this greenhouse effect that’s heating the world to dangerous levels? Can’t we fix global warming by just going absolutely nuts with tree-planting?

The answer is - yes, but only sort of. It’s true, there seem to be very few downsides to planting vast numbers of trees and leaving a greater number of existing trees in the ground so they can hoard their carbon and help keep it out of the atmosphere.

But this is also the kind of easy answer that dodges the cause of the problem it’s there to fix, so tree planting could easily be turned into a very attractive PR campaign by, say, fossil fuel providers who want to maintain the profits they make from putting carbon dioxide into the air in the first place. Keep the oil flowing, just plant loads more trees to offset everything, and everyone is happy!

Unless, say, someone blockades the Strait of Hormuz for some reason, but that would never happen, would it?

Even this apparent solution of turning the world into a megaforest has a few drawbacks. A surprising one to me is that trees are often relatively darker against the landscape they grow upon, and dark surfaces have a different albedo - the amount of sunlight they reflect - so they absorb more heat. This means that towards the poles, trees could have more of a warming effect than they do in equatorial regions, so it’ll matter where you decide to plant these forests.

Or there’s the question of how the aerosols generated by forests affect incoming sunlight, you know, all those delicious earthy piney smells that make you feel so alive, they’re due to tree-emitted chemicals suspended in the air - and recent research suggests that the volatile gases above forests block direct sunlight but enhance diffused light, which can help the trees grow better - in other words, the trees are altering the atmosphere for their own benefit. How about that for a bit of sly geoengineering?

So there question is - how much could these affect things at a global scale? There’s currently work being done to model this - and, it seems, a lot of fruitful arguing.

All this is fiendishly complicated. Yet the signs so far are that reforestation is still an excellent strategy to lean into - as long as it’s not treated like the environmental processes of our planet are only here to clean up the messes we’ve made for our own ridiculously short-sighted reasons - for example, making even more money, which, let’s not forget, is a human invention, and one that probably deserves a rethink at some point soon.

What planting lots of trees could give us is time. Time to tackle the root cause (look, another tree metaphor, thank you, trees), and time to understand how these extremely complicated systems actually work by properly supporting and funding the sciences investigating them.

In the October edition of Scientific American last year, there was a profile of the work of forest ecologist Mark Harmon, who is working in Oregon’s western Cascade mountains. His work is studying what happens to trees after they die. For the last 40 years, he and his colleagues have been monitoring more than 500 rotting logs, looking at the plants and animals that make their homes there. This has become a model for other studies worldwide, and it’s important because it’s another piece of the puzzle of understanding the atmosphere - how quickly do trees decay and release their carbon?

What’s already clear is that different species of trees decay at wildly different rates - some in a few years, others in centuries. Because of that, this is a colossally long-term study. Two hundred years. Harmon won’t live to see the end of it and neither will anyone else alive today. Of course, that’s if its funding continues - it’s supported by the National Science Foundation, and right now, Donald Trump’s administration is proposing even more cuts to NSF funding in general. But as the article notes about the study:

“Its timescale might save it. The project requires little maintenance, and the logs will rot whether anyone is watching them or not. For now, someone is.”

Once again, trees teach us the value of patience, and of considering our frequent inability to look beyond the anxious hastiness of our own timescales, to see all the other ways of living and cooperating that exist on this planet. There is also something about the very deliberate way that trees grow, taking centuries to fulful their potential, that I find inspiring.

One of the things you hear about a lot of technology these days is that it’ll save you so much time. Particularly with all these large language model tools we call “AI”. You want to do a thing? Great! Just hop on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and you can do it in seconds.

But - firstly, you didn’t “do it”, the machine did it for you, based on the parameters you fed into it. You got to use the result, but you didn’t learn the skill - or rather, you learned the skill of using an LLM (which is a service that costs you money at some point), but without access to that tool in the future, you’d be rendered completely useless. This is what I wonder about all the students using AI tools in Universities who at some point will find themselves in an exam with nothing except a pen and paper and what’s actually in their heads at the time.

And secondly, you didn’t learn anything because you can’t do that in a few seconds. Learning takes time. Learning is immensely frustrating in this manner, filled with all sorts of false starts, and forgetting of the basics again and again until it’s properly drummed into you. To learn something, to fully internalise it and especially to turn it from knowledge into what we call instinct and also the kind of muscle-memory where it feels like you hardly have to think at all - that takes a lot of time.

I’m well aware that folk half my age are doing things with technology that I’m incapable of learning because of the generation of computer-users that I grew up in. Fine! Call me as outdated as a larch, and go do your thing with my blessing.

But please don’t fall into the trap of equating speed of production, aka, efficiency, with depth of understanding.

The writer Sam Adler-Bell was being interviewed recently, and he said this:

“AI is super helpful for transcription. I understand there must be other harmless things that writers use it for. But I am very hesitant to become reliant on it for anything. I don’t mind missing the boat. It’s okay. I am not good at what I do because I am very efficient or optimized. Inefficiency and friction is a big part of thinking, in my opinion.”

So maybe all that ‘time wasted’, in doing things the long, messy, hard way that seemingly takes forever, is also time well spent, because it burns into you the skill you will eventually need to not be replaced by a robot.

Maybe that’s something we all need to relearn, yet again, over and over, for as long as it takes to actually remember it.

And what I’m relearning right now…is that when bad weather is blowing through, the entrance to my flat acts like a cross between a wind-tunnel and a carwash, and I’m getting soaked - so it’s time to go in.

Thanks for listening, and go hug some trees with my blessing. I reckon they deserve it.

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Photos: Mike Sowden

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