Jim Robbins - The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet

2015 Spiegel & Grau eBook Edition

Copyright 2012 by Jim Robbins
Illustrations copyright 2012 by DD Dowden
Afterword copyright 2015 by Jim Robbins

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, in 2012.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Robbins, Jim.
The man who planted trees : a story of lost groves, the science of trees, and a plan to save the planet / Jim Robbins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8129-8129-2
eBook ISBN 978-1-58836-999-4
1. Forest germplasm resources conservation.
2. Forest conservation. 3. Tree planting. I. Title.
SD399.7.R63 2012
333.7516dc23 2011040738

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Cover design: Thomas Ng
Cover photograph: Peter Kupfer

v3.1_c1

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Trees are the earths endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE, F IREFLIES , 1928

In 1993 my wife, Chere, and I bought fifteen acres of land on the outskirts of Helena, Montana. The property was tangled with a dense ponderosa pine forest so thick its called dog hair, and some of the stubborn old trees had lived well there for centuries, in rocky terrain, marginal soil, and cold temperatures. We installed a Finnish woodstove called a tulikivi, a mammoth dark gray soapstone box about six feet tall, in the middle of the living room of our new house. Tulikivis are highly efficient because the soft, dense stone mass around the firebox soaks up heat from a roaring fire and holds the warmth for 24 hours. Heat from the stone is radiant, softer and more pleasant than the heat from a burning fire. Its also cleanwoodstove pollution comes from damping down a fire so that it burns slowly, which gives off a dense cloud of smoke. This stove burns hot.

Our forest and stove were the perfect marriagewe planned to thin the trees gradually and feed the fire with what we cut. We had more than enough wood, I figured, to last not only my lifetime, but my childrens and grandchildrens. We were fireproofing our home as well, reducing the fuel in the woods around us in case a wildfire should blow up. Thinning would help open the dense forest for the wildlife that occasionally appeared. A moose ran through the yard one day, a black bear turned over the barbecue, a bobcat sauntered by. The eerie ululating howls of coyotes echoed at night and sent chills down my dogs neck, and she wailed from her bed in the front hall.

One day in 2003, as I was hiking through the woods to town, I saw my first fader. A fader is a tree that has been attacked and killed by insects and is slowly fading from green to a reddish brown. In this case the perpetrator was the mountain pine beetle, a small dark insect that burrows beneath the bark and lays its eggs. Larvae hatch and eat the phloem, a thin, moist membrane under the bark that is a life support system for the tree. As the grubs gobble their way around the trunk, they cut the crown of the tree off from its source of water and from nutrients in the soil; the life in the tree ebbs, and it fades slowly from life to death. Alarmed at the outbreak, I quickly chainsawed down the red tree and stripped off the bark to expose the insects to the cold. But I noticed several other large trees that, while still green, had been infected. Having finished this one off, the bugs had flown to other nearby trees to begin again.

The appearance and efflorescence of these bugs paralleled a series of warmer winters the West has experienced in the last few decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, winter usually meant two or three weeks or more of temperatures 20, 30, or 40 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Since the 1980s the temperature has dipped into 30 below territory only a handful of times and never for a long period, and it has never fallen anywhere near the record of 70 below set in 1954. The warmer wintertime minimum temperatures make a huge difference to the bugs. The larvae are well adapted and manufacture their own supply of glycolthe same chemical found in automobile antifreezeas they head into winter. They easily survive temperatures of 20 and 30 below.

Bark beetles such as the mountain pine beetle are highly evolved and ruthlessly efficientthe beetles Latin genus name, Dendroctonus, means tree killer. They carry a blue fungus from tree to tree in pouches under their legs, a super-rich food source that they plant in the host tree. As it grows, they feed it to their young. After the larvae feast, they turn into adults, each the size of a letter on this page, and hatch from the host tree by the thousands. Swarming to a nearby uninfected tree, they tunnel through the bark, and once ensconced, they send out a chemical mist called a pheromone, a scented request for reinforcements. They need to overwhelm the tree quickly in order to kill it. When their numbers are large enough, they send out a follow-up pheromone message that says the tree is full. Each infected tree produces enough new insects to infect five to eight other trees.

The telltale signs of an infected tree are ivory-colored, nickel-sized plugs that look like candle wax plastered on the trunks, which mean the tree is pumping out resin to try to drown a drilling bug. Sometimes a tree wins by entombing a beetle; far more often these days, the tree loses to the mob assault. The stress caused by warmer temperatures and drought makes it harder for the trees to muster enough resin to resist attacks.

A year after I saw the first fader, a dozen trees in our backyard forest were dead. Then things went exponential. A dozen dead trees turned to thirty, which turned to 150, dying far faster than I could cut them down and turn them into firewood. Finally, five years after the first infected tree, virtually all of our trees were dead. We threw in the towel and hired loggers to come in and cut our trees down.

Enormous machinery rumbled into our woods on tank treads. A piece of equipment called an excadozer grabbed a tree, cut it off at the base, and stripped the branches in less than a minute. I watched trees falling around the house, heard the angry hornet whine of chain saws, and looked below to see our forest piled up like Lincoln logs ready to be turned into paste. The tang of pine scent hung thickly in the air.

Its eerie when the tree reaper comes to claim your forest and renders the once living world around you stone dead. When the forest is gone and the sky opens up, its disorienting, as if someone has removed a wall of your house. Broken branches, smashed limbs, and slivered stumps were all that was left; tank tread marks scarred the exposed forest floor. Its like open-heart surgery, said my personal logger, Levi. You dont want to watch while its going on, but in the end its a good thing.

The loggers hauled the logs off on trucks and loaded them onto a freight train headed for Missoula, Montana, where they were sold to a paper plant, which chipped them and turned them into an oatmeal-like slurry to become cardboard boxes. It cost us about a thousand dollars an acre to cut and ship out our dead trees. They have little value as lumber because of the blue stain from the fungus the beetles inject. And there are so many dead trees in Montana these days that its a buyers market. The landscape looks postapocalyptic in many places.