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City of Trees

Page 12

by Sophie Cunningham


  In the early morning after that visit to Los Angeles Zoo I walked through Griffith Park. When I’m in LA I try to stay close enough to it that I can visit most mornings. On a clear day—and this was such a day—you look down across the city. To my left was the empty Silver Lake Reservoir, drained in 2015 as part of a project to build a bypass pipeline. The Los Angeles River sparkled as it flowed, more strongly than it had for some years, through its concrete canyon. The drought that struck the state in 2010 was over, but California was trying to prepare for the possibility of permanent drought, for it has become the state bearing the brunt of climate change, both literal (a boom and bust cycle of floods, drought, bushfire) and in terms of policy development. As President Trump isolates the US from any global policy initiatives and downgrades organisations such as the EPA, California’s Governor Jerry Brown is meeting with China’s chief climate negotiator, and has announced plans for California and China to work together on zero-emissions vehicles and fuel-cell research.

  As I meandered my way up a path that took me to the park’s northern section I smelled the lemon-scented gums before I saw them. Glorious. Afficionados will know that #treeoftheday April 7, 2016 was a lemon-scented gum. Two, in fact. They were planted ninety years ago by either Walter Burley or Marion Griffin—no one seems to know who—after the completion of Newman College at Melbourne University. The trees’ skin glows as if lit from within. Their boughs swing low, heavy with long, narrow leaves, with gumnuts and blossom. Woody patches of bark nestle in their elbows and knees. Their fragrance drifts through peak-hour traffic.

  The latin name of the lemon-scented gum is now Corymbia citriodora, though until the early 1990s it was Eucalyptus citriodora. Some naturalists and scientists still insist that is the correct nomenclature.

  One of the main difficulties facing plant classifiers is deciding upon acceptable criteria and ranges of variation in characteristics. Of course, this problem stems from the fact that any biological classification is a man-made scheme into which we try to fit a whole range of living things, primarily for our own convenience of organisation—which is not to say there is no rigour to the process.5

  All up, 113 trees were moved out of the genus Eucalyptus into the genus Corymbia, including the bloodwoods and ghost gums. Once you know what to look for, you see they look more like an Angophora (also a genus) than a Eucalyptus. Both genera have smooth skin in a variety of fleshy tones, and their beautiful limbs are as reminiscent of tendrils as of branches.

  It was Rebecca Giggs who pointed out to me that Australian newspapers use ‘that’ for animals. The Associated Press style manual stipulates: ‘“who” is only appropriate when an animal has been given a personal name.’ If the tree I’m writing about has an individual name—some do—I use it. I assign pronouns like he and she, when that seems right. Time and time again, when trying to identify my #treeoftheday I’ve started out asking myself, ‘What is this tree called?’ and ended up wondering what’s in a name. From there it is a slippery slope down into the mire of language and meaning. I become philosophical, read my Dao: ‘Naming is the origin of all particular things.’

  All this leads me to wonder: is a Florida puma still a Florida puma if Texan pumas have been bred into the population? Is P-22 an appropriate name for a heroic mountain lion? What does Killarney mean? Does it matter that I think of lemon-scented gums as Eucalyptus when they are Corymbia?

  It was on this day, a day of thinking about the wild animals that are being forced into the cities and the ways in which they survive, a day of wondering how to write about P-22 and Killarney, a day when I saw my favourite gums bending in a gentle breeze above Los Angeles, that my brother called.

  We drove back to San Francisco. I stayed one night, then got on a plane. Fourteen hours later, after a combination of sleeping pill, vodka and bad movies, I stood in a series of lines at Sydney airport trying to make my flight to Melbourne. The lines were long. I was going to miss my connection. I finally blurted out something about Dad’s imminent death, a card I had not wanted to play; but I did play it, and it worked, and they moved me to the front of the line. My brother picked me up from the airport and we drove to the home Dad had been living in for two years. My uncle sat by his dying brother. When I arrived he said, ‘I’ve been keeping him alive for you,’ then stepped outside for a break. A few hours later Dad died. There were four of us there. I’d been told many stories about people needing to be alone to die but I knew that was not what Dad would have wanted. He liked his people around him. If he’d been a tree he’d have needed a forest.

  His decline was unspeakably grim. I can find no silver lining in it. (Will you write about your dad’s dementia? people ask me. What would I say? I reply.) But here is the thing. Being with him when he died, that was the silver lining. It was an honour. A privilege. My brother, Dad’s brother, Dad’s wife, me—we had loved him, he had loved us. We forgot, for a while at least, all the rest.

  ____________________

  1 ‘The Concrete Jungle’, David Quammen, New York Review of Books, November 8, 2018.

  2 UC Davis biologist Walter Boyce, quoted in ‘A week in the life of P-22, the big cat who shares Griffith Park with millions of people’, Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2017.

  3 Curwen.

  4 ‘Fears for the future of Australia’s koalas’, RN Breakfast, ABC, December 14, 2018.

  5 Native Trees and Shrubs of South-eastern Australia, Leon Costermans, Reed New Holland, 2009, p. 2.

  YELLOWWOOD

  (Cladrastis kentukea)

  When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  FROM where I was sitting in Bloomington, Indiana, the northern hemisphere’s spring looked like it would never come. The trees were skeletal, and my attempts at identification usually failed. I gave up and called everything an oak or occasionally a chestnut. The sleet and snow continued into late April. I found it hard to believe that it was a warmer winter than usual but people kept insisting it was so, and the stories weren’t just anecdotal. Other countries in the north were reporting similar warming. The frozen soils Nordic foresters rely on were thawing, turning forest floors into mud and swallowing the massive equipment used to harvest timber. When I first heard that, I fist-pumped the air—Go Trees!—before I thought through the disturbing implications of melting permafrost. More stored carbon being released into the air; ‘zombie microbes’ such as anthrax, the collapse of permafrost ecosystems.

  Spring’s arrival was less predictable and its duration shorter than it once had been, but arrive it did, and suddenly I could tell a birch from a beech from an oak from a maple. I came to understand that sycamores and planes are basically the same tree.

  People had gone out of their way to detail the bleakness of America’s Midwest. This had the happy effect of making me very grateful for the beauty around me in southern Indiana. There are lots of stories I could tell about Indiana and trees, the most famous being the one about Johnny Appleseed, who sailed along the Ohio River, moving through the Midwest planting apples, but it’s a story Michael Pollan tells so well I’ll leave it to him.1 As often as I could, which was not often enough, I drove to Brown County State Park. Shafts of sunlight cut between stands of trees, their fallen leaves forming a crunchy brown carpet underfoot. Golden creek beds ran through clefts in the undulating valleys. The soundtrack to this dramatic landscape was the constant whisper of the beech leaves, which dry but don’t drop, and rustle whenever the breeze picks up.

  These modest gorges and escarpments were carved by glacier melt. Sixteen thousand years ago fast-moving glaciers reached down from Alaska as far as central Indiana, the weight of the ice planing the grand prairies to the north and the tumultuous runoff carving the hills and valleys to the south. That is where some of America’s great forests formed. S
ome millennia later the ecosystem is described in the literature as oak-hickory mix.

  As early as 1915 the area’s potential as a park had been noted.

  The state of Indiana should buy as much of Brown County as possible. It should acquire at least 1,000 acres in the wildest part of the county. The heart of Brown County is purely wild…From the scenic standpoint, Brown County is one of the best spots that ever existed in the great stretch between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains.2

  After several generations of farming, the fragile earth had degraded and eroded to the point it was unusable for agriculture, and so a bill was passed by the state legislature that allowed counties to give tracts of land to the state for state parks. Brown County State Park opened in 1929 in the southern area of Indiana that is home to one of the rarest and most spectacular trees in the eastern United States: the yellowwood.

  One afternoon I walked with friends through one of the remaining stands of yellowwood in the park. As we negotiated the steep steps into the ravine we passed hickory shag bark, American beech, sassafras, dogwood. Tiny orchards. We saw two different types of snake; many squirrels. The stand of young, whip-thin yellowwood were not clearly distinguishable from the beech, to my untrained eye, though the difference would have been obvious if they were in bloom. If you’re there at the right time of year (we were not) the trees fold over with the weight of fronds that look like giant pea flowers, which is what they are: the tree is, in fact, a legume. Without the flowers, I had to rely on the cheerful wave of the pink researcher’s flags to identify it. The yellowwood is erratically distributed due to the to-ing and fro-ing of glaciers over several ice ages. This stand and the population at nearby Yellowwood State Forest are the northernmost stands left, isolated from friends in Kentucky, 160 kilometres away. The tree is increasingly endangered (though not listed as such in Kentucky). In 2018 the Yellowwood State Forest was opened to logging, which explained why most gardens in the town of Bloomington had weathered-looking signs jammed into the soil: Save Yellowwood.

  One day when I was in the park I talked at length to a local naturalist named David. He was a kind, knowledgeable man who tolerated an endless torrent of questions from me about local trees. He was, I realised, doing his best to be as optimistic as a man can be when he cares about the environment under late-stage capitalism in a state that has thrown in its lot with Mike Pence. An hour of conversation ranged across the overuse of pesticides, chestnut blight (the tree species is not yet extinct, but several invertebrate species closely associated with the American chestnut now are), dieback in American ash and the now-endangered Indiana brown bat (its caves are being disturbed by humans; a fungus known as white-nose syndrome is killing the remnant populations). At this time of year the sunset stretched out to 9 p.m., long after the chill of evening had descended. As I became colder, I caught David’s eye and it seemed to me we were both trying not to give in to the tears threatening to spill. Research supports much of what he was telling me, and what I could see with my own eyes every time I walked through a forest. Milder winters have allowed many species of bark beetles to proliferate, forestry practices favour particular beetle-susceptible tree species. Deadly fungus and disease evolve at a far greater rate than a tree can manage. The trees aren’t living long enough to fight back.3

  I farewelled David—I stay in touch with him on Facebook—and walked to my car. As I was about to get in, I saw a massive turkey vulture spilling out of a garbage bag a metre or so away: dumped after being (illegally) shot. I got down on my haunches and sat for a while in the dying light, admiring the strangeness of the red folds of skin on its head; deeply impressed by the heft of its enormous shoulders and wings. These birds are so much larger and grander than they seem when you’re a mere mortal standing on the earth, neck craned back, watching vultures cruise the thermals above you, rulers of the sky.

  ____________________

  1 The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan, Random House, 2001.

  2 ourbrowncounty.com

  3 ‘The ecology, distribution, conservation and management of large old trees’, David B. Lindenmayer and William F. Laurance, Biol. Rev. (2017), 92, pp. 1434–58.

  FORT. DA!

  WHEN I was researching my book on Cyclone Tracy back in 2012, I visited Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory during the build-up, that time when humidity hovers around ninety per cent and clouds hang so low and heavy in the sky you feel you could reach into them. It’s a cheaper time to travel, but you have to be keen. One morning I got up at dawn and walked the half-hour to Nourlangie Rock. It wasn’t far but by the time I got there I was a veritable thunderstorm myself, sweat sheeting off me. I waded, rather than walked, through space.When I got to the caves I saw the painting of one of the first sailing ships to reach this area about two hundred years ago. The white sails billowed. It’s the kind of art that collapses time, that makes you see the world differently. There are more first-contact paintings at Ubirr gallery, which was (for me) a drive away. White men in their outlandish trousers with their pipes and hats. Most of the art in this area is older. It dates from around fifteen hundred years ago and is painted in a traditional Arnhem Land style known as X-ray art because of the cross-hatching that depicts the bones of the barramundi, wallabies, goanna. But the painting that really stopped me in my tracks was fainter, more a blur of iron red bleeding into the rock. A thylacine.

  It’s been three thousand years since thylacine have lived on mainland Australia. Dingoes are name-checked in their extinction here because the thylacine died out soon after the dingo arrived in the later part of the Holocene. This was a time of decreasing summer rain and temperatures, alongside increasing winter rain. Sea levels were rising. This changing climate, drier but with more floods, was a challenge for the strange and beautiful creatures, and must share some of the blame for the thylacine’s demise. I say strange because thylacine didn’t look anything like Canis, Vulpes, Panthera or any other big cats and dogs. They looked like marsupials. They had stiff sticky-outy tails, tiger-like stripes, broad foreheads and long pointy noses. They sometimes hopped. Their powerful jaws could hinge 120 degrees, and they made a yipping sound rather than barking or howling.

  I know what a thylacine looks like because of the devastating footage I saw of the last one in captivity, a thylacine called Benjamin, running back and forth in his enclosure in 1933. Bounty had been paid on more than two thousand of his kin—seven shillings for females, five shillings for males. On July 10, 1936 Tasmania listed the thylacine as a protected species, but the political intervention came far too late. That pattern—too little and too late—continues to this day.

  Back. Forth.

  When I think of that footage, I find myself thinking of Sigmund Freud’s description of repetitive games played by children to help them overcome fear and establish the illusion of mastery. He described his grandson Ernst’s ‘occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed’, and saying Fort (gone) with some satisfaction. Other games involved tying a reel to a piece of string, throwing it—Fort—and then pulling it back into view. Da (there).

  On September 7, 1936, some 30 million years after the fossil record suggests thylacine first walked the earth, Benjamin was left out of his enclosure one cold night and died of exposure. At the board meeting following Benjamin’s death the Hobart Zoo set aside thirty pounds to replace him.

  Da!

  Only to discover that no more thylacine were to be found.

  Fort.

  There continue to be reported sightings and rewards offered for evidence that thylacine still exist. This strikes me as an extraordinary act of denial. I don’t mean to suggest it’s impossible they might, but I wonder, what is the point of proving some remnant populations have survived if it’s only to bring them back to our dangerous attention? Might their paws not be hacked off, their carcasses hung off fences? Will they be stuck in zoos and left, once more, to die of cold
? Will tourists swarm through their territory in the hope of seeing them?

  The biggest killer on the planet of animals, of any species, is humans. We view other predators as competition—and I suppose, if you’re a farmer looking after stock, they are. But we’re terrified of them. Beyond reason. The Tasmanian Government recently spent 50 million dollars to eradicate foxes, even though it’s unclear whether there is a fox population on the island.1 There’s a certain amount of concern for marsupials, but it’s the rights of stock and those who own them that have driven much of our political agenda.

  One attempt at such protections is the longest fence in the world, Australia’s dingo fence. It runs for 5614 kilometres, meandering, much as a waterway might, from the Great Australian Bight to the Darling Downs north of Brisbane. The point of the dingo fence is to keep the dingo out of southeastern Australia and protect the sheep therein. James Woodford is a journalist who has travelled the entire fence, and his book The Dog Fence describes graphically the corpses of hundreds of camels and entire mobs of emus that have died searching for water during drought.2 Collateral damage. The fence is draped with the carcasses of dead dingoes, minus the bits of them removed to claim bounty.

  The pastoralists along some areas of the fence have tolerated being used as missile and nuclear testing sites and mined for uranium. They have suffered through endless drought and struggled to manage soil erosion due to overgrazing. Dingoes are not the big problem here. And while it is true that dingoes kill sheep, research suggests that in areas where dingoes are shot and poisoned, livestock predation goes up, not down. This is in part because dingoes keep feral cat, fox and pig numbers down. But it’s also because dingoes that grow up with their family structures intact hunt more strategically. Adults train the juveniles to hunt more skilfully and to understand their territory, which means their behaviour is less erratic and destructive. Some cattle pastoralists want dingoes to be able to roam freely, believing they lose more of their stock to starvation when the animals are competing with kangaroos for pasture. Dingoes that have grown up with their families know how to form a mob and bring a kangaroo down. Introduced deer, too, are becoming a problem in southeastern Australia (just as they are in areas where wolves have disappeared). If dingoes were allowed through these lands they would help sort that out. The loss of predators is creating problems in ecosystems around the word.

 

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