Peter Kuitenbrouwer is a journalist and registered professional forester who holds a master’s of forest conservation from the University of Toronto.
As my dog and I walked down the street the other day, a man stopped us. “I just found a tree,” the man said. “Somebody needs to save it.”
He held a lit cigarette in one hand. With the other hand, he pointed. There in the gutter, where the pavement met the sidewalk, a little tree had pushed its way out of the murk and stood proud, pointing its green leaves toward the sun. It had reached the height of a wine bottle.
A few steps from the seedling grew a tall silver maple tree, its trunk the circumference of a refrigerator. Clearly a samara, or seed, had fallen from the mother tree in a choice spot where rotted leaves had become earth. In this rainy summer, the seed sprouted. Hundreds of people have passed by the tiny, brave tree; this man noticed it.
“It’s not going to survive there,” the man said. “It needs to be moved. I don’t have a yard. You can take it and plant it in your yard.” (A guy walking a Labrador retriever must have a yard.) “We need trees,” he added.
Do we? Trees have gotten a bad rap lately, in our summer of forest conflagration. Bloomberg News reported in July that the greenhouse gases released from Canada’s 2023 wildfires are twice the emissions from every other sector of our economy. Canada’s National Observer noted that, in the 21st century, our forests have consistently emitted more carbon than they have absorbed. The New York Times piled on, with the headline “Forests are no longer our climate friends.” Also in the Times, a writer who planted trees in northern Ontario in the early 1990s called tree planting part of the problem: “Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day.”
Trees burn. This is true. But it is a terrible mistake to vilify trees as a culprit in climate change.
Trees suck in carbon and emit oxygen. Without trees, we would find it difficult to breathe. The forests of Canada store a large chunk of Earth’s carbon; even the epic carbon released by this summer’s fires is a tiny fraction of that stored in our forests. We want that carbon storage to increase – by adding trees.
Forests are burning. Why? Our rampant consumption of fossil fuels has caused global warming. Forests are hot, dry and more flammable. To slow climate change, we must drive less and ride buses or trains (or walk or cycle), and switch to renewable energy.
We also need to protect more intact forests, as more than 90 scientists and researchers, mostly from North America, pleaded with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an open letter last year: “Canada’s primary and older forests have a key role to play in preserving a safe and livable world, and the government can make a significant contribution by prioritizing keeping these vital and irreplaceable ecosystems standing.”
To spare these forests, we can plant trees elsewhere for our future use, as we have done for more than a century. In 1968, for example, Ontario’s premier celebrated the planting of the province’s billionth tree, grown in one of a network of provincially owned nurseries. Harvesting has since thinned these forests, providing lumber, paper and hydro poles. New openings in these woods allow other species of trees to grow, creating mixed forests.
A colleague the other day compared a tree to a Swiss army knife. A tree does so much: absorbing rainwater to take pressure off our sewer systems, filtering the water we drink, preventing erosion, cooling our houses and streets, growing nuts and fruits, and even improving test scores for our children and lowering the blood pressure of those who walk in their shade.
Back on the street, I knelt on the sidewalk and tugged softly on the tiny tree’s stem. The little seedling, its roots intertwined with decayed leaves and a bit of dirt, came away easily. I found a little plastic bag in my pocket and wrapped it around the tiny root ball.
My new friend smiled. “Perfect!” he said. He stood under the big silver maple and craned his neck skyward. “Look how big it’s going to get!” he said. He called to a passerby, “We saved a tree!”
I have planted the tree in my front yard (the man was right about that detail). For the sake of our collective well-being, I have high hopes for the youngster.