Happy Arbor Day everyone! I must confess that even for me—a tree hugger and nature lover from way back—the meaning of Arbor Day has been somewhat murky. It’s about planting trees, right? That’s mostly correct, but over the years the meaning of the holiday has become more profound. It’s become a celebration of the critical importance of trees in supporting life on our fragile blue-green planet.
In 1872 Julius Sterling Morton, a Nebraska journalist, proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture that one day each year be devoted to the planting of trees. Back then people weren’t worried about climate change or carbon sequestration. With a mostly treeless landscape, Nebraskans needed windbreaks, shade, and lumber. Remarkably, on April 10, 1872, the first Arbor Day, the good people of Nebraska planted over one million trees!
Within a decade many schools around the country had embraced the concept and, by 1920, 45 states had adopted the holiday. But it wasn’t until 1970 that Arbor Day became a national holiday generally celebrated on the last Friday of April. And for that we have President Richard Nixon to thank.
Although history doesn’t remember him fondly, Richard Nixon was one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history for his conservation and environmental policy. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the first Earth Day were all initiated during his first term. And he launched the Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate our federal approach to human health and the environment. All this legislation had strong bipartisan support. In fact, both the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act passed the Senate unanimously.
“The great question of the Seventies,” Nixon said, “is shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?” Those words resonate much more strongly today.
Last week, a group of fifth graders gathered at the Memorial School with the town tree warden, Tom Henderson, John Round from the Select Board, and volunteers from the Friends of Manchester Trees (FOMT) to plant a native red maple sapling to commemorate Arbor Day. But a sense of urgency to do more locally to mitigate the effects of climate change goes well beyond this symbolic gesture, especially for the many local organizations that protect thousands of acres of forested land in and around our town, and FOMT, which arranges for the planting of all our public trees and many neighborhood shade trees.
William Moomaw, professor emeritus at Tufts University and co-author of the seminal scientific paper, Intact Forests in the United States: Proforestation Mitigates Climate Change and Serves the Greatest Good (2019), tells me that an interest in trees within local communities in the Boston area “has skyrocketed. I’m getting calls from everywhere. There’s a movement on!”
To what does he attribute that growing interest? Often, it’s triggered by instances “where very large, beloved trees are being taken down for reasons people don’t agree with.” It’s often improvements in infrastructure—road widening, bike paths, extra parking, or development. “But when they plant a skinny little five-foot-tall seedling next to a huge stump, the contrast is just too much for people to accept.”
It’s not only the aesthetics that bother people. “Mature trees are an irreplaceable asset,” says Moomaw. One 100-foot-tall oak tree stores 8 tons of CO2, which is the equivalent of 151 young street trees. And, according to a story in Audubon magazine, that same mature native oak tree “can host over 550 different species of moths or butterflies and their larvae. Those caterpillars are a vital food sources for birds, especially warblers and other songbirds. In contrast, a non-native gingko tree can only host five different species.”
For these reasons FOMT is increasingly advocating for the planting of native species. FOMT’s president, Jody Morse, said, “I’ve come to understand that native plants are not just a ‘nice to have.’ They’re critical to saving our planet. You won’t have as positive an impact on the carbon cycle unless you plant native plants. Everything is interconnected. And you need biodiversity—the insects, the birds, the fungi—which we’re losing all over the world.” In fact, a 2023 study reported that in the U.S. alone, 34% of plants and 40% of animals are at risk of extinction, and 41% of our ecosystems are at risk of collapse.
“Since the last ice age and throughout human history,” Moomaw tells me, “We’ve had a benign climate thanks to forests and oceans keeping atmospheric carbon in check. Today we know that fully one-third of the carbon in the atmosphere is a result of deforestation and land and wetlands degradation. And, we know this because there are several different types of carbon based on its source.”
But isn’t saving the world mostly about reducing emissions from fossil fuels? Author of “Climate: A New Story,” Charles Eisenstein says, not really. Eisenstein cautions us not to focus exclusively on carbon accountancy. The biggest threat to life on earth, he says “is the loss of forests, soil, wetlands, and marine ecosystems. Even if we can cut carbon emissions to zero, if we don’t also reverse ongoing ecocide on the local level everywhere, the climate will still die a death of a million cuts.”
But can local efforts really move the needle when we know that mature trees and forests have the greatest impact on both carbon sequestration and protecting biodiversity? The late Dr. Arika Miyawaki, a plant scientist at Yokohama National University, believed so. In the 1970s, he had an idea, and through much experimentation, developed what is now known as the Miyawaki Method.
The essence of the Miyawaki Method is to select a small (often urban) site, analyze the soil, create a special mulch to establish legacy mycorrhizal fungi, then plant only native species—a mix of canopy trees, sub-canopy trees, and shrubs—in tight proximity to one another. For the next three years, water and weed as needed, then do nothing. Miyawaki and his many disciples found with this approach a mini-mature climax forest would emerge within just 10 or 15 years, something that could take Mother Nature a century or more.
This approach has really caught on, especially in cities suffering from the “urban heat island” effect. There are now over 3,000 Miyawaki Forests around the world, and 14 in Massachusetts. The key to getting one of these mini-forests up and running is community involvement. For this to happen in a town like Manchester would require a local partnership-based collective effort.
Let Arbor Day remind us that we shouldn’t wait for global solutions to the seemingly intractable problem of climate change. We need to act locally and focus on what we can do as a community that values the natural world. As Professor Miyawaki said, “The forest is the root of all life. It is the womb that revives our biological instincts, that deepens our intelligence and increases our sensitivity as human beings.”
Jim Behnke is a Manchester-based nature writer whose stories have appeared in On the Water, Outside, and Scientific American.
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