What if we planted a lot more trees?

     It takes a lot of trees to have a meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the United States, for example, our vast national forests store about 16 percent of the carbon we annually produce. All of the street trees in U.S. cities together store only less than 1 percent of our carbon emissions. Still, the 360 metric tons of carbon that street trees store won't warm our climate.What if we converted half of subirdia's lawns to trees?

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     [T]hink about the effect that we could collectively have on carbon if only half of America's turflands—twenty million acres—could do what my trees do. Turf consumes carbon just as does any plant, but unlike trees, grass doesn't put on an annual layer of wood. Its use of carbon dioxide increases the soil's carbon stores. . . . [A]n acre of U.s. grass annually adds about eighteen hundred pounds of carbon to the soil, and it continues to do so for about thirty years after it is planted. An acre of my trees did about three times that amount, in aboveground carbon storage, and they have been doing so for seventy years. Their annual storage capacity will slow as they age, probably in a century or so, but their overall capacity to buffer our climate is magnitudes beyond what grass could ever hope to do. . . . [A]n additional twenty million acres of trees could absorb another 1 percent to 2 percent of our national carbon emissions. In this accounting, every little bit helps!

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 223, 225.

According to the Arbor Day Foundation, "National Arbor Day is always celebrated on the last Friday in April, but many states observe Arbor Day on different dates throughout the year based on best tree planting times in their area." In Washington State, it's the second Wednesday in April. 

Love nature in the city

Including the urban ecosystem, and within it subirdia, in a broad conservation strategy can cure environmental amnesia. The city is the place where we can foster a love of nature because it is where we experience nature. There, among the streets and buildings, ecologically aware citizens bring local and scientific knowledge to bear on pressing social and environmental issues. Doing so not only helps the animals now, but also may be essential to those of the future that will require that Home urbanus value nature at a distance, despite living in the city.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 214.

America's investment in the lawn

In 2005, 2 percent of the coterminous United States, some forty million acres of land, was lawn. Nearly every bit was "industrial lawn," composed of only a few nonnative grass species. These invaders are regularly mowed to a low, even height and kept continuously green and free of weeds and pests. To maintain this sea of grass Americans annually spend $30 billion. The use eight hundred million gallons of gas, seven billion gallons of water, three million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, and thirty thousand tons of pesticide. The use of pesticides alone is ten times greater than used by the average farmer and includes chemicals that disrupt normal hormone function and reproduction, are suspected to cause cancer, and are banned in other countries. Simply filling up gas-powered lawnmowers is an ecological disaster of the highest order; seventeen million gallons of gas are spilled annually. That amount is more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 and every twelve years would equal the amount spewed into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. 

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 182-83.

Vowell sees her own hypocricies

My small life in the surface world is a contradictory,  hypocritical mess in which I scowl through newspaper articles about the abuses of the timber industry while sitting in my maple chair next to my maple bookcase. Isn't that how most of us live in this country?

Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 138

Americans and our trash

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. . . . I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in sea.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America  (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 26 (orig. published 1962)

Duty to take care of the land

In time, ownership of property will probably carry with it certain obligations, over and above the obligation to pay the tax and keep the morgtage going. There are signs that this is coming, and I think it should come. Today, if a landowner feels the urge, he can put a backhoe into his hillside pasture and disembowel it. He can set his plow against the contours and let his wealth run down into the brook and into the sea. He can sell his topsoil off by the load and make a gravel pit of a hayfield. For all the interference he will get from the community, he can dig through to China, exploiting as he goes. With an ax in his hand he can annihilate the woods, leaving brush piles and stumps. He can build any sort of building he chooses on his land in the shape of a square or an octagon or a milk bottle. Except in zoned areas he can erect any sort of sign. Nobody can tell him where to head in—it is his land and this is a free country. Yet people are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility. The earth is common ground and we are all over-lords. whether we hold title or not. gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safekeeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to the public good to allow an individual, merely because of his whims or his ambitions, to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or the water or even the view.

E. B. White, One Man's Meat, November 1942, in Martha White ed., E. B. White on Dogs (Gardiner Maine: Tilbury House, 2013)