A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization

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humans would be have confined to a small area in Africa had they not developed a fire but fire uh cannot be fueled except by wood and so the whole idea of humanity uh you know without wood would be unthinkable and also the fact that people had fire they could change a night in today with light they could also and this is a very uh a point a lot of people Miss is that once they had fires they could sit around and start to talk and a language developed because of uh wood Fuel and also all the uh implements that people use are basically unable are are are don't just don't work unless you have wooden handles yeah hello everyone good afternoon or evening or whatever time of day it is wherever you happen to be welcome to this 23rd webinar in the Life saves the planet series co-hosted by biodiversity for a livable climate and the gbh Forum Network so today we are honored to present John perlin author of a forest Journey the role of trees in the fate of civilization published in February 2023 by Patagonia this is the third edition of the book its earliest iteration in 2005 was heralded by Harvard as a classic in science and world history and one of the 100 books everybody should have on their Shelf the book looks at the history of human civilizations on this planet from the Sumerians to today and John perlin who did extensive both research and field work and has been to every place that is mentioned in the book basically learned how the abundance or the scarcity of wood shaped in large part every civilization's culture demographics Foreign Affairs economy politics and technology and ultimately its fate this new addition includes research about essentially what people who've been to earlier webinars that we've presented in this series The biotic pump function of trees in creating and distributing rain across the planet making possible a livable climate that has been included in both Chapters at the end of the book but also in looking again at the entire book basically the fate of civilization today rests as John perlin will explain on leaving the trees standing John is going to be joined in conversation by Paul Hughes who is director of the forever Forest Foundation based in California and focused very much on protecting the great redwoods there and John and Paul are going to have a very interesting conversation before we start to present your questions and so now I'm just going to say welcome to John perlin an adventurer a scholar and a terrific storyteller I'm sure you're going to really enjoy this well thank you very much Paula um so we're going to do a short slideshow giving your audience a um a little bit of a taste for the many images that are included in the book uh now the book actually uh the new book starts 385 million years ago uh with the first true tree and what makes a true tree as large Roots as we see these fossilized roots in this image a trunk and uh branches and leaves which archeopterists the first true tree had and now the um what the tree um serviced you might say the environment is that it brought photosynthesis to the picture where the tree took down tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide and exuded large amounts of oxygen which basically changed the entire world and the reason why it changed the world was because there was only one continent and the tree spread everywhere for example today fossils of this tree are found in Oklahoma in Pennsylvania in New York and then Ireland Belgium and actually the greatest number of uh trunks were found in southern Morocco next slide please and here we see yours truly the author boots on the ground digging up many fossils and here for example is um 380 million year old bark which I dug up at this uh spot in Western Pennsylvania called uh Red Hill and in my uh living room I have uh a zillions of fossils I brought home of the leaves and actually one of the most interesting fossils is a charcoal because For the First time there was sufficient oxygen in the air it allowed for uh ignition and created the first forest fires and that resulted in charcoal remains and what's amazing is the charcoal if you rub your finger on it it smears just as if uh you are smearing your finger on a campfire that existed um was put out just 24 hours ago even though this charcoal is so ancient and so archeopterists basically changed the world and provided the uh terrestrial environment for large creatures to come on land and created the ambience that today allows us to survive next slide please then after I discuss uh archeopterists I begin with of the first uh great tree cutter of history and this is Gilgamesh Gilgamesh ruled the city of Urich which was the first uh flag of where a first flag was planted of civilization and she was like uh all civilizers uh he wanted to make a name for himself he wanted to build a great City so he required tremendous amounts of wood so against the gods who made the Forester abode he said he was going to attack the cedar Forest so he led on to the he let his men with huge axes to cut down the uh Cedar forest and the gods fled to heaven and the trees from Iran to Israel started to cry because they knew what their fate would be and what's interesting about the Gilgamesh story it's the first story extant that we have of a great adventure is that as they were going down the river with their uh trunks uh his uh follower encodo looked at Gilgamesh and he said I think we've turned our forest into a wasteland what will our Gods think so here we have the first you might say thoughts toward an ecological future next slide this boss relief was found in karasabad of a future Gilgamesh about a thousand years later we're talking about maybe four thousand years ago had to take even a longer Forest Journey because they had deforested the entire Middle East so they had to go Westward and one of the fascinating aspects I think of the forest Journey which I Learned was we have a constant Westward Movement from the Middle East eventually all the way to North America in search of a sufficient Timber and here we see you can see the logs are being uh carried by from sea to land and it supplied uh the future gilgameshes with the uh wood they needed to build their great uh edifices next slide please and the consequence was the great Cedars of Lebanon where a Gilgamesh was attracted to in future gilgameshes went uh suddenly it became roughed of wood with only a few Acres left when at one time it was a vast Woodland where thousands and thousands of elephants roamed now this might seem to you a fairy tale but later archaeologists have found giant elephant bones all over the Middle East and this was because at one time all the hills above Iran Iraq in southern turkey and in Israel were all forested and provided a habitat that no longer exists and because the habitat no longer exists the elephants no longer exist next slide and here we see why the trees got cut down these are the tree cutters with their axes the neanderthals uh used wood for handles uh to make their tree cutting more effective and from that day on it was goodbye to our forested Earth uh next slide and this is very uh typical we see this happening in Africa today we see what I call a forest journey in fact a colleague once remarked when I showed this slide that looked just like his uh trips to uh various African countries here we see in Europe from the 14th century this woodcut of people coming from the forest uh with the gold that kept them warm uh at a night especially in winter time and also allowed them to have really good meals next slide much of the wood was turned into a charcoal now charcoal Burns at a higher Fuel and a more guaranteed temperature charcoal allowed us to um go into the Middle Ages we talk about the Aegis iron and copper and bronze but in truth it's really the wood age or you might say the charcoal age because without the heat you would have had no metals because most of the uh or is like maybe 10 percent metal and so you have to have a high flame to extract the metal for it to be usable and Not only was charcoal used for making a metal possible but also Ceramics which were necessary for eating for transporting goods and for just for civilization so it's not a very like oh um dubious assumption and that's what I show in the book that without wood there would be no civilization next slide please and not only wood was used for fuel but it also was used for all means of transportation uh here we see construction from Lumber the wheel rights and so you wouldn't in fact the uh North American Indians uh called the uh oh um the wagons uh that the settlers uh moved from uh say from the Mississippi to uh Oregon to California they called them uh wood on Wheels just to show you how important it was in fact yesterday I watched a western and I saw how essential wood was uh reinforced my idea of how essential wood is because even the teepees required the structural material uh used Uh Wood and not only uh was it provided for land transport but just think of this for thousands of years until the ironclads um went to it in the Civil War every ship was made of wood in fact for example England would have never existed as a Powerhouse throughout the last say a 300 400 years if not for wood and the English admitted it by calling uh its uh protection and its wealth of the wooden walls of England next slide please now in California was the uh as I said as I mentioned civilization moved Westward and once uh people deforested the Eastern Seaboard um the Eastern forest was so immense that people said a squirrel could travel from the coast atletic Coast all the way to the Mississippi without touching ground and it was comparable to the great Amazon so by the 1850s there was no more great forests in the east coast so people went to California where everything is always much bigger and here we see the kill of a great Redwood that was accomplished in the 1890s next slide please and as uh Machinery uh developed the forests were even greaterly threatened because instead of being limited by um transport by boat say which required to be near a river you had machines first the railroads then the um uh other mechanized um implements uh going even further and further in the forest and who gave a damn about the forest uh when there was lots of money to be made and this is uh actually the tragedy of humanity is all we thought of was the wood and not the trees and uh thank you very much Andrew so let me add so this gives you a visual taste for what a forestry uh contains I'd like to add that the new book actually it contains oh I would say at least UH 60 more images of each period and a lot of it is in color for the first time which I think everyone will agree makes for a very beautiful book okay I believe that's my fear starts asking John a few questions and I will wait to be interrupted uh by our stage managers if that's not the case I'm going to Dive Right In Here okay I'm ready great to be with you John um I was introduced to this book uh 30 years ago uh I read yeah it was on a list of recommended books and when I read it I knew it was one of the most important books about forests ever written and that's been echoed by critics and Scholars ever since the core idea seems like such a simple one the world's greatest civilizations have tended to rise in power and prominence when they had abundant Forest resources readily available to them and these same societies declined and fell when they depleted or even eliminated their forests the power of this correlation seems obvious to most anyone when they read your book John and yet this idea hasn't been put together in quite the same way before now uh tell us if you would what sparked the idea for you to write the book well I was writing uh I was finishing the research and the writing for my first book called the golden thread 2500 years of solar architecture and technology which has morphed into a more recent book called Let It Shine the 6 000 year story of solar energy and so what I discovered was people when people turn to the sun it was because they were running out of wood and so they needed a new means of heating and the only mechanism they could come up with was designing uh cities and homes to use the solar heat of the Sun and so I asked the question if people are changing their entire way of heating because of wood shortages would indeed must have played a great role in the development of a civilization just like petroleum for example plays such a crucial role at this moment in our world and so with that idea I began to do the research and I didn't actually know um that this would consume Decades of my life foreign decades more of other people's lives now that they have some additional guidance of what we need to do I want to dive into some of the specific societies throughout history and their relation to forests but John first let's remind every one of the many things and the Ancients used wood for ranging from obvious things to those that readers may not have realized were forests derived or of vital importance Wireless includes farm and household implements interrupt me here if you like building materials wagons and carts to weapons from bows and arrows Spears and catapults breastworks battlements and fortifications Siege Towers the timber for mining uh water wheels barrels and tasks for Industrial and Commercial use we're making and transporting beer and barrels and casks looms to make cloth the early Machines of the Industrial Revolution were of wood and then on to fuel a lot of folks don't think immediately how important fuel was John touched on uh charcoal everything from firing Limestone to make lime-based concrete to firing bricks and tiles smelting metals and onto ships for Hull planks masts tar and Pitch we could add to the list all day but let's start with Rome which is perhaps the best known of the ancient civilizations or at least best publicized well Paul I'd like to add a few things when you consider how important it is to stay warm there would have been no migration for example from Africa to settle in more we might say you euphemistically temperate places like for example Europe or for example China or um you know or even the Middle East gets really really cold and so humans would be have confined uh to a small area in Africa had they not developed a fire but fire uh cannot be fueled except by wood and so the whole idea of humanity uh you know without wood would be unthinkable and also the fact that people had fire they could change a night into day with light they could also and this is a very uh a point a lot of people Miss is that once they had fires they could sit around and start to talk and a language developed because of uh wood fuel and also all the uh implements that people use are basically unable are are don't just don't work unless you have wooden handles uh for example as I earlier mentioned uh the ax can you imagine trying to cut down a tree with a a rock uh and no handle or to say clean a uh uh a hunted Deer uh with um a knife without any handle uh this would be Unthinkable and so the wooden handle basically transformed uh civilization uh into the what they call the Neolithic and then when we get to say Uric or the first part of first times of civil days of civilization uh they were all based on Metals uh so like you said like the implements for war uh actually John uh Jack London uh says it's very succinctly that um Iron always defeats Stone meaning you know the conquest of the West uh with uh in view of say for example Alaska or another example you know in North America or anywhere and in fact all these uh metallurgical um developments without wood they would have been impossible so I like to tell people that we live in a wooden age still uh at least for the last so um say uh 5 000 years until the Advent of fossil fuels but I think what it was it's really interesting is that the scarcity in England of trees for fuel brought about uh the uh use of fossil fuels and introduced us into what we call the um I uh you know the the age of fossil fuels yeah and a lot of folks don't realize until they read your book that some of the materials that ancient civilizations used were made of things like Concrete and brick for example in Rome as I was beginning to a segue into Rome uh we have learned that a lot of the aqueducts and even the Coliseum and such big public buildings were made of concrete uh tell us John A little about how Concrete and brick are made using wood uh and how those materials evolved and played a role in the rise and fall of Rome well actually I I'd like to uh once again add that this is not only true of Rome but also all the other civilizations that I discuss in the book uh first of all uh your structure of a building uh as you as you see like uh when the suburbs are being built here in say Santa Barbara uh they require infrastructure of wood right so that's just the beginning uh then also the uh you take you take the concrete for example um that just doesn't appear uh you know really uh what you have to do is you have to heat oh what's called limestone uh to create a um what they call lime and that not only requires lots of wood but also releases a lot of carbon dioxide because it's the Limestone sequesters carbon while creating concrete for example um creates carbon in the chemical equation and so for example uh the aqueducts would have been unusable if it hadn't been for uh the lime uh what we call mortar uh to fit the various Stones together as an example of the baths of Rome which are extremely famous right they ate up like Timber out of after huge trunks in fact they had just like we had a um oh uh we have a fleet of oil tankers uh that always are about um the Romans had 500 ships called an avocalari lignari which meant wood ships that would scour the Mediterranean for wood supplies for Rome to flourish and now this will seem like a fairy tale but where do this wood come from it came mainly from North Africa where you don't see very much wood today uh creating what they call desertification because you no longer have the trees to protect against the uh oh the the sand accumulations in that area and also in France too I mean I've been to France it's totally like clear-cut and that used to be a center for uh which supplies for Rome and that's as I said uh that actually it's the Roman experience that first got me interested in doing a forest Journey because they um quickly uh realizing how much waste was created for using trunks to heat their baths to like what 120 degrees they decided to use glass to trap solar heat to heat the baths which actually uh have been found in the studies about 20 30 years ago to provide on a sunny day in Winter all the heat needed for the bounce so this is actually I'm glad you asked that because it was the wood shortages that um created the solar aspects of my studies that led me to a forest Journey yes and I believe you I have your book is sprinkled with some lovely quotes including a writer from the time who says the baths were not hot they were on fire and he was complaining about how hot the valves were kept uh stayed with Rome II one of the arcs that you traced that points out the civilization's decline was the amount of Base metal in coins the currency of the time silver coinage uh that changed uh and largely due to the amount of silver smelted silver and and base metal uh can you say a little about that oh oh this I'm glad you asked that question because um both uh Greece and Rome um depended on Silver to have a um a a hard currency I guess you would say it and so in Greece for example it was the minds of lorium uh that actually produced enough silver uh so the Greeks were able to uh buy the wood uh to create the fleet that defeated the Persians as solemnly in fact had they not had the silver to finance the building of these ships which was also a void right the we would be speaking person today and so with the defeat of uh Persia we are what we call a western civilization and so now you see the significance of wood uh as a fuel for Metallurgy because the silver only comes like consists of two to three percent of uh The Ore so you have to smelt it and the same thing happened in Rome Rome actually uh conquered Spain uh for its uh silver you had What's called the um Rio Tinto which divides Portugal and uh Spain and it's that area which was silver rich and so I forgot I I don't have the numbers uh right off hand but it basically deforested uh Spain so as the um uh wood ran out uh you had uh problems with the uh currency and you had to go to places like Cyprus for uh the copper to um you know create your coinage yeah and as the uh amount of pure metal particular silver but also gold began to decline as a proportion of the silver silver gold coin and more base metal which was easier to to incorporate into a coin because it took less uh charcoal smelting fuel uh their confidence in the currency declined and thereby led to a decline in the civilization itself well actually yeah well but actually we have other signals too uh for example the size of the tiles changed as people had less access to uh for us and the problem this created too remember is the fact that Rome depended on Far uh away areas of forests would and Forest resources and this created uh difficulties to protect those uh boundaries where you need more and more legionnaires and that created actually what's happening today where in the oil rich countries they um wheeled a disproportionate amount of power because they hold the fuel and it was the same uh back in uh the days of the Romans when places like England uh were the um Depots you might say of iron for the Romans but the only way they could get that iron was through smelting Rock which required wood fuel and one of the interesting areas in which you shine a light in your book is uh that civilizations in Asia Minor city states and Asian miners such as Troy that's in modern day Western Coastal Turkey were originally uh documented as having been coastal cities uh but it was found later in the archaeological record that those cities weren't where the ancient documents said they were can you say a little about uh your trip to Troy and where you found it where it was expected to be and why that location of ancient Troy had changed well um what was interesting is that until the um 20th century um people believe that the Iliad was just a um a fairy tale because they talked about battles around Troy on the coast it wasn't until uh the uh Troy was um Unearthed uh that um fiction uh became fact and I spent like a week camped out about 800 meters from uh Troy and so I could sneak in before the tourists got in and I could go to areas that were closed off and I would scoop uh in the uh debris thousands and thousands of scallops just to show you uh the uh beachfront aspect of Troy and but unfortunately Troy looks like a beach ship today it's it stands up where uh you would expect water to be about all there is is uh dirt right and you have to travel um about oh I would think it's about seven or eight kilometers now uh to get to where the um uh the Greeks had beached their ships and and and to show the why Troy was so important was because it commanded uh the entrance from the Aegean uh to the uh Black Sea and at the point where it's called the Dardanelles is very narrow and I sat up on a pillbox and watch that all the ships had to go in single file because the uh Straits were so narrow so Troy commanded oh that uh area and we know how important that area is even today uh because we have that great fight in the Ukraine is this is the Bread Basket of antiquity and this is also the Bread Basket of today so Troy commanded uh the um you know entrance and exit and so therefore was extremely coveted and extremely powerful yes and because of deforestation largely in the Watershed above Troy the removal of trees it caused erosion and siltation that actually filled in the beachfront area and moved the beach away from Troy by as you mentioned several kilometers today so right yeah well actually this happened not only with Troy but also it's the very famous city of Ephesus and I have these um oh maps that show exactly uh the change over time in the book uh from the fact that upstream and this is actually I never thought of this but the problem is is people Upstream uh don't give a damn about people Downstream right so they're cutting the wood upstream and where the you know the um saltation goes uh it's not going to my house right and so they don't care that they're transforming these great ports uh into a landlocked areas yes and John uh On a related problem that you discuss is not uh just uh siltation and uh the uh alluviation it's called of uh soil particles into areas that were formerly water uh but also salinization of cropland okay so about how that happens and why that affected these ancient cities well this is uh was endemic to uh Mesopotamia what happened once again there was no forethought you know Gilgamesh thought he had really uh was really a dude right he cut down the cedar forest and created a huge City in uric what he didn't realize was that the logs What followed the logs uh going Downstream uh were um great uh amounts of sediment that had tremendous amounts of salts in them and so over time uh his great Empire of fell because it's very difficult to uh grow uh food uh and uh salty marshes yes then the the water will actually leech salts out of rocks and soil uh and that have salt has to go somewhere and if it settles on your Farmland it becomes um infertile well once you get Once once again you have this movement because of these catastrophes so you um southern Mesopotamia lost its power and it moved northward to places like Assyria and places like Maori uh became more important let's talk about uh shipping in in Maritime trade and warfare and why forests were so important there folks don't often realize that these ancient civilizations uh achieve dominance or Conquest through shipping uh and uh that depended on treason more ways than we might think of can you say a little about that the ways that masks for instance played a role well actually I'd like to talk first of all about the importance of a wood for uh roads uh the great roads of Rome what you had underneath the rock bed uh were a plethora of wood uh to keep the rocks from sinking and you had this also in the uh roads leading from the Eastern United States uh for example Connecticut to the Ohio they call them plank roads right uh because you know rains fall the uh soil gets muddy and you can't get you know you can't get Overland right so here you have the Wood Road and you have the wood Carriage right uh so it's Woodward wood and then uh we'll talk about the Seas uh the great power of alphons for example depended on uh its access to forests in fact the area northward which was called amphipolis was so significant that the Greeks were willing to lose about 30 000 people uh to conquer it and what actually led to uh the Athenian downfall was the fact that they lost access to the Great Northern woods above them and what made for example Alexander the Great great was the fact Macedonia was the great Timber Center of that uh area so and actually once the Greeks were losing their um uh wood they looked towards of all places I mean people laugh at me but of uh Italy right of Sicily which there's an area tree there now uh for their uh building their great fleets to uh fight in for example the Peloponnesian Wars um and so you have the formation what they call Magna greiko which is greater Greece uh which uh was both in Sicily and in southern Italy and it was all available uh because they wanted control of the woods in fact Rome um has you know the story of the founding of Rome is all based on wood uh you know the the ramus and Romulus right uh they were wood um you know Ramos was uh Romeos was fed by uh Ramos the wolf and actually um Italy near Rome had such an immense Forest that P the government forbade people to go into it because they feared they would be lost and I told this detail to a Italian friend of mine who actually helped edit the book and he just laughed in my face because you know there's there's not even a stump left right that's the evernian wood you're referring to isn't it no that that's a chameleon Forest actually we would I'd love to talk about the evernian woods it means birdless and the reason why it was birdless was it was so thick of for us and uh that's by Naples and I took my son to visit Pompeii and yo where is the wood where is the forest a lot of these places have never recovered from deforestation in ancient times folks well actually all the all the mountains are called Mount Ida's all over um uh the Mediterranean which means in Greek um wood Mountain but there's no wood there now and uh it's sort of like uh in ancient Chinese times which is also discussed in the book you had new Mountain which um was uh described by mancius as a mountain that was not a mountain because he said all mountains naturally have trees and new Mountain has no trees and why do they have no trees because people went and chopped down the trees and then they sent their animals in uh to eat the saplings and eat the seeds and so you have this no matter what group of people What ethnicity um we all have this very um you might say troubling a relationship with the forests yeah uh John at the end of the Bronze Age the shortage of fuel for smelting had become so acute that metal workers turned to iron ushering in the Iron Age can you relate a little about how that transition came about why why civilization moved from bronze to iron and how that affected forests well the copper ore that they were using for uh you know the main ingredient for bronze uh actually contained uh more um Iron Ore than um copper ore so uh it was uh you might say more uh efficient use of uh say the available wood uh to uh smelt um to get cut the iron out but also you could actually mechanically remove the iron and so people began slowly just like yo yo yo with with with once again with a wood handle tools right uh to remove uh the um Iron uh from The Rock and so so um this uh led to um the Iron Age what but what's also was fascinated me was I got this email about two years ago from an archaeological group in the MOX Planck Institute uh that they were stimulated by a forest journey to go really look at what kind of fuel people were using if they were running out of wood and what they discovered uh was that in um turns uh in the Peloponnesian area of Greece and also in Kania in Crete were began Burning uh fossil fuels coal for the first time ever and this pushed back the use of fossil fuels um 2000 years that people uh really had not conceived before and so I actually have all that uh discussion by the new archeology uh the discoveries in of the new edition of a forest journey and I'd like to tell the audience that it's not just a page or or a sentence here and uh there that was changed we have a 160 more pages in the new uh version much thicker uh one of the new uh sections in your book sets the forth the development of Steel in Africa in places such as modern day Togo and Mali and there too the evidence points to the creation of derived Savannahs on account of deforestation to feed Iron Works can you say a little about how this pattern played out in ways that there that were similar to or different than in other civilizations um in that part of the world well uh I I when I was researching the first book I knew a little bit about Togo uh but um not sufficient to make it into uh the book but I was talking to this uh one uh Togo uh metallurgical archaeologist and he said you should talk talk to Peter Schmidt he made some major discoveries and what he discovered was that by um Lake Victoria a thousand years before the Europeans uh ever discovered how to make steel uh these people were making a steal and it you know goes against the uh white racist uh notion that Africa is a Dark Continent uh in fact they developed into not only the Iron Age to the steel age uh long before uh the west but this also uh just like the West uh caused a great um changes in the forest lands uh because you need vast fuels uh to create this iron and so um they uh basically uh develop various efficient more efficient ways of uh creating uh the iron however they had to stop uh several hundred years at a time because running out of wood because the fact is not only do you smelt the iron but then you have the iron tools which you can then you know destroy more for us and you can you know farm and what happened for example in Togo was that about the 17th century 18th century uh they a people's started running out of fuel for the iron and iron means power whether you're white or black or you're Asian you know people we're all people and civilizations um you might say uh get their fuel on Power and so the African uh ruling classes wanted to continue their power and their power came from Iron so what they did was they traded people slaves for a European iron in fact they found several shipwrecks that were coming from Sweden to supply the Togo uh with iron because of the deforestation that the iron industry created anywhere you have iron you lose for us in fact Avid uh you know centuries before talked about how in the Iron Age uh all the pine trees leave the uh hilltops okay let's fast I see Paula uh can't hear you Paula ah I'm going to jump in for a minute with two questions and also to move us towards audience questions because because um I mean obviously this conversation could go on and on and um maybe we could have part one part two part three part four you know every week right right but here are my two questions sure when at what point did you start to think about the implications of this for us in this current day whatever we want to call it civilization and secondly what when did biotic pump understanding bring you to a rewrite of the book well let me answer one at a time um well in 1989 when I uh the first first edition was published uh the main concern was uh over tropical forests rather than uh uh um and also around the um accessibility of fuel in the world rather than the the conversation hadn't really begun that greatly about you know carbon dioxide and also in 1989 you didn't have what was called the development of the new Forestry and the new forestry uh which has permeated the schools at least in North America is that trees are more significant than just for you know uh you know building and you know for you know basically for building and also an understanding came that old growth that okay the problem was everybody was anthropomorphizing uh trees um until 1990 that a young tree is much more vigorous so it takes in more carbon and an old tree is decrepit and needs to go to the rest home right and um you know can't take uh in very much carbon and it turned out to be just the opposite of that the older a tree is allowed to grow uh the greater carbonate sequesters and not only does it sequester it but it holds it um into the biomass so that was one aspect that hit me and then um perusing the new developments was the fact that a forests are more valuable uh are are as valuable I should say for not only uh holding and sequestering carbon but also for um the Integrity of the weather of the world and this was slowly uh beginning to uh hit the uh various uh uh Foresters uh the more Progressive Foresters especially uh people like Doug shale uh who helped me out uh and what what they discussed is first of all that the idea and still people hold it that we get all our rain from evaporation of ocean water what the new discovery was that we get a high percentage like up to 40 50 percent of our precipitation uh from evapotranspiration of leaves and not only that aspect but also the trees uh create a relay of precipitation say from Scandinavia and Siberia all the way to China as one example or another example uh from the Congo base and uh to the Nile so if you get rid of those trees um you know what what are people going to be able to uh drink and so um or grow yeah or any you know we are what the biggest problem on this planet is we don't realize is that we're just another critter and we need um the the um clouds we need the uh forests to survive and so of these issues entered into a stimulation for a whole new part of the book uh but also other aspects like uh for example that forests allow for the migration of birds I I couldn't believe I mean I blew me out that um the uh hummingbird for example they travel like uh ten thousand um miles uh in a season they go all the way from Central America to Alaska for example and we require you know hummingbirds and other birds to uh pollinate and we also require Birds to get rid of pests that uh prevent um oh the trees for growing and also the discovery of that of the soil in the Boreal forest for example which have been uh greatly ignored you know the Boreal forest over the tropical forest uh the Boreal forest it contains a great amounts of carbon in the soil and not only that but the aerosols that the leaves create to uh cool down the Earth uh what one aspect that I think was really interesting is people's talked about clearing the boreal forests uh so you would have a better Albedo uh but what they didn't take in consideration was all the services you might say that that Forest creates and so all of these uh nearly discovered oh and I'd like to say also uh human health how words is dependent on the forests of social distancers in fact uh one of the great uh stimulations for me to uh write the um the new portions of the book was that um I came across in 2018 an amazing Journal article called bats deforestation and coronaviruses and so so so that this uh you know I could talk for hours about this but I'd just like to say these were the uh uh aspects that said John uh you've got to write all this new material down because people need to know um that at one time uh we um you know um that the wood built civilization and now we have to keep the forests intact to save it thanks John I'm gonna go off screen again because Paul has audience questions to ask you thanks okay okay um let me look at some of the questions the audience has turned in um can you talk about the history of non-native invasive species changing the forests in Maryland today for example non-native invasive Vines are the second largest cause of native tree loss well yeah I mean I mean um like in the hills of Santa Barbara you see this fight all the time uh say between the um the the native lupins and the uh what we call the wild oat uh for yeah this is a big problem of uh you know of stuff people brought into the forest just like in Florida we have the problem about you know the various uh uh pythons for example that people have brought in and so we you know you know we have to clear the land of um you know the invasive species to allow the trees to uh proliferate well I want to uh turn to a slightly upbeat uh area that your book touches on which is voices of conservation and this is my framing we sometimes tend to think that Advocates of restraint and wise use of resources only arose in recent times but you cite many examples in your book of historians philosophers politicians and others that decried the waste and destruction of forests and makings and we're making scientific and sophisticated uh arguments almost identical to those that we make today for example uh ancient uh Greek philosopher uh Plato uh reading from your book uh wrote uh you wrote that he gave for us a major role in his Utopia in his vision of what Attica looked like in its pristine State quote the country was unimpaired it had much Forest land in its mountains and besides there were many lofty trees of cultivated species the canopy of the woodlands protected the rich Earth covering these Hills from The erosive Acts of action of deluge is prevalent at the time and allowed the country to turn to good use the yearly rain from Zeus not as now wasting What flows from bare ground to the Sea and one more shorter quote that we want to point out in the book is from Cicero the famous Roman Statesman in order who blasted one of the uh tribunes uh servilius Rellis saying uh he is a luxurious Rake who sells his forests before his Vineyards a little shout out to our activist friends in Napa County who are fighting against completely rampant and unregulated uh high-end Resort and Winery development at the cost of deforesting Oak Woodlands there no thought to the water John can you say a little about has conservationists always been there been around since the beginning of time because it's that's my view of it there have always been people there who cared and tried to push back against destruction well I'm bless you for the question because it all began with Gilgamesh about eight years ago and this is uh why I think the uh you know one of the Necessities for a new version of a forest Journey uh is that there was a new tablet found it's called the ecological Gilgamesh where the writer gives the forest life you know it's not some dark dreary place it's full of like monkeys screaming it's full of uh bugs you know humming and uh like like like a symphony and as Gilgamesh cut down the trees and I already mentioned this but this is how I end the book is uh they're on like a a a Timber raft right and and could do looks at Gilgamesh and says I think we've transformed the forest into a wasteland and then he looks at gilgameshes says what will our Gods think so I mean that's the beginning of the environmental ethicist ethics uh right there and then you uh get with uh for example uh like you mentioned uh um Plato where he describes that because of deforestation the soil and Attica now is like a skeleton of an animal with all the fine meat removed and then in Greece too we had the Advent of the Sacred Groves where uh people were forbidden to uh enter and mess with the trees and there's one great tale that I like to just uh touch on oh you have this rabbit Forest hater who's cutting down all the trees and suddenly uh gets the ire of uh sarri's the goddess of abundance and she sends them a curse that no matter how much he eats uh he'll never be satiated and so he eats the whole world uh to uh scarcity and can find no food left and so he ends up eating himself which I think is a parable for today so um so those are examples I could go on and on yeah um I I there's so much uh that you touch on that we won't have time for but I did want to uh touch on the early American Colonial period you discussed quite a bit about the increasing tension between Britain and its colonies where the forests were here in New England uh and they were used among other things for sourcing masts uh bigger masks meant bigger ships more freight more more velocity for the ships no what they meant no actually what they meant was uh more guns more you know you had like these ships that had like 200 300 guns on them but you needed to balance them as they were called ships of the line where the ships would line up in a line uh opposing each other and they'd let off like 280 300 guns right and if you didn't have huge mass huge intact Mass not not wood that's uh uh uh pasted to get adhered together uh for um you know balance right as the ricochets of the uh guns blue and there were no um masks to be found masting Timber to be found because what happened was and this is like sort of like what happens in The Straits of Hormuz is the uh English we're getting most of their masks from uh Scandinavia but the Scandinavians uh decided they wouldn't uh send it anymore and so the only place the English could access were the White Pines of New England and we have for example a diary where uh um the masting ships there were regular masterships just like oil tankers uh going from New England to uh England and um they failed to arrive because of Heavy Seas and uh the uh head of the Navy was having an ulcer over the possibility of not being able to Mouse the English name Navy in fact the reason why Americans won the Revolution was over masting Timber was because they realized that England depended on their area for a mass so what they uh said well why should we um you know send it to England why don't we just create our own Navy right and uh so we can you know have Independence and according Wallace if everyone remembers was caught in a naval blockade I believe it was in Virginia and the English because they were kept out of the masting Timber areas that they once uh held by the American revolutionaries they couldn't uh resupply uh Cornwallis and the end result was the creation of our country yeah and I wanted to segue into that a second because it struck me too when you noted that just a few chops of the oven ax could ruin a mast tree and that was kind of a profound thought but it was very easy to damage a strategic uh resource back then uh with a few chops of the next um you mentioned the pine tree Riot you discussed that and the cat and mouse regulatory efforts between the uh Regulators that were sent over from Parliament to try to enforce what sound like fairly Common Sense rules to protect forests against the depredations of local profit interested colonialists and uh they um they ultimately were engaged in a futile Quest doomed from the very beginning did you say a little more about how forests may have played a role in the tension between the uh colonies in Britain that led to the revolution uh very simply the English wanted large trees for masting uh the colonists wanted a large trees for lumber and so for example if you were going to start a farm the first um piece of equipment you uh put in was a sawmill and what did this Sawmill like uh require it required the devouring of the masting Timber the English like uh needed and so the first seed of Revolution happened in the Backwoods of Maine New Hampshire and Northern Massachusetts where the English attempted to guard the masting Timber and the Americans got dressed up just like for the tea party as Indians and attacked the British soldiers who are protecting the uh or confiscating I should say of the material from the sawmills and so this created the first I would say uh the the first stab of uh revolution in um the United States yes the so-called pine tree Riot took place in oh yeah the pine tree I love the pine tree I love the pine tree Riot because everybody gives uh so much play to the uh Boston Tea Party uh but actually the uh pine tree Riot was as significant uh and it was also uh covered uh in uh the uh Colonial newspapers uh where um the uh British once again wanted uh the Sawmills to be shut down and the Americans uh you know that's how they were going to make their fortunes and so when you try to step on someone's Fortune uh you definitely gotta fight and so you have this great Riot where they uh took the sheriff and uh basically uh flogged him and as I said uh what do they say they call it painting and Stripes uh yeah uh running amount of town on the rail tarry and Feathering is that oh yeah tired and feather the Americans were uh gnarly people you know they didn't want uh their uh fortunes to be messed with because they were able to finance their farms for example well you know you had uh required a lot of capital expenditures to start a farm and so if you had a sawmill and you were able to cut down these great trees and turn them into Lumber there was great demand well what's called the sugar islands in the Caribbean because they had all been deforested for uh oh uh processing sugar and for clearing the land for sugar crops and so they depended on the colonies uh for a um a great trade uh in Timber in Lumber and people made their Fortunes in Lumber and they didn't want their fortunes to be liquidated uh by the English needs yes and they were not necessarily motivated by conservationist goals they were there was corruption there was um self-healing and the courts that a lot of the colonial powers like Britain depended on for justice and the colonies were run by judges who ran Sawmills and so right right right it was like the typical conflicts today right in the Supreme Court right uh you have these people who are run by uh uh you know by Brad prophet and so they're not going to like stamp on their money making because uh that seems to me in uh our society making money is a big uh aspect John I'm going to read a question to you from the audience to uh have you ever seen evidence of a failing Society attempting reforestation if yes what were the results um let's say um yeah yeah the uh I talked about the uh uh sacred Groves uh was an attempt to uh reforest but the fact is is because uh so much of the uh outside area had been deforested uh people began to um you know attack the uh sacred Groves and they didn't give a fig about whether they were disturbing the Gods uh because they wanted to be able to have warm Homes at night I I hate to step been here but because clearly we could you could go on and our much of our audience has stayed with us oh great so two things that there is also an example which I intended to put into resources of uh deforestation the the tajuka story which was told by Tom Garrow at our first conference about the deforestation I believe of a significant Mountain outside of what became real and their discovery that they didn't have water anymore and so they did a major reforestation of that um of that mountain and their water returned but the other thing is that there was a question asking about um the last question that came in on chat asks if you could talk about for example the coastal Salish people and other indigenous groups that had a very different ethic and relationship with the forests that they lived in well I don't want to create a lot of controversy but I guess I will because first of all the term indigenous is not is a false concept because um except for maybe uh the original Africans the homo sapien in Africa were all like oh immigrants and so even the Clovis man for example who were the first entrants into North America they caused mass extinction of the larger mammals and you take the Algonquin in Indian Saiyan um oh New England um they loved uh to have huge fires in winter time to stay warm and they didn't give a fig about conservation because they like to sleep naked and so every four or five years they had to move to a different forest in fact the reason why you could not like oh christianize uh the Iroquois was because of the Jesuits said that there was an eternal flame in hell and they laughed at him because they knew from their own experience that they would have lost all their forests with an internal flame and so we our human beings um and uh for example another example is the Aboriginal in Australia uh totally uh changed the whole of ecology of Northern Australia from a rainforest to um a eucalyptus Forest because we're all humans and no matter where we are who we are the one thing we do know how to do is make fire in fact there is no group in the world that is human uh that does not know how to make fire in fact that is the single uh defining oh um trait of our species and that's where you get such a a legend a Prometheus who steals you know fire for Humanity and then the gods you know torture him for creating a Humanity into gods thank you John perlin thank you Paul Hughes this has been a wonderful presentation and discussion foreign

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