Chad Wilkes

Andy Hickman

Lawrence Winship

Tree Rings & Climate Change

May, 2013

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Taraxacum Officinale vs. 2,4-D: Collateral Damage

To start this off right, I thought that I would elicit help from the great John Muir: “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.” ^[1] The health of all living things is dependent upon a huge spectrum of variables that are constantly subject to change and disruption; speaking specifically about trees, this fact is no different than any other living creature.  If a tree is deprived of light, it will be stunted and may even perish.  Pests, disease, chemicals, human intervention, etc. are all factors that can easily contribute to a tree’s failing.  If a drought occurs then some trees may wither and die; if a landscape changes and suddenly a tree is inundated with moisture then it may not be able to survive this newly moist soil.  This last variable is the point that I will primarily focus on in my inquiry as to why a particular stand of trees on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA is dying at a very high rate.  It must initially be said that this project was picked up very late in the semester and only limited data was collected for this plot, but what has been collected gives us a substantial starting point for attempting to understand why these trees may be dying; but I cannot confidently draw any conclusion into what has caused the death of so many trees.  This will be an ongoing project that will hopefully go beyond just understanding why the trees are dying, and my hope is that it can move into a kind of rescue mission to ensure that the death does not spread deeper into the woods (as there are some 100+ year old trees in these woods).  However, this last point does beg an interesting question: Is it even important to “save” these trees? If so, then why?  Our understanding of nature is such that we know there have been countless cycles throughout the earth’s existence, so then why is it important to save a stand of trees that are just a part of this series of cycles?  Hopefully throughout this essay it can be understood why it IS important to intervene in this dying.  As I understand what John Muir was saying, the wrongs done not just to trees are often done in the cloud of ignorance, so for the simple reason of developing consciousness for those who do not know, these trees must be saved.  I was first made aware of the issue that was happening in Hampshire’s woods on a particularly frigid New England March morning.  I had gladly volunteered to be part of the crew that goes into the woods to collect sap from the Sugar Maple trees; having spent the majority of my life in lower latitudes I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to make one of the sweetest treats nature ever provided.  However, while making my way through the woods, I came to a patch in the forest that immediately felt different.  Though I had only walked 20 feet from the last bucket, this stand of trees were experiencing something totally different.  The other person collecting in this area was, to my great fortune, Leslie Cox; Leslie manages the farm at Hampshire College and runs the syrup making process.  He told me that this stand of Sugar Maples that we were in has only recently begun showing a high rate of attrition.  It wasn’t just the trees either, the whole area was visibly affected; the understory was exhibiting the same style of stunted growth and evident sickness. The ground was considerably more wet in this area than any other area in the forest, as well. I cataloged the placement of this sickness in my mind and stored it away until about a month later, and while walking in the woods with class we came around the bottom side of where I had previously seen the Maple death; about 100 yards east of the dying Maple stand we came across a patch of trees whose sickness made that of the Maples look like a common cold.  There were trees dying everywhere we turned; Ash, Maple, Birch, Hemlock, Oak...all were struggling to survive.  Again, as serendipity shined her gracious fortune on me, I found myself in the woods with Larry Winship and his two assistants Milo and Tilly.  After surveying the scene, Larry concluded that the situation was much worse than he had originally anticipated.  As we walked out of the woods and onto the lower soccer field it didn’t need to be stated that this field and the one directly above it could be strongly suspected of contributing to the problem.  Larry explained that about 10 years ago the soccer field was changed in the form of a new irrigation system, which is a factor that could certainly contribute to an increase in runoff, especially if there was a lack of consideration for drainage management.  Before I go further, let me say a few words about this soccer field.  

As you walk across campus, you are constantly being greeted by a beautiful tree or patch of wildflowers opening their petals to just say hello.  You find students at every turn, basking in the beauty that is Hampshire College’s campus.  One might think that the Dandelion, with her sweet yellow tops creating a golden sea, was Hampshire’s official flower; however, the Dandelion is not a selfish creature, sharing the limelight with a myriad of specimens all budding with the same vigor as the next.  The aroma is intoxicating, and in regard to college campus’ that I have seen...Hampshire College possesses great beauty.  This oasis comes to a stark and distinct end when you reach the edge of the upper soccer field.  With no transition, the ground goes from a bevy of wild grasses and flowers to a homogeneous patch of Scott’s™ new Agent Orange inspired lawn cover.  It is immediately obvious that a great battle occurred here and was part of an ongoing war to eradicate all weeds from this piece of land.  The effort is quite impressive actually, but in the year 2013 it seems hard to believe that this is even an option for considering on Hampshire’s campus.  But I am digressing.  With the location of the now known two sections of forest being directly below the soccer field with the runoff settling in the woods, it seemed reasonable to consider that as an effect of whatever was done to the soccer fields it may have caused a chain reaction further down the line...

Almost immediately, we set off to mark the affected area’s boundary and found that the area was quite large; snaking through the middle of our marked boundary is a small stream that looks to be forming from the field’s runoff.  We chose to focus on the more easterly patch of forest in order to better concentrate on one section, and in my opinion it is the worse of the two sites.  Once the boundary was established we gained a better understanding of the plot we were working with, and the next step was to figure out what the frequency and distribution of the trees were.  Andy Hickman and myself set out to the woods armed with a compass and long tape measure.  Creating a center point in the general middle of the area, we then started working our way around and eventually had a rough table created of an aerial plot.  In around a 500² meter area we identified and plotted 42 trees; out of these 42 trees there were 24 that were distinguished as either being sick or dead.  Granted, just by the nature of how the data is collected it is inherently biased towards identifying all of the sick trees by the virtue of studying sick trees, but the method we attempted to apply was to identify any tree of substantial size that was in our radial plot area.  I’m certain that if we went to another part of the woods just feet away then we would have dramatically different results, seeing much less death than in our affected area.  The trees varied greatly in species, but the varieties that seemed to be hit the hardest were the Sugar Maples and Ash.  As I said before, there were also Hemlock, Red Maple, Oak and White Pine in the section; whatever was working to destroy these trees was certainly doing it without discrimination.  Once we had the circular plot taken it could be put into excel and mapped, and when we finally had that done it was startling to see the amount of damage in such a small piece of forest.  However, it does not take an expert to see when standing in this area that it is the lowest point below the soccer fields, the fields have nothing but grass to try soaking up moisture, there are no trenches or swails to deal with water running off the field, and there are certainly no measures of planting that have been done to prevent this collection of water in the forest.  However, just showing that some trees are dying in the forest is not compelling enough evidence for a conclusion, and it is certainly not compelling enough to convince a mind that is possibly closed off to the likelihood that human intervention is causing disturbances in our natural world.  To reach a deeper conclusion we took core samples of a few trees in this plot, hopefully gaining a glimpse into when these trees started showing signs of dying.

Having the core samples allowed us to look more closely at what may have caused the death in some of these trees, and a couple of the samples certainly showed signs of definite disturbances.  A few of the cores showed an event occurring between 1977 and 1980, and some others showing a decrease in growth right around there as well.  However, I was able to take a sample from a Hemlock that was at the very back of the plot, sitting underneath two sick Oaks, which I dated to be around 120+ years old.  The Hemlock had relatively uninhibited growth (with the exception of a little period of stunted growth around 1910) until around 1960.  The data shows a slowing in growth around this time and can probably be attributed to it becoming succeeded by the trees around it. This only slowed the Hemlock down a bit but at 1968 it dropped dramatically, and in 1980 the tree took a hiatus from growing for a span of three years.  Of course this didn’t deter the mighty Hemlock from persevering as it kept chugging along through the 80’s and 90’s.  Then, exactly 10 years ago the Hemlock practically stopped growing.   The year’s growth goes from around a millimeter a year to around two millimeters accounting for the last decade.  Again, more cores will need to be taken from this area to understand better what is going on, but with some of these cores showing similarities in growth and the Hemlock experiencing very timely sickness, the thought that there could be a case for a human created problem grows more substantial.  This investigation will hopefully go further, and a possible conclusion could potentially be reached.

In the “Complete Guide to North American Trees”, Curtis and Bausor offer an introduction saying:

In every section there are attractive and useful plants now threatened with extinction.  This is due to the ignorance of people and their consequent thoughtlessness.  If one really comes to know a tree he will have a respect for it.  It has a personality as striking as his own and is in many ways more sensitive to the treatment it receives. ^[2]

I certainly don’t mean for this essay to sound overly critical of human ignorance, but it is nonetheless something I remain deeply concerned with. In our particular situation it seems that whoever designed and implemented the “improvements” to the soccer field did so without knowing that they could potentially be causing harm to the adjacent forest.  Maybe they aren’t aware that the herbicides that being used on the field probably are not contributing to the overall health of the surrounding area, and even if the herbicides are not the issue it is worth asking why the chemicals need to be sprayed at all.  It’s also possible that they had no knowledge that if the grading of the field was done differently it could have prevented runoff from entering the forest.  However, the excuse of ignorance only goes so far and there comes a time when this ignorance must be questioned and investigated.  The question that all of this comes back to is why humans feel the need to intervene at all.  One side is convinced that the trees must be healthy and free, while the other side is stalwart to the fight for manicured lawn totalitarianism.  It seems obvious to a dendrophile like myself that the stand of trees is worth saving because a tree, let alone a forest, is an essential piece of the earth’s balance and a much more valuable asset than a monocrop of grass.  But if one side is certain that they are correct and the other side couldn’t even fathom how they could operate differently...then who is correct?  I recently had the pleasure of sitting down to lunch with Ray Coppinger, one of the original staff members of Hampshire College and an advocate for responsible land management.  We were talking about the implications of putting aside land for conservation, and how one person’s interest of supporting wildlife could potentially be in direct (and reasonable) opposition to that effort.  If I put a piece of land into wildlife reserve and the deer that I attract decimate my neighbor’s corn crop, then what am I actually supporting in this?  I often consider the point of what my motivation is for being involved in a particular cause, asking myself: “am I fulfilling some self-serving need of relinquishing the guilt I have for being part of a race that is incapable of living in harmony with its environment, or am I truly trying to develop change that, in fact, is beneficial not just for the earth but for all living creatures?”  I lean towards the latter of the two, and not merely because it is the more glamorous, but because in my experience I have seen what a world that hasn’t been contaminated looks and feels like.  There is no greater joy than walking into a wild part of the world and experiencing, if only for a moment, what it must have felt like to be fully connected to our human nature; the need to progress and innovate limits our ability to be rooted in the nature of what it has meant to be human for thousands of years.  I feel that the efforts of chemical companies to rid yards across america from the clutches of the evil Dandelion are contrived and profit driven.  There is no logical reason for the creation of a uniform yard, unless your goal is superiority.  We have conquered all mammals of this earth, and now we will try to conquer even the lesser life forms.  In a pursuit to civilize we will not only kill everything around us, but we will inevitably kill ourselves; we teach children that they need to play nicely with one another, but what example are we setting when bombs are dropped everyday...people are jailed in the thousands...chemicals are sprayed over this whole earth in a pursuit to conquer?  

I propose a solution; rather than concerning ourselves with the constant tedium of war, or the adherence of “industry standards,” why not embrace the benefits that we can gain from creating harmony and true diversity on this planet and move towards tackling more important issues?  If our species continues down the road towards total civilization, then there will be no natural world to experience; no woods to walk in, animals to encounter, fresh water to swim in, sea life and plants to help clean and feed the planet.  Since it seems that happiness and simplicity are becoming relics of the past, we are forced into a mode of survival...and in order to survive this crisis, spending time killing wildflowers seems like a slap in the face.  The way Rosemary Gladstar frames her opinion of the Dandelion is telling of the different perspectives that are shaping this dynamic and destructive battle of the weeds:

                Dandelion: Taraxacum Officinale

Half the world loves it, uses it for medicine, and dines on it regularly.  The other half wages war on it with a heavy arsenal of pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides.  Who’s winning?  Dandelion, for sure.  Dandelion’s tenacity is part of its beauty and, perhaps, has something to do with its medicinal properties; it has the ability to thrive no matter what.  Try as you might to banish this benign plant from farm fields and gardens, spunky Dandelion returns year after year, seemingly undaunted, raising its golden rays to the sun each spring. ^[3]

If the mentality of global genocide is allowed to be perpetuated and is taught as the norm for current and future generations, then losing a stand of trees will be dwarfed by the problems that are already coming our way.