Article first published on Blogcritics.
I would describe myself as “not the mystical sort”. That means that Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us is not an obvious book for me. But beyond its mystical side, it also contains a lot of science, and that’s what drew me to it. Particularly, it’s the sort of big picture science that helps you to see the world in new ways.
The author is described in the blurb as “a world expert on how trees connect the effect our environment” and the detailed knowledge and expertise behind the writing is obvious. Yet she puts this into something accessible and highly readable, the inspiration she says in the introduction, the traditional Irish storyteller. So The Global Forest is structured as 40 short essays, which range across key aspects of our global ecosystems, and historical and recent human interactions with them.
The basics are here. This the fact that in the 1950s 30% of global land was covered with forests, and in 2005 that figure was down to something like 5%. This the fact that the demand for paper, almost entirely reliant on trees, has led to exploding demand for pulp of 200 million tonnes a year for the Western world. And the fact that, despite the global garden offering a cornucopia of 80,000 potential food species, we now rely almost exclusively on eight food species. As the author says: “the traditional knowledge of the other 79,992 is rapidly being lost to future generations”.
And so are practical suggestions. One of the chief concerns of the book is the promotion of what she calls to two-tier agriculture, the combination of tree and ground crops in a “Savannah design”. The chief knowledge base is clearly grounded in North America, and she is fascinating on the subject of the nut crops and the nut milk Native Americans made from them. And also the future potential. “All of the hickory family produces particularly dense wood together with a colossal nut crop…. The hickory can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere like no other tree can. They have done this in the past enemy stretches of virgin forest and they can do it again.”
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