Less a Forest than a Thicket of Greenwash
This article from Alex Morss makes many excellent points. I love trees. In fact, everyone seems to love trees. Apart from, maybe, Ronald Reagan, who is reputed to have said that ‘if you’ve seen one Redwood, you’ve seen them all.’ Except that he didn’t quite say that, although he did express himself somewhat artlessly while pandering to the Western Wood Products Association in San Francisco for campaign support. On 12 March 1966, he said this to the Association: ‘I think, too, that we’ve got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?’
Nowadays, everyone loves trees. That unanimity that trees are a good thing is reassuring in a way. In a world in which people disagree on so many things, at least we are agreed on one thing. We are all tree huggers now. In politics, though, that kind of agreement is grounds for suspicion, not least because it comes without the usual contests, shouts, pain, and tears. This is a unanimity that seems to be too easy and too cosy to be true.
As the title of this article by Alex Morss states, ‘planting trees to tackle climate change might feel nice, but it could be doing more harm than good.’
In the race to capture carbon, we are mass planting trees at the expense of conservation and protecting biodiversity
I’ve been involved in tree planting schemes all over the world, have nice little certificates with my name on to remind me that I am a little tree hero. I know from experience that the people behind such schemes tend to see themselves as pragmatists engaging in practical actions and delivering solutions of tangible benefit whilst the rest of us argue over politics. I was once advised to stop using the words ‘socialism,’ ‘class,’ and ‘revolution’ because they put off the rich investors. The trick is unlock the wealth of the rich and unleash the talents of the poor. So I was told. Put that way, it makes it plain that tree planting is conceived as a practical alternative to the difficult, intractable, and, some would say, impossible nature of social transformation to deliver a society no longer split between rich and poor.
Capitalism is both a class divided society and a global heat machine. But people who want to address the problems of the latter seem most averse to taking sides one way or the other with respect to the former.
There are people who still insist that capitalism is not the problem, industrialism is, and that socialism is at least as bad as capitalism when it comes to this. They ignore that the capital system rests on an accumulative dynamic that ensures that the economy has to grow continuously. Endless growth is central to capital rule. Such a system is unsustainable. By definition, it can recognize no limits to its expansion of monetary values. The system is incapable of balance, but must expand exponentially. In fine, capital rule is the problem. I no longer waste words with people who persist in equating socialism with top-down state command and control. From the economies of Eastern Europe to contemporary China, the core dynamic is accumulation. Whether these societies are state directed or not makes no difference. These are regimes of accumulation and hence capitalist, not socialist. It is for people to grasp this. How convenient it is to define such regimes as socialist. That conclusion which comes with the not inconvenient corollary that we may continue with the prevailing capitalist system, given that the socialist alternative is so authoritarian, so polluting, and so bad.
I am glad to say that more and more people are understanding this, and showing the intellectual and political nerve to say so against those who, out of political cowardice or worse, seek to muddy the waters.
‘Environmental destruction isn’t driven by human nature or mistaken ideas. It is an inevitable consequence of a system built on capital accumulation.’ By Ian Angus
by Robert R. Raymond
‘One of the biggest ironies of the right-wing trope accusing socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that in reality, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse if it couldn’t continue to rely on free stuff. Without free or artificially cheap access to things like natural resources, care work, labor and a whole array of other elements, capitalism could not stay afloat.’
‘We call it the Capitalocene because it’s not some innate quality of humans that has destroyed the planet, it’s a product of how the system of capitalism operates. If we are to stop the destruction of the planet, then we need to name the systems that cause it and observe that there are some humans who had nothing to do with it — that some humans are very importantly not to blame for what gets called the Anthropocene.’
All very true, and ground that I have covered in depth throughout my work. But I really want to get back to trees. Because something that is very striking about the attempt to address climate change is the extent to which so very many people who are concerned with environmental crisis are politically nervous, neutral, evasive, and, if I may say, cowardly. They have little trouble in envisaging the end of the world, but as soon as a socialist starts to propose the end of the capital system driving the eco-catastrophe bringing about the end of the civilized world, they become vociferous in their repudiation of socialism. In fact, as they say limply and lethargically that capitalism isn’t the problem, or is merely a secondary issue, they virulently denounce socialism as politically repressive and ecologically destructive. In other words, their loathing of socialism outweighs their distaste for capitalism to an infinite degree.
Hence the appeal of tree planting schemes to social transformation. It feels nice. It is politically neutral. It makes people feel like they are doing something practical and making a difference. It feels like action. People agree with it. There are no nasty controversies. It’s easy. It’s safe. And it may well be doing more harm than good, as Alex Morss argues. This really needs saying, and has needed saying for an awful long time. I knew this from the day I was advised to drop references to socialism, class, and revolution, by people who told me that politics is a hopeless hindrance to getting things done.
Tree hugging is fine, but it isn’t politics and, as a substitute for politics, is a plain evasion of the issues to be addressed. ‘We face an epidemic of the wrong sort of tree hugging,’ writes Alex Morss. The likes of XR claim that their campaign is all about raising climate awareness. In truth, climate crisis awareness is now at a peak. The big question, though, is not climate awareness but how that awareness is to be directed politically. Or misdirected by being dissipated into distinctly non-political channels. It seems that every leading politician in all the main political parties, the big land owners, and charities are rushing to embrace tree planting as the big solution to climate change. And that should make us all suspicious. Politics is conflict and disagreement. Politics is about power and struggles over power. When politicians of all colours are tripping over themselves to plant a tree, then there is something amiss.
We need to ponder the words of author Oliver Rackham who, in 1986, said this: “Tree planting is not synonymous with conservation; it is an admission that conservation has failed.”
Rackham likened a modern wooded landscape to a library in which thousands of ancient books are destroyed each year by people who cannot read them and do not appreciate their value, then the shelves are simply restocked with “bad paperback novels and pamphlets containing meaningless jumbles of letters.”
‘Rackham understood that one of the biggest threats to what remains of our dilapidated wildlife heritage, aside from habitat loss, is the introduction of alien species and diseases through soil and transplanted tree stock, and through a loss of genetic diversity in favour of monocultures of unnaturally grown nursery trees.
Add to that, the enlarged water and carbon footprints of growing and transporting, the plastic pots, tree guards and ties, ongoing watering, possibly peat usage, lower resilience, lack of regional, wild or native provenance, and suddenly those neat rows of dream trees – all the same age and genetic stock – might feel closer to a manufactured Disneyland forest than a wild wood.
And yet here is a growing consensus that planting trees is a good thing, the solution to all our problems. Politicians are being photographed daily planting trees. Why? The answer is simple: ‘It is the easy, celebrated crowd-pleaser, loved by schools, charities and funders, even though it is often a poor surrogate for a more environmentally sound tree choice that would help tackle climate change and the ecological crisis.’
It is certainly far easier than the political challenges of addressing the socio-economic drivers of climate change. It is yet another aspect of the “apolitical” politics of climate activism. They are all up to it. ‘In October, Extinction Rebellion symbolically gifted a tree to every eager politician in parliament.’ ‘The Woodland Trust is calling on one million people to plant a tree or donate to have one planted, on November 30, for Tree Charter Day, with events across the UK.’ ‘Now we have the Tories and the Lib Dems locking spades in a manifesto duel: the blues are promising 30 million new trees, so the yellows have pledged to double it. Labour says it will take advice from scientists.’
Here’s the advice: the millions promised are merely one per cent of the committee on climate change’s advice on the number of trees that Britain needs to plant to meet the climate change limiting commitment of the UK government. And the problem is that it is questionable on how ecologically valuable or carbon-useful the trees will be.
In the race to plant a tree people are losing sight of the main crisis: tackling the ecological emergency and halting the sixth mass extinction. These require massive habitat protection measures: not just any old trees, but ecologically and climate-resilient, relevant ones.
‘The trees should be selected to fulfil all their important purposes beyond merely storing carbon. Therefore it is vital that we do not plant the wrong sorts of trees in the wrong ways.’
Alex Morss sees this tree-planting obsession as driven by a ‘feel-good factor’ that makes matters worse: ‘As funding across local authorities and conservation charities has evaporated amid a decade of austerity, I have witnessed local nature reserves and wildlife sites committing eco-vandalism by planting up precious grass wildlife sites as new woodlands.’
‘While we only have 2 per cent of ancient woodland cover left in Britain, we also only have 1 per cent of species rich meadows, and they need saving too. Both habitats harbour rich diversities of declining wildlife.’
And the benefits of trees when it comes to carbon storage are questionable: ‘Meanwhile scientists are widely disagreeing on how much CO2 each tree will sequester, as well as how many and which are needed to partially photosynthesis our way out of our climatic mess and how much land would be needed to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere back down to safe pre-industrial levels. There remains uncertainty on whether there is even enough suitable land and whose land it should be.
Forest researchers recently found that 45 per cent of new forests globally were monoculture plantations of fast growing trees, usually intended for harvest, holding little carbon, ecologically poor and even decreasing biodiversity.
‘On 4 November, the UK government launched a new £50m Woodland Carbon Guarantee scheme, with payments to farmers and landowners to plant more trees to help tackle climate change.
‘A potential flaw is that trees may be used by industries wanting to offset future carbon emissions rather than capturing existing CO2. To add insult, the government is calling one of its new schemes the HS2 Woodland Fund. As they carve up 108 ancient woodlands for the new rail link, guilt money will be spent on newly planted nursery trees, and with no promise they will all be native either.
‘It looks like options might be sold to businesses that want to keep pumping out more carbon, thereby scoring two home goals in not reducing existing CO2 or biodiversity loss.
‘These remaining, irreplaceable ancient woodlands are ecological symphonies, the last hints of our native wildwood, temperate rainforests, rich in wildlife. Irreplaceable. New native plantings will bolster tomorrow’s heritage, but lack that key ancient woodland wildlife. In contrast, more plantations will be dark, comparatively joyless factories.
‘There is an old saying that a person should plant a tree under whose shade she will never sit. Often it would be better to step back and let acorns grow.’
The idea picked up support following the publication of a paper in Science in July 2019. The scientists behind this paper argued:
‘Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.’
People love technical solutions that enable them to go round the awful business of politics, argument, and confrontation. If we have the money and the technology, then let’s give politics a miss. The problem is that all these fixes are never quite what they seem.
To begin with, it takes trees a long time to absorb CO2, maybe as much as hundreds of years. This is interesting, given that argues for social transformation are frequently ruled out for being a long-term project. Social transformation is indeed a long time. But here’s the point. It is arguable we have been engaged in a transformative politics these past four decades, creating the ground for the big changes that tend to come rapidly at the end of the process. Such a politics is constantly being junked for technological fixes of dubious character.
Whilst it takes trees a long time to absorb CO2, stored CO2 is released immediately a tree is chopped down and burned, or is left to decay. There is, therefore, a substantial time lag between planting and effect. Unless a tree lasts a long time upon being planted, and seeds a new tree or trees which then reabsorb released CO2, before coming to a natural end, CO2 will ultimately be released. The upshot of this is that if the stored CO2 is to remain trapped permanently, what is required is the recreation of forests that are permanent. As Alex Morss argues, forests of this kind are a matter of preserving complex ecoystems and letting them develop, not planting millions of saplings. ‘There is an old saying that a person should plant a tree under whose shade she will never sit. Often it would be better to step back and let acorns grow.’
The enthusiasm for planting trees has all the hallmarks of political evasion and desperation. Instead of addressing the politics of climate change by identifying and uprooting its socio-economic drivers, it is pleasing to think that all we need to do is merely plant millions of trees and all our problems can be solved.
In the UK, a number of plantations were created by the Forestry Commission to deal with the wood shortages that followed in the wake of the First World War. The woodland is sterile, poor in biodiversity, vulnerable to disease, comprising trees that grow fast and die easily and quickly. Such forests are not a permanent carbon sink, merely a crop.
Political questions can never ultimately be avoided. I think the rush to plant trees has political evasion written all over it, the idea that tree planting is an easy alternative to questions of socio-economic causation, and a substitute for a politics of transformation. But there is politics at the heart of tree planting. These millions of trees will be planted somewhere, and that somewhere will be an extensive chunk of land. Whose land is this? Who lives and works on it? What are the economic impacts? What are the stakes and interests? Who are the agents and parties involved? These are not enchanted forests that are magicked up out of nowhere, and remain in nowhere land.
In the end, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the mania for tree planting shared right across the political spectrum and, significantly, by those openly disdainful of politics is the plainest ideological evasion. The great attraction of tree planting is that it fosters the illusion of something practical being done to tackle climate change without having to confront the socio-economic drivers of climate change. Tree planting is another technological workaround that allows capitalism-as-usual to carry on unabated. For all of the organic appearance, tree planting is a technological fix, and as politically evasive as all other such fixes. That’s the appeal. The actual benefits of tree planting are actually uncertain. It’s another substitute ‘solution’ that enables avoidance of the socio-economic drivers of climate crisis in the capital system. So long as we keep pursuing tech solutions, we are spared the trouble of having to confront the material roots, economic dynamics, and class divisions that lie at the source of the environmental crisis. Climate crisis is a crisis of capitalism, the product of the contradictory ecological dynamics of capital. To seriously address the crisis in the climate system requires an emphasis on preventing CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere in the first place, not trying to suck it out. Sucking CO2 out at the same time as pumping it in describes a process as nihilistic and endless as the capital system itself. It’s a perfect fit.
Tree plantation may well have a substantial part to play in addressing the crisis in the climate system, but it has to be done properly, which is to say politically, taking on board social and economic drivers, interests, impacts, community involvement, and democratic control. New woodlands have to have the characteristics of genuine ecosystems and fit into the environment, and not merely be harvest factories under the control of business. Neither business-as-usual nor politics-as-usual is an option. The problem with tree planting, like all tech solutions, is that it enables politicians to adopt measures as substitutes for more effective climate actions with respect to the climate system. There is no substitute for a comprehensive policy of decarbonisation, and such a policy is only possible on the basis of making substantial democratic inroads into the power of capital. The wide appeal of tree planting, like the appeal of other tech solutions, lies in its existence as a substitute for effective socio-economic strategies for zero carbon. However much the intervention of politics and awkward questions of power, resources, and control may discomfort those looking for a reasonable solution to which all can agree, this confrontation with socio-economic realities is essential if we are serious about addressing the converging crises that are upon us. Technological fixes are no substitute for an effective politics, and often function as a cover for a ‘business as usual’ which is itself ‘capitalism as usual.’
The universal enthusiasm for tree planting just looks like a dense thicket of greenwash to me. If I am sorry to sound so negative, I’ll never be sorry for being critical.