Yale Forest Forum: A Tree’s View of History
On Wednesday, February 15, 2023, Yale Forest Forum (part of the Yale School of the Environment) and Orion Magazine presented “A Tree’s View of History: A Conversation with Lacy M. Johnson” via Zoom webinar. Johnson is an experienced writer from the greater Houston area. In 2022, she published the book More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas with co-editor Cheryl Beckett of the University of Houston through University of Texas Press. More recently, she wrote the essay “The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine” for Orion, connecting longleaf pine farm to slavery in the United States. The notice of this talk, which I received via email from the Atlantic Black Box project, caught my attention immediately, since I know a lot about longleaf pines my time as a park ranger at Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, where longleaf pines grow in abundance thanks to conservation efforts.
The talk was moderated by Mary Evelyn Tucker, founder of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. She focused the conversation on Johnson’s writing about climate change and natural disasters. Johnson described the the original size of the longleaf pine forests, which covered around 92 million acres from eastern Texas to Florida to Virginia. The forests now cover 5 million acres, with only 12,000 acres filled with old growth trees. Four major changes to the environment caused the destruction of the trees. The growth of the turpentine industry, which involved bleeding sap or resin from the tree, along with the sawmill bonanza of the early 20th century caused a dramatic reduction in trees due to industry. Fire suppression policies upheld by the United States Forest Service from 1905 to the 1960s and 1970s increased the amount of brown spot fungus that attacked the pine, encouraged the growth of brush, and discouraged the growth of new pine. Unregulated use of private property meant many lands were cleared. All 12,000 acres of old growth are part of protected public lands.
Johnson described the use of storytelling and tools for writers when advocating for the environment, especially related to her work as a professor in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. Stories about nature have been told for thousands of years, and words describing nature are hidden in our everyday speech. The word “dendrology”, meaning the study of trees, comes from Ancient Greek, while its roots are in the Proto-Indo-European term “deru”, also an ancestor of “truth” and “truce”. Later in history, the Christianization of the Roman Empire introduced the idea of a temporary earthly dominion separate from an eternal kingdom in heaven. In the medieval period or European Middle Ages, Catholic scholars devised the “Great Chain of Being”, establishing a Christian worldview that ordered all creation from lowest to highest esteem. During the Enlightenment in western Europe, the disciplines of hard science and soft science were separated, further dividing the natural world from the higher thought of humanity. Scholars like Carl Linnaeus brought supposedly scientific verification to hierarchies, going as far as to invent and rank human races. Because modern understanding of nature is based upon past knowledge, Johnson argues that many seemingly scientific stories involving nature use a single, dominant, Eurocentric narrative. These stories convince readers that non-scientists can do nothing to protect the natural world.
In contrast, Johnson found ways to value or mourn the loss of nature. She cited the article “The New Abolitionism”, written by Editor-at-Large for The Nation and MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes back in 2014, as one model for examining the meaning of the natural world. Hayes mimicked the radical, even extremist, language of the abolitionist movement of the early to mid 19th century by condemning the impact on fossil fuels on the environment and calling for capital divestment. Hayes paralleled the treatment of enslaved African-Americans as “things” used for profit, rather than beings with rights, to the use of nature as a “thing” rather than a living entity. Johnson referenced her article “How to Mourn a Glacier”, published by The New Yorker in 2019, as another way of treating nature as a being instead of a thing. Icelandic scientist Oddur Sigurðsson created death certificates for each glacier melted due to climate change and installed a plaque on the mountain where the glacier had flowed.
Johnson also described her experience as a Houston resident during Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that hit Texas and Louisiana in 2017. She and her family lived on the far west side of Houston near Addicks and Barker Reservoirs that ordinarily would have prevented water from overflowing the bayous, protected the downtown, and regulated the ship channels. Due to the sudden influx of water from the gulf, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was forced to open the reservoir gates, causing additional flooding in residential areas. Johnson described how water came within fifteen feet of her house, while many of her neighbors had flooded homes. The city of Houston was built over the clay ground of coastal prairie, a porous soil type that has become a bowl instead of a sponge due to the layers of pavement. After the disaster, the Houston Endowment and other partners assisted Johnson in creating the Houston Flood Museum, which reflects on how climate change causes natural disasters that further aggravate wealth gaps and racial disparity. The only positive in the disaster was that bayou trees like bald cypress and water tupelo were not affected, as these species enjoy flooding.
While this talk spent little time discussing “the longleaf pine’s integral role in the American slave trade” that I was promised, I did get a refresher on the ecology and history of eastern Texas. I enjoyed the overview of the history of European thought on nature and learning about unique takes on environmentalist activism. The speaker and moderator were both excellent, as they came prepared and referenced interesting materials. My only complaint was the apparent false advertising, as I spent the entire talk waiting for a topic that was only briefly referenced.