Earth Day and Arbor Day, 2021

Flowering crabapple in bloom

This year we are combining our Earth Day and Arbor Day issues to talk about deforestation and reforestation. You may want to revisit our 2019 Earth Day and 2020 Earth Day issues, and our 2020 Arbor Day issue, as well.

We live in the high country of western Colorado, where we are acutely aware of climate change, having lived through several consecutive years of drought. Summer temperatures continue to climb and will likely continue to do so for years, even decades.  Some climatologists have warned us that this coming August may be the hottest one on record, with many days above 94 degrees.

 

 

Such temperatures can be devastating to both people and animals. The number of deaths from heat exhaustion and heat stroke are likely to go up sharply.  They are particularly dangerous for the elderly and for children with respiratory problems.

Are catches like this a thing of the past?

 

Both livestock and native animals will suffer.  Many animals, particularly mammals and birds, are raising families at this time and mortality rates for them are already high.  In some cases. entire species maybe wiped out. High temperatures, especially combined with low water levels, threaten native fish populations as well.  In some places stream flows are shrinking so much that officials are calling for limits on fishing or even years when there may be no fishing at all.

Last year we saw the three most severe wildfires in state history. There is no longer a "fire season".  Major fires can — and do — happen year around. In their wake come landslides and more frequent and severe avalanches.  Without protective ground cover, the land will not hold snow-melt or spring rains, often causing flash flooding down-stream.

 

Native mule deer (print by Annake)

Here in Colorado, the large areas where whole stretches of forest died from beetle-kill some years ago have posed even more problems.  A decision was made over large areas neither to clear-cut nor to cut patches or lanes of dead trees and replant with aspen or young evergreens that are immune to the beetles.  This has led to both large, unsightly areas of dead trees along major highways and also loss of habitat for many native animals.

 

Except for water birds, almost all native birds — from songbirds to raptors — are dependent upon trees for food, shelter, nesting places, etc.  Clear-cutting of large areas of native forest interrupts birds' migration patterns, breeding seasons, number of broods, survival of offspring, and general health of the populations.  Some birds can, given time, adjust to living in towns and cities, but most cannot.  The barn owl,  for example,  can be found in barn lofts and other relatively undisturbed places as well as in the wild, but it has had centuries in which to make that adjustment. Other species are running out of time.

Rocky Mountain Goat (print by Annake)

Oddly enough,  the wood of the dead trees is extremely attractive and is much in demand for architectural panels and other uses. Now, it might seem simple to clear-cut the areas and use the money for the sale of the wood to pay for new plantings, but that may not be such a good idea. Clear-cut areas of 40 acres or more often suffer from erosion and over-use.  There would be no shelter for the small, newly-planted trees.  A slower approach with smaller clearings may be more successful, particularly where the land is relatively steep.  Planting aspen first might give a better chance for successful reforestation. Quick-growing but relatively short-lived, the aspen could act as  "nurse trees" for the young evergreens while creating beautiful autumn scenes to attract viewers.  Another suggestion that has merit is to choose young evergreen species from places like New Mexico and Arizona, which are already adapted to hotter and drier climates.  By the time the trees mature, the climate is likely to have become even hotter and drier.  Experts from many fields need to cooperate to design good plans for these areas.

Click here to download

Earth Day will be celebrated on April 22nd, 2021, in 170 different countries. The poster to the left is available as a free download from the U.S. government website, https://share.america.gov/.  There is also an official Earth Day 2021 poster available at https://www.earthday.org/, by Brazilian artist Speto, which is being sold for fund raising.

 

The theme for this year is "RESTORE OUR EARTH!" First and foremost, discussion will be about the disappearance of the planet's tropical rain forests.

Tropical rain forests are found on both sides of the Equator, usually between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. They are rapidly disappearing due to clear-cutting for farms and ranches, as well as simply for money. Let me try to put this in perspective. One and a half acres of trees are cut down every second. That means 36 football fields worth of trees are cut every minute. Multiply that by the minutes in an hour and the hours in a day and you can see how enormous the problem is. Twenty percent of the world's oxygen is generated by rain forest trees.  About 20,000 species of rain forest plants are expected to disappear in the next 25 years. When you consider that at least a quarter of our current cancer-fighting drugs, as well as other medicines, come from the rain forests of the Amazon, that is a very significant fact. Deforestation also disrupts the water cycle. Trees absorb groundwater and release it back into the atmosphere through the process of transpiration from their leaves. That water is pure and clean, making the air good to breathe.

 

Endangered Species, a few of many

If you are concerned, as you know we are, for endangered species of animals, just think of this: the existing rain forests cover only about 7 per cent of the earth's surface. But they contain more than HALF of the earth's species. Just this morning I read an article about how illegal poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks, combined with the loss of habitat from deforestation, are pushing the African elephants closer and closer to extinction.  And that is just one species among many.

Much of the deforested trees are used for the making of paper.  The greatest consumers of that paper are from North America, Europe, and Japan. None of these areas have rain forests of their own. The average U.S. household may get as much as 40 pounds of "junk mail" every year.  That makes recycling and reuse a "must" for most of us.

Free stickers/stamps available from the Arbor Day Foundation

"In Times of Uncertainty, Plant a Tree."

Dan Lambe, President, Arbor Day Foundation

The official date for Arbor Day 2021 is April 30, 2021.  Ordinarily there would be a special theme with special activities to honor the occasion. But this is not an ordinary year. The pandemic has made many activities difficult or impossible.  Arbor Day started in the U.S. in the state of Nebraska and became a country-wide celebration. It has now spread to many other nations around the world.  Each state may have its own designated Arbor Day. The dates vary greatly from Florida to Alaska, depending upon the dates when young trees can safely be planted. Free trees which are appropriate for a region are available from the Arbor Day Foundation.

Here are some suggestions for activities which individuals, families, or small groups, following the Covid rules, might do to celebrate the occasion:

• Plan a hike or bike ride to a park or forest are to study and admire the trees. Stay on the designated paths. take a bag along and pack out any trash that you come across. Enjoy and appreciate the trees.
• Make a poster, take a photograph, draw or paint a picture of a particular tree. Check out our post, "Trees in Art and Design," to give you some ideas.
• Read the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer, or write a poem, rap, or song about forests or a particular tree.
• Search for online lessons about trees, forestry, what to do (and all the things that you should NOT do) if you are lost, injured, or stranded in a forest.
• Learn how to understand, interpret, and count tree rings.
• Join and/or contribute to a group fighting for the survival and recovery of the rain forests. The Arbor Day Foundation and EarthDay.org are great places to start; plus, they have their own lists of activities that you can add to this one.
  

What does he do who plants a tree
He plants for sap and leaf and wood,
In love of home and loyalty,
And far-cast thought of civic good
His blessing on the neighborhood.
                                             Charles Lathrop Pack

To the trees!

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Arbor Day 2020

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Aspens  (photo by J.D.)

National Arbor Day is celebrated on the last Friday in April in the United States, where the idea was first proposed by Julius Sterling Morton in the 1870's. Morton was a Nebraska newspaper editor, a very successful farmer, and a statesman. He was very respected as an agriculturist. Morton loved trees, but Nebraska was not really rich in native trees, so he planted many trees on his estate. He came up with the idea for an Arbor Celebration and got the backing of other influential people. The first Arbor Day was celebrated in Nebraska on April 10, 1872. Morton's followers planted an estimated one million trees in Nebraska.

"Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future."

J. Sterling Morton

The day became a Nebraska state holiday in 1885, the date changed to April 22 to honor Morton’s birthday. By the 1920's, each state had also passed a law establishing a state Arbor Day. These are celebrated on different days in each state. Trees are planted for these celebrations, so the dates depend on the climate in each state. In 1970, President Richard Nixon proclaimed a national Arbor Day on the last Friday of April each year. This year National Arbor Day falls on April 24th. Morton's former estate and lodge are now Arbor Lodge State Historical Park. Nebraska's state tree is the Cottonwood.

Blue spruce

All of the states in the United States have a State Tree (some have more than one).  In addition to State Trees, the U.S. National Tree is the mighty Oak and the District of Columbia claims the Scarlet Oak. Our Colorado's State Tree is the Colorado Blue Spruce.

What Is Deforestation?

Deforestation is the cutting down of forests to make way for farmland, pastureland, building cities, logging for lumber, and mining. It also happens when fires in the forest get out of control, or when there is an infestation of insects or diseases from some other part of the world for which the forest has no immunity.

Here are some disturbing facts about deforestation:

• Forests currently cover about 30% of the land, but scientists fear that 100 years from now there will be none left!
• One and a half acres of forest worldwide is cut down every second!
• That means 90 acres are cut down every minute. That's 20 football fields! Multiply that 90 acres by 60 and you get 5,400 acres per hour. Multiply that number by 24 to see how much forest is lost every day
  
• Deforestation contributes heavily to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is because trees absorb carbon dioxide to make their food and to grow. In return, they produce oxygen and release it into the air. Carbon dioxide is a dangerous "greenhouse gas" and adding it to the atmosphere raises temperatures worldwide. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today is higher than it has been in 3 million years.
  
• Trees help to clear the air of pollution. People in large cities were wearing masks outdoors to protect themselves from pollution for years before the coronavirus epidemics began.
• Deforestation also contributes to soil erosion because tree roots keep soil from eroding. Loss of trees has made floods more devastating because so much topsoil is washed away. That also means that substances like fertilizer are washed into coastal waters, poisoning ocean plants and animals.

  

  Endangered lowland gorilla, photo by J.J.

• The majority of Earth's endangered animals live wholly or partially in forests.
• The tropical rain forests were once called "the lungs of the Earth" because of all the carbon dioxide they kept out of the atmosphere and all of the oxygen they produced. But rain forests are disappearing faster than other forests.
• Many life-saving medicines, including cancer-fighting drugs, have come from species found in rain forests. Many more remain to be found — if they don't disappear before they are discovered. As many as 28,000 species will disappear at current rates worldwide by the year 2045.

  

  "And a Corby in a Pine Tree",  by J.J.

• Bird species here in North America are declining in alarming numbers. That means both numbers of birds and numbers of bird species.  Climate change is driving species to find cooler climates in order to survive. That may mean moving further north on the globe or moving to ever higher, cooler elevations. In either case, they may find these new habitats don't have good supplies of their natural foods. They may not find sufficient nesting materials to build nests that protect their eggs and baby birds. They may run into new predators. The fact that they have left their natural habitats may well mean that those habitats will suffer from increases in the populations of harmful insects and their larvae. We need to preserve existing trees and replant ones that have been lost.

 

What are some things that trees do for us besides affect air quality and climate change?

Do you like to put maple syrup on your pancakes and waffles? Maple syrup is made from the sap of sugar maple trees in the Spring during a time when the trees have come out of their winter dormancy and started producing fresh sap to carry nutrients throughout the tree. Read the labels carefully; there are a lot of "maple-flavored' syrups out there which cannot compare with the real thing!

Many of the fruits that we eat grow on trees. That is something you can teach small children when you serve any of these fresh, canned, or frozen: apple, apricot, avocado, cherry, date, fig, kumquat, lemon, lime, mango, olive, orange, papaya, peach, pear, plum, quince, tangelo, tangerine. Many other fruits are available and popular in other parts of the world.

The same thing is true of nuts, which are the seeds of many trees. These include: almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, coconuts, hickory nuts, macadamia nuts, pecans, pinon and other pine nuts, and walnuts (both black and English).  But the list does not contain peanuts, which are not nuts and don't grow on trees. Coconuts and almonds produce a good substitute for milk that lasts much longer in the refrigerator than cow's milk.

As I mentioned before, many medicines have been derived from trees and tree products, particularly those from the rain forests.

A major use of cut trees is for lumber and plywood.  Woods with particularly nice colors and/or patterns are used for furniture and decorative moldings. Most of the latter are hardwoods, rather than the softer evergreens. If you have some of these, take good care of them. They will become increasingly rare and far more expensive.

What can we do about some of these problems?

Forest's Edge, photo by J.J.

The obvious answers are 1) cause fewer trees to be cut down and 2) plant new trees. Let's look at both of those activities. A huge amount of wood is used to make paper. That is something we can do something about. Going paperless as much as possible can help. Recycling paper will definitely help.

Cloth shopping bags

Using cloth shopping bags and not choosing to buy items with a lot of unnecessary packaging are large steps in the right direction.

Try to set up a book and magazine exchange with friends and don't duplicate subscriptions. Let the children draw and color on the backs of paper that is printed on one side only.  Ask companies that send unwanted catalogs to you to remove your name from their mailing lists. Encourage your children to make art and craft projects with paper and cardboard.  Reuse cardboard boxes for mailing or compact storage. Crumpled or shredded paper is better packing material from an environmental standpoint than "packing peanuts" or plastic airbags.  Use greeting cards and pretty wrapping paper again for decoupage and collage projects.

Planting a tree

Now, about planting trees.  The best trees to plant are those which are native to your area or which have been bred to do well in your soil, water, and climate conditions.  Check out your state tree, for example. Our state tree is the Colorado blue spruce and it is available here — baby ones are even free from the Arbor Day Foundation.  But you might want something that is more multi-purpose. Consider fruit trees. They don't take up as much space as shade trees, they grow fast, they provide you with valuable food, and the leftovers will make birds and squirrels happy.  In either case, read planting and care directions carefully and follow them.  You can also volunteer to plant trees in state and national parks or in areas where trees have been destroyed by wildfires or flash floods.  Check with the authorities about opportunities and regulations.

Here are some other things you can do:

1. Learn about prospective legislation that involves forests, parks and other public lands. Make your opinions clear and vote on the side of conservation and reclamation.
2. Vote for candidates for office who share your views. Talk to someone on your town or city council or attend some of their meetings. Ask questions about the possibilities for conservation and reclamation locally and make suggestions for improvements where possible.
3. Learn more about trees — they can be fascinating.
4. Teach your children to love and respect trees.
5. Don't carve your initials or words into tree bark. It can damage the growing layers underneath and let in harmful insects or diseases that will eventually kill the tree.
6. Watch an episode of Pete Nelson's Treehouse Masters on the Animal Channel™. Pete's a man who doesn't hesitate to hug a tree! See how carefully the crew cuts floors and decks so the trees can move naturally in the winds common to their environment. Those trees are meant to live for many decades.
7. If you cannot plant a tree,  give a donation to a group replanting areas ravaged by fires, floods, tornadoes or avalanches. Bring back the trees.

For more about trees, check our Extras page for:
Teachable Moments: Trees for Children
Teachable Moments: Trees for "Tweens" (Ages 9 to 12)

*** Our  "Extras"  page (the last tab on the top menu) has PDF files of extra materials related to the subjects in our blog posts, mostly aimed towards young people, their parents and teachers. Due to the current pandemic resrictions, we intend to expand this section greatly over the next two months. Check back every week for new files.

J.D., Annake's Garden Gnome

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What Is Earth Day?

*** NEW MATERIALS ON OUR EXTRAS PAGE  ***

See more info at end of this post.

Earthrise, photo graphed from Apollo 8

ANNAKE: Those of you who read our post on Earth Day 2019 know that I worked on a project which in 1967 made the Earth Sciences (Astronomy, Geology, Meteorology, Oceanography) mandatory parts of the science curriculum for grades 1-12 in all 50 states. We did a tremendous amount of research while we were trying to determine what scientific principles should be taught at each level. Things that we learned in climatology (a branch of meteorology) and oceanography alarmed us, and we were also made aware of the mass extinctions of much of our planet's animal and plant life. Most of us had also read Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, published in 1962.

Not long ago we held a yard sale in which I included a number of outdated science books, including some that had been sent to me by publishers after the new science curriculum was established. One gentleman was very excited by the books and asked me about them. I explained about our efforts in 1967. He thanked me profusely for our efforts. He said he had never known there was such a thing as geology until he read about it in a new textbook. He was "hooked for life". He majored in geology in college and had spent his life as a geologist until the previous year, when he retired.

The Grand Canyom, a geologist's playground

But, while we got the courses into the textbooks, we did not get the emphasis on those disturbing trends highlighted as we thought they should be.  When we received the textbooks from various publishers the following year, very little, if anything, was said about these issues. We felt that no one was listening to us. We wrote letters to teachers in other states, members of state and national government, science magazines, etc. and spoke to our students in detail about environmental issues. Some very important people were listening to us — our students — but they were not really in a position to make much of a difference yet.

One member of Congress shared our concerns — Gaylord Nelson, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. He was alarmed by the air pollution that was prevalent in large cities and disastrous oil spills like the one in the ocean off California in 1969. He set out to promote what he described to the media as a "natural teach-in" about environmental issues. On April 22, 1970, 30 million Americans — many of them college students and other youths —  from coast to coast attended conferences and rallies on environmental issues. That was the first Earth Day. In that same year the Environmental Protection Agency was created. Many environmental projects were supported by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. (Yes, that can happen!)  Important legislation was implemented, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Environmental Protection Act. Earth Day was, and still is, celebrated on April 22nd every year.

Clean air, clean water, clean shores - the American Dream?

For some years, this was an American project, growing in strength and numbers every year. But in 1990 Earth Day went global. It reached 200 million people in 141 countries. President Clinton presented Senator Nelson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest honor a civilian can receive in the U.S.

"It was a gamble, but it worked."  — Senator Gaylord Nelson

The theme for Earth Day 2020, on its 50th  anniversary, is Climate Control, because this is a major issue which affects everyone and must be dealt with now.

J.D.: For about the last 25 years, it has become popular in certain circles to deny that climate change is happening at all; or, if it is happening, that it is just a temporary statistical anomaly or a slow, gradual natural process that we can easily adapt to. For whatever reason — greed, shame, an attempt to avoid blame, belief in massive global conspiracies, ignorance, or just inertia — some cling to this belief despite the overwhelming evidence right before their eyes. Like this:

• The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest it has been for 3 million years.
• The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years.
• In the year 2019, almost 400 all-time high temperatures were set in the Northern Hemisphere.
• The continent of Australia suffered extreme drought, enormous wildfires, and the loss huge numbers of endangered species.

Melting glacier

• Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice six times faster than they did just 20 years ago. The amount of ice lost by their ice sheets last year would cover the entire state of Texas with a layer of ice 30 feet deep.
• Permafrost, the layer of soil in the arctic that has been frozen for centuries, is melting. This is releasing methane gas gas which was trapped there. Methane is one of the most serious greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. NASA has equipped planes with highly sensitive methane detectors. They have flown over 11,583 square miles (30,000 square kilometers) of Arctic tundra in North America, Asia, and Northern Europe, so far detecting 2 million of these methane "hotspots".
• But there is something else disturbing about the thawing of permafrost. People have been buried in shallow graves in this layer for a very long time. Scientists have already encountered viable samples of the virus which killed so many people in what was called the "Spanish flu" pandemic in 1918. They are now concerned about finding scarlet fever. And it is possible that smallpox — which was declared eradicated in 1980 — may make a reappearance. People have not been vaccinated for that deadly disease for four decades.

• Famine is another danger; in just the past few weeks, countries in Africa and the Near East have lost — and are still losing — huge amounts of their food supplies to hordes of locusts.

Flood

• Hurricane season is expanding at both ends.
• In 2019 Hurricane Dorian tied the 84-year record for having the strongest winds at landfall and became the 5th strongest Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in terms of atmospheric pressure.
• Since 1995 there have been 17 above-normal hurricane seasons.
• Now 800 million people are already vulnerable to climate change impacts such as droughts, floods, heat waves, extreme weather events, sea level rise and health issues.

That number goes up daily.

It’s bad, folks, and getting worse. If anyone wants to argue how we got here or why, or who is to blame, save it for another time and place; right now, we all need to do whatever we can to improve the situation. More importantly, we need to STOP doing anything that might make things even worse: when your house is on fire, you don’t solve the problem by throwing gasoline on it.

A climate agreement was signed by 195 nations in 2016, agreeing to limit global warming, adapt to climate change, and protect Nature. The United States is not currently one of them.

Endangered Lemur (Photo by J.J.)

ANNAKE: You probably know that those of us here at Annake's Garden are crusaders for the protection of endangered species. Recently the Weather Channel ™ did a nice interview with National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore. Some years ago, while Sartore was photographing a small, rather insignificant-looking sparrow called the grasshopper sparrow,  in Florida, he became interested in species — like that little bird — that were threatened with extinction. After his photo of the bird appeared on the cover of a national magazine, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Service devoted resources to ensure its survival.

Now Sartore is devoting his life to photographing, to the best of his ability, every endangered species while it is still here. He thinks it will take him another fifteen years to complete his project, called The Photo Ark. He films mostly in studios and in protected places like zoos and aquariums.  Most of the animals are photographed against a solid black or white background so that the focus is entirely on the animal.

Sartore says that when people look at one of his animal photographs, they are drawn to its eyes. There they see beauty, curiosity, determination, and other characteristics the we, ourselves, possess. All the photos are the same size, so that a little mouse is just as important in its portrait as an elephant is in its portrait. Each one plays a part in the ecology of the Earth and every one is important to all of us.

Cheetah, print by Annake

I really identify with that idea. When I do an animal "portrait",  I look at dozens — sometimes hundreds — of photographs, paintings, even cartoons.  But I don't want to portray just AN animal; I want to show THE animal. The last part of the picture that I put in is the animal's eyes. It is only then that I know the animal — in a way and at a level that I cannot truly explain.

Sartore says that an iconic photograph, which stands the test of time, can long outlive the photographer.  It tells a story. Photographs and photographic projects like The Photo Ark can illuminate the problem and save many endangered animals, if we care enough to help.

For examples of things that young people (and even those of us not so young) can do to help this coming Earth Day — and every day — check out these documents under our Extras tab:

• Teachable Moments: Preparing Children to Be Good Environmental Citizens 
• Teachable Moments: What "Tweens" Can Do to Help the Environment 
• An Open Letter to Teenagers about Good Environmental Citizenship

*** Our  "Extras"  page (the last tab on the top menu) has PDF files of extra materials related to the subjects in our blog posts, mostly aimed towards young people, their parents and teachers. Due to the current pandemic resrictions, we intend to expand this section greatly over the next two months. Check back every week for new files.

J.D., Annake's Garden Gnome

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.