LISTENING TO TREES
By T. J. BANKS
Trees do their best growing in clumps, not in solitary splendor, as we’ve been told. Doing away with trees and grasslands for agriculture, development, or any other purpose destroys fertile soil, leaving us with just plain dirt. Not all old trees need to be cut down: many are still viable, ecologically speaking.
These are just a few things that Basil Camu, author of From Wasteland to Wonder: Easy Ways We Can Help Heal Earth in the Sub/urban Landscape (2024), explains. Camu joined his dad’s business, Leaf & Limb Tree Service in Raleigh, North Carolina back in 2009, “not know[ing] the first thing about trees – except how to cut them down.” He quickly learned, however, that they “play an essential role in the well-being of life on this planet. We decided to transform Leaf & Limb into a company that cares about trees instead of one that cuts them down.”
Camu became adept at speaking tree – and at really listening to what they were telling him.
“Forests, if you can find one that hasn’t been over-predated by deer or over-managed by humans, are very dense with shrubs and trees,” Camu explains. “It would also seem that trees share resources….Soil formation is driven primarily by plants.” Perhaps Camu’s most radical vital point is that not all the trees we worry about should be cut down – that most decisions to do so “are fear-based. We found that with about nine out of the 10 calls we get from people to remove their trees, there’s actually nothing wrong or you can fix the problem with a much easier of cheaper solution.”
The tree in question often turns out to be “not only viable but crucial,” he adds. “I always like to say that when a tree dies, a whole new life begins – a whole new ecosystem. There are a tremendous number of insects and fungi that need that tree.” And they’re not the only ones. Birds and bats also depend on dead trees or “snags.” Woodpeckers make their homes in them and feed off beetles from the snags and from the live trees nearby, thus protecting the latter from insect predation. Bats like roosting in the dead trees and “provide free mosquito control service.” So, think carefully about taking that dead tree down — it’s having a busy and beneficial afterlife.
