A Pine Tree's Ecosystem
Observing an entire city in one tree and thinking about our interconnectedness
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Last week, I spent some time in the woods with my son’s first grade class. Every Friday, he and his friends hike out into the forest adjacent to his school’s campus and have about three hours to stay in one area and perform imaginative play. This time, families were invited to come along and enjoy a peaceful morning surrounded by tall pine trees.
I used to walk in the woods a lot more regularly, but it’s been a few months since I’ve had time to do that. Even when I do go, I’m usually hiking through. I may stop for a minute or two to observe something interesting or to take in a sight, but I’m generally moving when I’m in a forest.
My experience with my son’s class was unique in that I spent an extended period of time in one general area. This meant that instead of observing things in passing, I could really take a deep, long look at the forest around and think deeply about what I was seeing.
One tree that really caught my attention was a tall, skinny pine tree that seemed to have been blown over at some point, presumably in a storm. It was now leaning against another pine tree, not really in any danger of falling, but also not really a thriving tree anymore.
The longer I looked at it, the more I could see that this single, unremarkable pine tree contained an entire city, an entire ecosystem, within its small trunk.
At some point when the tree had fallen, bugs like ants began to take over, eating the wood pulp and making paths through the trunk. These ants were helping to decompose the tree, breaking it down. But they were also serving another purpose for the forest.
The ants and other bugs under the surface of the bark attracted woodpeckers, who pecked holes in the trunk to access the bugs. In doing so, they were further helping to break down and decompose the tree.
The woodpecker holes started small, but towards the base of the tree, I discovered even larger holes. I’m not sure if these were entirely the work of a woodpecker or if another animal helped enlarge the holes, but at any rate, the larger holes led to a giant hollowed out section of trunk.
These larger holes were the perfect place for a mouse, a chipmunk, or other small creatures like that to make a nest, or at least to find shelter from the snow and rain.
All of these creatures were going about their business selfishly, yet their acts were also helping the other critters around them, or were benefitting the larger ecosystem
I couldn’t help but think about this in the context of humanity.
So often, we go about our days thinking only of ourselves: our needs, our wants, our desires. We don’t think about how our actions benefit or hurt the things in our environment, whether that’s other people, other animals, or things like the air or the water around us.
Our modern capitalist system has done a great job getting us to think as everything as distinct and disconnected. We buy gas because we have to drive somewhere, not thinking about the harmful extraction process or what happens when that fuel is burnt. We go to the grocery store to buy food because we’re hungry, not thinking about the destructive agricultural practices under which that food was grown, the thousands of miles it was transported, or in some cases, the vast amounts of chemicals and sugars used in the processing of packaged foods.
But nothing that we do is abstract. Everything is connected.
Our world is much more like that pine tree than we care to admit. There is life everywhere: ants, woodpeckers, mice, chipmunks. We are a part of that system, whether we chose to see it or not.
We also tend to think of life and death as binary: something is either dead or alive. When we embalm our dead bodies and protect them in thick wooden coffins, it’s easy to get caught up in that kind of thinking. But I’m starting to realize that life and death is really a continuum, a cycle, a process. To quote Semisonic: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end”
(And yes, I just quoted 90s one hit wonder rock band Semisonic in a paragraph about life and death, the type of writing that you will only find at Willoughby Hills. If you enjoy deep thoughts punctuated by 30 year old music references, consider upgrading to a paying membership today)
This entire time, I’ve been discussing this pine tree as though it was fully dead too. But even as the lower sections of the tree were being actively decomposed and hollowed out, when I looked to the top of the tree, I still saw a few living branches with green pine boughs.
Somehow, even through falling over and being slowly eaten away, this pine tree’s roots managed to hang on, and enough nutrients were able to travel through the trunk to reach the upper branches, some 25-30 feet above my head.
We can choose to see ourselves as separate from nature. We can choose to see ourselves as separate from other people. Or, if we spend a little time observing, we can realize that nature isn’t just a place to be, it’s a part of who we all are. And we are all way more connected than we care to admit.
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