Dear California trees,

When will you stand up and take responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not just the blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars or the rats you palms harbor. It’s not even that your out-of-control fires foul California’s air, destroy homes and drain the state budget.   


You trees get away with this irresponsibility because your millions of human apologists engage in a vast conspiracy of blame-shifting. We are told that the damage trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities that don’t keep you away from power lines, or government agencies that don’t manage you, or rural homeowners who live among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation. That’s pretty rich, since there are 4 billion live trees in California — 100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under you.

To your credit, you pull your weight in some ways: You store carbon, helping limit climate change.You collect and store the snowpack that California humans depend on for water.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has slipped.

Why? It starts with your exploitation of human fire-suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. While humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and giving up newspapers, you grew everywhere, creating dangerously dense forests with smaller, weaker trees.

Such overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and attack of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million of you to die between 2010 and 2017.

Did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads and power lines, and fueled apocalyptic fires across vast swaths of the state. These mega-fires seriously decreased that air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard work, because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you tax yourselves to help with expensive thinning projects? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees — especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman — were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires. When Gov. Jerry Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief, from environmental and logging interests alike.

I’ve even seen commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But years ago, the governor convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that included every tree stakeholder except the trees themselves. Without their work, the tree situation in California would be even worse. The task force might have accomplished even more if you trees had demanded a greater budget allocation for yourselves, but you remained characteristically quiet.

You can’t play shy any more. California’s tree problems are too big for humans. For us to solve your crisis, we’d have to engage in well-funded, long-term collaborations to restore and manage forestlands, and embrace new approaches to land preservation and fire prevention. Such far-sighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

So if you want to save the forests, you trees will have to do the work yourselves.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.


Read or Share this story: