Crane lowers tree surgeon into the top of an 80′ oak. Photo: Dave Lindorff.
My house located in southeastern Pennsylvania about nine miles north of Philadelphia, in which my wife and I have lived and raised a family over the past 28 years, is a testimonial to the crisis of climate disaster.
That looming, and already evident disaster can be clearly illustrated by three trees.Two of these are quite young. The other as of last summer, is just a very large stump.
We moved from Hong Kong back to the US in 1997 so my harpsichordist spouse could take up her new job as a professor of early keyboard a Temple University in Philly, and our two kids could experience school in the US — high school in the case of our daughter and nursery school in the case of our son. We has purchased a unique place to live: a somewhat neglected and rundown 257-year old stone farm house and really neglected barn on 2.3 wooded acres, the rest of the original 100-acre farm having long before been sold off for a suburban housing tract.
Over the years, I fixed up both structures, re-roofed both buildings, added missing doors to the rooms, wired in overhead lights, repaired long-neglected plumbing, etc. We had a lot of trouble, though with large trees near the house including a huge horse chestnut tree that was diseased and managed to drop a huge limb on my old Volvo station wagon, bending the frame and caving in the roof which rendered it scrap. Other trees that died or got felled by hurricanes over the years included an American elm, two beautiful old apple trees, several smaller oak trees, all the ash trees on the property in one bad year of a elm bark beetle infestation, and a mammoth silver maple tree near the house — the oldest tree on the property that had given the property its name: Maple Tree Farm.
As the mid-1990s was when climate change began receiving a lot of attention, and I became aware that the tree die-offs we were witnessing were mostly the result of that new environmental threat, either because storms, like Hurricane Sandy, with its bizarre track that saw it make landfall in New York Harbor, then turn west instead of the typical northeastern storm track, and ran across New Jersey, into Pennsylvania and right over our house. There were also destructive insect infestations that were worsened by unusually warm winters which didn’t kill fungus-spreading beetles that managed to over-winter in bark crevasses or under fallen leaves, as well as extended summer droughts, that stressed all the trees.
But by 2006, when I’d read James Lovelock’s alarming book The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity on It and Mark Lynas’ even more terrifying Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, I realized that our stone house, which had survived a revolutionary war, innumerable hurricanes, the widening of a former wagon trail and later wooden plank road and finally a widened and frequently re-paved main state thoroughfare with heavy traffic including large trucks, I had an epiphany. Our house, because of its durability, was destined to become reef for fish, corals and algae! Even though its elevation well above current sea level was vulnerable to polar ice melt. Chesapeake Bay, an large arm of the Atlantic Ocean, fed by the Delaware, Susquehanna and Potomac Rivers, reaches inland to a point some 20 miles to the south of our house and the Delaware River, which is at sea level upstream to a point about 18 miles to our east. Since a fully melted Greenland and Antarctica snow caps are a real possibility, eventually over a few hundred years the seas could rise globally by up to 216 feet, which would make a map of North America unrecognizable and erase much of the whole East Coast from Canada’s Maritime Provinces to Florida and the Gulf states.
Thinking of that relatively distant yet increasingly likely future, and about the much closer and predictable chaos that willl ensue just from the current track of temperature rise and social disruption, I decided I needed to take some serious action. Having noticed palmetto palm trees growing tall on the south-facing side of houses around Williamsburg, Virginia during a trip there in around 2010, and reading more recently that that southeastern Pennsylvania could have have climate in another by 2030 similar to Virginia’s 2010 climate, I decided to purchase and plant two Windmill Palms.
What the mail-order tree nursery sent me for an affordable $15 each were two small palm trees that the instructions promised if planted in a sheltered southern exposure setting in my climate zone, would thrive and grow, surviving our ever milder winters, and would become stately palms of a 15-20-foot height. I chose one spot about eight feet out from the south side of my house, and a second spot in a more sheltered corner or the house that would protect the palm there, where it would be closer to two warm walls, protecting the tree from both the east and the north. Both young trees were about 18” tall over their root balls at the time.
I’m committed to becoming the first Philadelphian to be able to sip piña coladas while toasting humanity’s self-anhilation under my own prophetic palm trees but this will take a little time. So far the more sheltered of the two palms has a nearly three-foot, quite thick and sturdy-looking trunk with the trademark thatched weve of cut ogg stalks of earlier lower-down fronds. The large dark-green newer fronds reach up over 6.5 feet and reach out in all dirrections by a radius of almost six feet. The more exposed palm located farther out from the house has grown more slowly and some of its somewhat smaller fronds (which on palms last for years), have suffered frost burns at their tips, which I have had to snip away each spring. It has a shorter trunk and beautiful light green fronds that reach not yet four feet above the ground. But if not as fast growing, it is still seemingly surving the winters, and is otherwise thriving too.
I have had a sadder climate-related task which I took care of last summer: the sacrificial murder of an ancient almost two-hundred year old Oak tree with a five-foot diameter trunk — a beautiful and perfectly healthy specimin that soared up 80-feet above the ground standing 20 feet behind the kitchen of the house.
The problem was the the huge tree-sized limbs spreading outward and upward beginning about 20 feet above the ground were long enough that any one of them leaning towards the house, if broken off by a heavy wind, could have crushed and turned it into a pile of rubble . The frameless house with its stone walls only held together by mortar and clay, are not designed for that kind of attack. And I couldn’t have solved the problem by having the threating branches taken off because that would have unbalanced the whole tree, putting a neighbor’s house at risk should the whole giant tree be toppled in a heavy storm.
It was a dramatic but sad day when a crane operator came with his massive truck-mounted crane able to pick up the heavy limbs as the tree surgeon cut them off from the trunk. The crane operator then carried them gently and frighteningly right over the roof of the house, setting them down on the front lawn where a crew with chain saws cut them into manageable lengths auitable for splitting and using in the fireplace.
The ancient tree will not go to waste at least, but it was a solemn moment when I later knelt on the remaining stump as it began bleeding out its sap, and counted the rings. I ceremonially noted on it with a black marker how big the tree was when South Carolina Confederate troops fired on Ft. Sumter, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration, when the Spanish-American War was fought, when women gained the right to vote, and even when I and my wife and our two children were born between 75 and 32 years ago.
The tree, healthy as it was, could have conceivably yet seen more milestones, most of them likely tragic, had I not cut its life short, but I consoled myself with the thought that given what had been happening with the other great trees on the property — the storms that toppled some and the insect attacks that killed others — this tree would probably not have lasted much longer anyhow, and could well have suffered a violent death, taking our ancient house (and possibly its occupants) with it.
Meanwhile, the two palm trees, my grimly humorous effort to laugh in the face of impending climate disaster unfolding, will attest to the new global reality we are entering.
