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The shift from rights of usage to rights of ownership

The shift from rights of usage to rights of ownership, seen as the mercantile spirit of northern Europe inveigled or imposed itself across the world, was, it seems, the crucial shift, as forests ceased to be seen as sacred places of wonder, mystery and sustenance and instead became a standing crop with a value expressed in pounds, shillings and pence calculated by the acre and the ton.

The real tragedy is the enclosure of common land

The so-called tragedy of the commons (that humans cannot be trusted to manage a common resource sensibly) might be a problem for individualistic societies unable to restrain pollution and over-exploitation, but as a histrocial explanatio for the British landscape it doesn’t hold except perhaps as a retrospective ideological justification for the real tragedy to follow: the enclosure of common land.

In any carbon cycle, death is the engine of life.

Twisted pines grow in the most unlikely of cracks in the rocks. Dead trees, standing and fallen, are everywhere. This is the signature characteristic of wildwood - dead trees are allowed to rest where they fall. Dead trees support far more life than living ones, hence the density of bird life. Some species like tree pipits and redstarts associate only with old-grown forests because of the volume and species of insects. The great spooted woodpecker nests only in dead Scots pines. Even more niche, the pine hoverfly breeds exclusively in wet hollows of dead Scots pines. No wonder it is almost extinct in Scotland.

Modified source-sink dynamics govern resource exchange in ectomycorrhizal symbiosis

Summary

Symbiosis between tree roots and fungi as a trade explains mutualism development on evolutionary timescale but not experimental results. Instead think of it as source-sink dynamics.

Scotlands signature landscape - the bog - is a ruined landscape

Rackham argues that pine wood never stretched from shore to shore., but it certainly covered most of Scotland until Mesolithic humans began to clear the forest for agriculture, hunting and construction. Managing the forest rhrough felling, clearing or burning for game played a role in creating biodiverse habitats of heath and moor, but also set the stage for the creeping blanket bog that has become upland Britain’s signature landscape. The bog is, in a sense, a ruined ecosystem as tree clearance has allowed minerals and iron to be washed into the lower layers of the soil, creating a pan impermeable to water. Unable to drain, the rundra-type landscape becomes waterlogged, and plants do not fully decompose, forming peat.

Migration of Scots pine to Scotland supported by humans

Before driving north, I read a scientific paper by Lithuanian researchers demonstrating that the DNA of Scots pine in the eastern half of Scotland came from a refugium - a place where species survived the last ice age - near Moscow around 9000-8000 BCE. Previous DNA analysis has shown that the surviving pines in the west of Scotland came from the Iberian peninsula in modern-day Portugal and Spain. In both cases the seed migrated to Scotland on timescales hundreds of times faster than is possible through natural succession. The most likely vehicle for such rapid migration was humans.

The first expression of an economic system founded on overreach

The Romanes, Danes and the nobles of England were in search of natural resources, principally timber. The colonisation of Wales was the first expression of an economic system founded on overreach: having exceeded the limits of what their own environment could sustain, early mercantilists applied force to acquire tribute and resources elsewhere. Empire, whether British, Viking, Roman or otherwise, is by definition overreach. And colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy share a common, perverse philospoph: limits on some human’s freedom of action are seen as an affront to the principle of freedom itself. The excat opposite of the co-evolutionary dynamic of the forest.

The elite six boreal tree species

It was only when I discovered that a tiny handful of tree species make up the treeline that I began to see that an attempt at description might be possible. An elite club, the six featured here are the familiar markers of the northern territories: three conifers and three broadleaves evolved to survive the cold. Moreover, remarkably, each of these tree species has made a sectio of the treeline its own, outcompeting other species and anchoring unique ecosystems: Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandiavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska, and, to a lesser extent, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland.

But now the planet is hyperventilating

But now the planet is hyperventilating. This bright green halo is moving unnaturally fast, crowning the planet with a laurel of needles and leaves, turning the white Arctic green. The migration of the treeline north is no longer a matter of centimetres per century; instead it is hundreds of metres every year. The trees are on the move. They shouldn’t be. And this sinister fact has enormous consequences for all life on earth.

The treeline is a moving target

The fact that in modern usage the term ‘treeline’ has come to mean a fixed line on a map indicating the growing limit of trees is simply evidence of the very narrow time horizon of humans, and of how much we have come to take our current habitat for granted.