Shades of green: an environmental and cultural history of Sitka spruce

455 Pages·2016·33.7 MB·English

by  Tittensor, Ruth

Shades of Green
An Environmental and Cultural History of Sitka Spruce
Ruth Tittensor
Ceremonial Potlatch Hat woven of Sitka spruce roots in the traditional Haida style by Debbie Young-Canaday of Juneau,
Alaska. Photo: Marilyn Holmes
They that plant trees love others besides themselves.
Adapted from Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
For Isabelle, Sebastian and Sylvie
Windgather Press is an imprint of Oxbow Books
Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
OXBOW BOOKS
10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EW
and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083
© Windgather Press and R. Tittensor 2016
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-909686-77-9
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-909686-78-6
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-909686-79-3
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the
publisher in writing.
For a complete list of Windgather titles, please contact:
United Kingdom United States of America
OXBOW BOOKS OXBOW BOOKS
Telephone [phone] Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone] Fax [phone]
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]
www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow
Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate group
Cover design by Susan Anderson, Eikon Design
Contents
Foreword by Richard Oram
Foreword by Richard Carstensen
Geography
Acknowledgements
1. The Most Hated Tree?
2. ‘The Tree From Sitka’
3. Origin, Migration and Survival on the Edge
4. At Home in North American Rainforests
5. Sitka Spruce in the Lives of First Nations
6. Prehistoric Lives and Woodlands in Britain and Ireland
7. Woodland History and Britain’s Need for Sitka Spruce
8. Realisation: New Trees for New Woodlands
9. Ships, Surveyors, Scurvy and Spruces
10. Journeys and Experiments for Seeds and People
11. From Rare Ornamental to Upland Carpet
12. Peat: The Final Frontier
13. Perceptions
14. Contribution to Modern Societies
15. Plantation Ecology: Plants and Animals Re-assemble
16. Sustainability in North America
17. New Temperate Rainforests: Futures in Ireland and Britain
Bibliography
Glossary
Latin Names
Foreword
Richard Oram
Professor of Environmental and Medieval History, Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy, University of Stirling, Scotland
In the intersecting fields of cultural and environmental history, the focus of scholarly study has
been animal species, mineral commodities and rivers: cod and herring, salt and coal, the Forth
and Severn, to name but a few.
Oddly, while trees and woodland generally have long been subjects of research, there has
been no single tree species that has been treated to such close-focus research as a cultural
entity around which a complex human system operates, rather than solely a living organism in a
complex ecosystem. Given the English fixation with the oak as the symbol of everything from
enduring royalty to the virility of their fighting men and as an essential element in everything
from furniture-making and leather-tanning to the construction of warships – and to a lesser
extent the elm and the yew – it is remarkable that there has been no study that has tried to draw
these two strands – the cultural and the environmental – together in a truly interdisciplinary
exploration. It is rather ironic, then, that the species which should be the subject of such a
treatment is one whose very presence in these islands has been the focus of both censure and
celebration since it was first planted on a large scale a century ago: Picea sitchensis – the
Sitka spruce.
How can a tree that on one side of the globe was valued for its intrinsic worth as a bountiful
source of manifold and versatile materials, and treated with spiritual reverence by the native
peoples of America’s Pacific North-West, become one of the most loathed and reviled
organisms to so many people on the other? Known to Europeans since the later eighteenth
century and grown as specimen trees in British arboreta, it burst into public awareness in the
midtwentieth century when vast swathes of Britain and Ireland’s largely tree-less northern and
western uplands began to be submerged beneath a tidal wave of dark-green saplings. It was
loved by foresters and government planners who saw in this fast-growing and resilient species
a strategic resource that could provide these islands with a secure, home-grown supply of
commodities as diverse as timber and wood-spirit for future wars. Large-scale planting
coincided with more intensive ecological study of the land on which they were planted, land
long seen as almost valueless, and the intensification of an environmental consciousness that
awakened the wider public to the destructive impact of humanity on the world around them. To
many, however, it was the visual impact that was most harmful in a culturally transformative
way: the distinct character of Britain’s anthropogenic landscapes that had been shaped over
millennia of human intervention into something familiar and loved, and around which so many
aspects of rural life revolved, seemed to be swept away by something visually jarring and,
simply, foreign.
For Sitka spruce the result was a popular loathing that was at once an ill-informed reaction
to the shock-of-the-new usually associated with purely man-made features like electricity
pylons or dams, reinforced by opponents of large-scale forestry planting. Often dismissed as
alien vermin, the Sitka spruce plantations have been portrayed as the coniferous equivalent of
the Dark Satanic Mills that scarred the face of Blake’s green and pleasant land. Yet, like the
output of those reviled mills, the products of the plantations have delivered to successive
generations commodities upon which they depend.
It remains the most widely-planted tree species in these islands, but greater care is taken
through strategic intermingling with stands of trees of other species – producing variation in
height, colour, shape and texture.
In many ways, these opposed responses, of antipathy and dependence, of rejection and
integration, reflect, often disturbingly, public attitudes to the presence of other exotica like
roads, airports or foreigners. And it is here, in its exploration of the cultural significance of the
tree in both its ‘home’ and its ‘host’ lands, that Ruth Tittensor’s study of this quite remarkable
tree transcends the traditional nature/culture opposition still found in so many natural or
environmental history books. In her discussion of still deeply-entrenched public attitudes
towards the Sitka spruce she holds up a mirror in which modern society in these islands can
reflect upon itself.
Foreword
Richard Carstensen
Naturalist, Discovery Southeast, Juneau, Alaska
On the phone, just now (June 2015), Ruth Tittensor and I compared the summer weather
outside our homes on far sides of the world. Quite the same, we concluded – cool, grey and
moist. No surprise; that’s partly why we were talking in the first place.
An American coastal tree, evolved to thrive in my well-watered, fire-free climate, has
eagerly galloped over the moistly moderate UK and Republic of Ireland. Roughly
contemporaneous with the British invasion of American rock music, Sitka spruce executed a
counter-coup. Esteemed and groomed by European silviculturalists, the spruce plantations, and
more feral, tree-by-tree advances into moor and sheep pasture, are less welcomed by lovers of
open, rural landscapes. Social tension and ecological conquest make a potent mix in the hands
of a good story-teller like Ruth Tittensor.
Another way in which I feel connected to Ruth is in our cross-disciplinary approaches to
study of natural and cultural history. We’ve each tried to ‘lean back’ a bit, to admire the wild
and unforeseeable sweep of evolution, succession, and cultural metamorphosis. From that
perspective, the entrenched debate over what is ‘natural, traditional, indigenous’, or ‘alien,
aggressive, weedy’, can seem a bit parochial. Aesthetics aside, what have been the deeper
ecological implications of the spread of Sitka spruce into Britain and Ireland or of the massive
loss of old-growth spruce forest in my (western) hemisphere? When we learn to ‘turn on the
projector’ – to visualise changes in landform, demography, forest structure, species range – the
concepts of ‘native’ and ‘newcomer’ relax into relativity.
That said, I agree with ecologist Dan Simberloff that invasive species should be held ‘guilty
until proven innocent’. Nor should we ever deem ‘proof ’ absolute. Here in Alaska, a few
dispersed patches of ornamental Japanese and Bohemian knotweed (Fallopia japonica/F.
japonica x F. sachalinensis) could be found in yards and gardens when I arrived about 40
years ago – innocently minding their own business, I thought. We might then, with enough
foresight, have eradicated it. Now, as any British naturalist could have warned us, it will be
much harder. Sitka spruce has been present in Britain and Ireland for almost as long as
Brazilian pepper-tree (Schinus terebinthifolius) has grown in Florida. For most of that time,
few in Florida suspected the innocuous pepper-tree would eventually ‘bolt’, overwhelming
and displacing coastal mangrove communities, as well as scrub and pine flatwood habitats.
Is this a meaningful comparison? Southern Florida – a cultural and ecological cul-de-sac
until a few centuries ago – is a hotspot of threatened, specialised, endemic species.
Britain and Ireland have been cultural and ecological crossroads for millennia, swept by
wave after wave of hardy, world-travelling flora and fauna. Which of the ephemerally ‘native’
British species might now – or in the future – fall victim to authorised or surreptitious spread
of Sitka spruce? What will be the long-term costs and contributions of this conifer to
biodiversity in its invited hemisphere? Although surely, nobody knows, who is best prepared
to guide us?
For my money, that cultural ecologist, who appraises ignorance, and patiently chips away at
it, one fact, one story, one hypothesis at a time. Ruth Tittensor has scaled out to a global view
of Sitka spruce. She examines its evolutionary and natural history, as well as the roles it played
for cultures as diverse as seventeenth century Alaskan Tlingit – to whom iron adzes salvaged
from Asian flotsam were novelties – and mid-twentieth century ecologists, then perceived,
Ruth remembers, as ‘eccentric bearded men in sandals’ (hmmm, that still describes me pretty
well).
Reading Shades of Green, I realise how much we have to learn from each other. If Sitka
spruce eventually comes to define the ‘new temperate rainforests’ of Britain and Ireland,
where better for their foresters to preview them than in an Alaskan Landmark Forest, one of 76
one-acre (0.4 ha) plots we established on Tongass Forest stream sides? In these forests, old-
growth spruces rise more than 60 m (200 ft) over bear-chewed salmon carcasses, in thickets of
fruiting Devil’s club (Oplopanax horridum) and Grey currant (Ribes bracteosum). And if
Alaskan second-growth spruce-hemlock ‘plantations’ ever replace the old-growth forest
currently favoured by our anachronistic timber industry, who better to coach us than Ruth’s
colleagues in silviculture and forest ecology, who for more than a generation have been
iteratively adjusting the balance of timber yield, landscape aesthetics, and habitat values?
I hope every world-changing species someday earns a biographer as capable as Ruth
Tittensor, and a tribute as penetrating and open-minded as Shades of Green.