Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Forests, Climate Change, and Our Future

Abstract:

Forest management has emerged over the past decade as a prominent means to limit planetary warming below harmful thresholds. Climate centers now include in their models representations of forests, their physical and chemical interactions with the atmosphere, and changes in community composition and ecosystem structure so as to simulate forest feedbacks in a changing climate. This is a remarkable achievement given that less than thirty years ago some centers did not include vegetation in their models. How did we arrive at this point? Avocation of forests to improve climate has a multi-century history. It touches upon European colonialism, the nineteenth century origins of ecology and meteorology as scientific disciplines, and its legacy adversely imparts on the sciences today. Present-day ecologists and climate scientists, while striving for a common understanding, use different language to discuss forests and climate, and they talk across disciplines rather than exchanging knowledge among disciplines. And there is a need to consider forests beyond the lens of science; to see them not simply as a public utility that provides climate services. If we see forests only in the context of climate benefits we miss the larger import of trees to the natural world and in our lives. We need to return to a more interdisciplinary view of nature embraced by nineteenth century natural philosophers such as Alexander von Humboldt prior to the specialization of science. This lecture tells the story of the history, significance, and science of forest-climate influences, and how the geophysical perspective of climate became the biogeoscience perspective of Earth. It reflects on the past to explain how we arrived at the present and looks to the future to see what is needed. It presents an understanding of forests and climate from a robust interdisciplinary perspective – one deeper than can be attained through the standpoint of a single field of study. If not, if proffered through traditional disciplinary study, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of disciplinary chauvinism. The science of forests and climate, and its history, is complex and messy. We need to effectively cut the Gordian knot presented by interdisciplinarity to voice a coherent meaning. We need to see the forest for the trees.