WE NEED THE AIR OF THE TREES
This past October I had the opportunity to tour the Menominee Tribal Enterprise sawmill located in Neopit, Wisconsin on the Menominee Indian Reservation. The logs that come into the sawmill are harvested from the 220,000 acre Menominee Forest. They have been harvested in a sustained-yield manner. Since 1854 two and one-half billion board feet of lumber has been cut, that is the equivalent of cutting down all the standing timber on the reservation almost twice over. However, the volume of standing timber now is greater than when they started in 1854. The forest can easily be seen from outer space in that it resembles a forest island among the agricultural fields of northeast Wisconsin. There are actually more trees and healthier trees now from when they first began their sawmill operations. They follow a basic formula of not taking more from the forest than it requires to regenerate itself. It is basic equation of balance.
Nels Huse is the Marketing Manager at MTE and helped lead the tour. He provided a long list of the high-quality products that are produced from the wood originating in the forest. It is an impressive list of professional basketball courts to high quality furniture. There was one comment he mentioned that particularly fascinated me. He said that the Menominee Forest produces enough oxygen into the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis to provide sufficient oxygen for all of Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the entire city of Chicago. I found that bit of information to be amazing and filled me with deep gratitude for how the Menominee Tribe has sustained their forest over all these years so that the rest of us can breathe. This also got me thinking about the unspoken debt that we owe to the millions of trees all across Wisconsin and how they provide for our basic need of drawing breath. Too often trees are seen as obstacles to so-called “development” projects. They are the first living organisms to be eliminated when we want to build a new subdivision, storage unit, hotel, or highway expansion. Little thought is given to the environmental services trees provide us without ever asking for a single dime in repayment. Besides oxygen they provide shade, habitat cover, soil conservation, water filtration, carbon sinks, construction material and a myriad of other services. It seems to me that are very own existence is intimately tied to the existence of trees. The Menominee have always understood this concept that a forest ecosystem works in harmony and that it requires all of its’ resources in order to protect any part of it.
In spite of our good intentions of caring for the environment, we desperately need new tools and new tactics to sustain our Living Planet. The emerging Rights of Nature movement (http://rightsofnaturewi.org/) here in Wisconsin is one such strategy. It embraces the indigenous concept of ecosystem interconnectedness. It recognizes that nature – water, land, animals – have a right to exist and to be healthy. The natural world does not exist solely to be exploited for economic gain. Humanity is part of the natural world, not its owner. On our website you will find our vision statement which says:
“We envision a world where the inherent rights of nature are respected and protected, and where the natural world is recognized as a living, breathing entity with its own intrinsic value and worth. We believe that all living things must exist in harmony, and that the health and well-being of the many interconnected ecological systems of the planet is essential to the health and welfare of all beings, including humans.”
There is no doubt that trees have been very good to us. They give us oxygen, provide shelter, food, fuel and protection. We as humans are fortunate enough to have certain rights that enable us to live with some amount of legal protection. We think that it is time that “our relatives” in the natural world also be awarded certain legal rights in order to assure their protection. This is a movement that is catching on in many parts of the world and across the United States. We hope to see it flourish in Wisconsin.