How Trees Defined America
(Historian Erik Rutkow argues in a new book that forests are key to understanding how our nation developed and who we are today)
According to historian Eric Rutkow, the United States would not be the country we know today without the vast forests that provided the growing nation with timber, paper and other resources—and eventually inspired our environmental consciousness. In his recently published book American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation, Rutkow traces the history of the United States through our trees, from the mighty elm in the heart of Boston that would become the Liberty Tree, to California’s giant conifers, which inspired an early generation of conservationists.
How has Americans’ relationship with trees shaped our character?
We have such a material abundance of trees. Trees allowed us to develop this style of aggressive consumption, and this style of immediacy over permanence in how we look at developing the landscape.
How has this relationship shifted over time?
For most of American history, trees surround us conspicuously. I’m not talking forests and the environment we plant around them, but our homes—you can really see that wood is everywhere. And there’s a shift that happens in the middle of the 20th century, where we’re still depending on wood to build many things, but we start hiding it and processing it. At the same time we start pursuing new legislation to create things like wilderness areas, and to have recreation in forests and national parks. That split is a really interesting development in the American character, the evolution of the idea of the forest as where we go to find spirituality, the forest as where we go to find recreation, the forest as where we go to escape.
With wood and forests less visible in our daily lives, have we lost touch with our trees?
In some ways we’ve lost an obvious closeness to our trees. If you were to look back at earlier epochs, many Americans would be able to at least identify the trees that constitute the environment where they lived. We’ve really lost that sensibility. If you were to read this book and simultaneously read a few books on tree identification, I think you would then be able to walk through whatever environment you’re in—it could be a suburb, it could be a city, it could be the countryside, it could be a park—and you would not only be able to name those trees, but, seeing how they were through the history of America, you could really start to see the history of how the country evolved.
Over the course of your research, what were some of the most interesting things you learned?
There’s a surprisingly high correlation between the presidents I think of as great and the presidents that were considered tree-lovers. George Washington was obsessed with trees. Thomas Jefferson was a very informed horticulturalist and had a lot of books on trees and planted a lot of tree species. The president who created the greatest number of national forests was Teddy Roosevelt. He was profoundly shaped by his ideas about wilderness and nature and forests. And very few people appreciate that FDR’s love for trees was very deep. When FDR was the president and he went to cast his vote—at that time they asked you to list your occupation—he wrote his occupation down as “tree grower.”
Continues: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-trees-defined-america-121423874/