When Nature Goes Big

By Safina Center Writer-In-Residence Paul Greenberg

Every once in a while, in this highly diminished world of ours, one comes across something in nature that has been allowed to reach its full potential. It’s happened to me in the Singer Tract of Mississippi where the sewing machine giant had deeded a swatch of cypress to the state and since then the trees have just grown and grown. It happened again on the edge of a marine protected area off California where halibut the size of picnic tables eased right up to the preserve’s edge. It even happened to me just a day’s drive from my home in New York City, on an Adirondack lake private owners had left to conservation. Trolling it once with a spoon to catch a specimen for a local aquarium produced lake trout after lake trout, each of which would have bulged the eyes of any angler.

A big old oak in Scotland. ©Paul Greenberg

But my most striking encounter with nature’s bigness happened when I stumbled upon a life form this summer so common that it never had occurred to me how incorrectly I had perceived its potential. I was passing from the Isle of Mull in Scotland toward Inverness. Along the way, on the recommendation of a local writer, my family and I made a stop off at Ariundle preserve, a fragment of a swath of forest that once spanned the Atlantic coasts of Europe from Norway to Portugal. Stepping out onto the path we were greeted with this creature that was at once familiar and foreign. A member of the species Quercus robar, known as the common or pedunculate oak, soared up in front of us and spread its wide, shade giving limbs beneficently like some kind of goddess making ablutions. It was well over 200 years old. Yes, I’d seen an oak this big before. Repeat an oak. But just to the right of this soaring goddess stood another. And then another and still more, flowing with green goodness down into the valley where a brook thrummed and frothed.

It was an entirely new orchestra whose lead instrumentalists were trees that had never in my experience played the melody they were supposed to play. They shaded, they protected, they stretched out their roots like giant trunk cables, communing with the soil and conducting the ways of worm and wood thrush alike. Every surface was alive with lichen, moss and liverwort. Above clusters of the more than 200 species of moth and butterfly fluttered.  A sense of peace and security these big trees brought filled the land and air.

When trees can grow to their full size they provide shade and protection. Their roots stretch out, providing a communication channel for fungi and other trees. Lichen, moss, and liverwort abound. Mature trees function to their full potential. ©Paul Greenberg

And it made me think, how many things we see in nature are just infant versions of what they’re supposed to be. Worse than infants – orphaned infants, cut off from the parents that held the memory of a world that had not been turned upside down by humans.

We need more natural bigness in the world. Not just in preserves where bigness is to some degree put under glass. We need not just reforestation but “proforestation” – movement to allow trees to grow to their true maturity on state and federal land. We need more “slot” limits on the fish we catch that curtail not only our taking of fish that are too small but stop us from taking the big breeders that keep a population robust.  

We need bigness all around us. We need it not just for maintaining environmental equilibrium. We need it to remind us of our own relative smallness. We need it to remember that we stand within nature, not above it.

We need big trees for the environment and to remind us of our own relative smallness. ©Paul Greenberg