Forests, Fires, Friends, Foes, and Frames

Leave the familiar for a while..
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
~Hafez

Forests, Fires, Friends, Foes, and Frames

So it was with great dismay that I read David Wallace-Wells’s New York Times opinion piece of September 6, titled Forests Are No Longer Our Climate Friends. (Note: Wallace-Wells’s essay is a NYT subscriber-only newsletter, I still include a “gift” link here, in the hope that you will be able to read it. I apologize if that is not the case).

Wallace-Wells, a journalist known for his writings on climate change (The Unhabitable Earth (2017), Beyond Catastrophe (2022)), argues in this latest essay that because of recent wildfires driven by climate change, forests are making the human-caused climate breakdown worse, not better. Hence the title of his piece. Already his 2022 essay, Beyond Catastrophe claiming that things are not as bad as they had previously appeared, created climate confusion. Certainly after reading his latest essay I felt uneasy, no longer knowing what to think about trees and their place in the climate crisis, and uncomfortable enough to have me pause for a couple of weeks until some clarity emerged.

Since the publishing of his piece on September 6, there has been a number of rebuttal letters posted under the title Forests: Friend, Not Foe, in Climate Change which reiterate the belief that trees and forests are needed to continue to absorb the carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere.
And yet, Bill Gates, interviewed by David Gelles of the New York Times during Climate Week NYC, said that it’s foolish to plant trees. And yet, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is spending his philanthropic dollars planting a trillion of trees. (See Billionaire Moguls and a Trillion Trees- Bill Gates and Marc Benioff do not see eye to eye)

So…. how to make sense of this climate confusion?

Confusion arises when competing views are emerging at the same time; there are multiple ways of making sense of the situation and it’s not clear which one is true or best. The “breakdown in obviousness”, as Martin Heidegger has called it, that I experienced when reading Forests Are No Longer Our Climate Friends, required some sense-making.

The practice of sense-making is a way of making sense of the world so that you can act in powerful ways to address what you care about.
~Steve March (Aletheia School of Unfoldment).

I decided to first hang out in the uncertainty space: maybe Wallace-Wells and Gates are right? What if I saw the world through their eyes?

Complexity entails the existence of a plurality of different observations of the same system.
~Dave Snowden (Cynefin complexity framework)

And out of this time in the woods, some clarity emerged: yes, I was reading about different observations of the same complex system: the behavior of forests under the human caused climate breakdown. I started noticing my own biases as well as Gates’s or Wallace-Wells’s; we all have them.

Each of our separate constructions was valid to a certain extent: -trees grown for commercial logging as single crops are not our friends and will burn (David Wallace-Wells) -it’s important to plant new trees (Marc Benioff) -planting trees will not be sufficient to absorb all the CO2 that has been put in the atmosphere, technological solutions are needed (Bill Gates), and – old trees absorb significantly more carbon that younger trees and need protected (POST, Sempervirens Fund, Save The Redwoods League).
All solutions are needed. Tom Styer says it best in his foreword to Project Drawdown:

It’s a global crisis with no place for partisan rhetoric, requiring solutions at every scale and across every sector.

Then, as a coach, I know the power of reframing. So I reframed my own mantra to be more precise and inclusive of other people’s views without negating my own. A practice that I frequently give my clients is a modification of the STOP practice (Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed) popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn in his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs. Before the Proceed step, I add a Reframe step. The acronym then becomes STORP:

• Stop,

• Take a breath,

• Observe,

• Reframe, and

• Proceed

Without noticing it, I had applied this practice, typically used multiple times daily for a couple of minutes or so, to a few weeks, each step lasting days. I now see how this simple practice can be applied for as long as is needed when sense-making is required, when there is confusion about what is the powerful action to take to address what we care about.

So here is my reframed mantra:

May the old growth forest be with you.

Very warmly,

Anne-Marie
(October 1, 2023 / 418.38 ppm of atmospheric CO2, last year 415.67 (safe level 350)

Poem: When I Am Among The Trees by Mary Oliver

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