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daily kansan
thursday
11.5.98
six.a
Seeing the trees for the forest
One KU student ponders the little details in life despite the onslaught of modern information
story by dan curry photos by mike perryman
KNOWLEDGE
Bur Oak
Quercus macrocephala
Tree with the largest acorns of any native oak, stout trunk, often crooked, spreading branches. Leaves are broadest beyond the middle and lobed. They turn yellow or brown in fall.
Silver Maple
Acer saccharinum
Large tree with
short, stout
trunk, few large
forks, spreading,
open, irregular
crown of long,
curving branches,
and gracefully cut leaves.
It produces the paired,
winged seeds that
spin like helicopters.
Leaves are deeply
lobed and doubly saw
toothed. They turn yellow
in autumn. A few
Sugar Maples on campus have leaves that turn deep red, orange or yellow.
Svcamore
Sycamore Plantanus occidentalis
One of the largest eastern hardwoods, with an enlarged base, massive, straight trunk, and large, spreading, often crooked branches forming a broad, open crown. These trees produce brown, tuffy balls as fruit that matures in fall.
Cottonwood
Maple trees surround the Uncle Jimmy Green statue on Jayhawk Boulevard. Kelly Kindscher, a professor of biology at the University, thinks the average person should know the names of a few trees. "A major problem in our culture is that we no longer teach literature," he said. "Nature isn't as big a part of the curriculum as it should be."
Continuing
Populus deltoides or occidentalis large tree with a massive trunk often forked into stout branches, and broad, open crown of spreading and slightly drooping brances. Leaves are triangular, long-pointed with course teeth, becoming yellow in autumn.
Black Walnut
Block vrain
Juglans nigra
Large walnut tree with open, rounded crown of dark-green, aromatic foliage. Leaves are broadly lance-shaped, long-pointed and sawtoothed. The leaves turn yellow in autumn.
The fruit is thick-shelled green balls that squirrels crave.
Tomatoes and apples do not survive near mature trees.
From The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, Eastern Region
A close-up of orange red and yellow maple leaves
Save a few sentimentalists and oddball naturalists, finding the names of trees is not a priority, even if the desire to learn exists. Without compelling environmental motives, the names of trees have become non-essential infor-
trees have become non-essential information.
An onslaught of information confronts us each day. We sift through facts and conflicting reports, foreign affairs, personal phone calls and scholarly gibberish. Increasing the load, modern communication networks make information ubiquitous, instantaneous — we stick trumpets in our ears and hold megaphones to our lips. We hear more people, and more people hear us.
I can't criticize anyone for imperfect acts of appreciation. Hazy questions about trees take a well-rested imagination to consider — contemplations that work, study and few hours of sleep make scarce.
Of course, we could learn the names with the purchase of a book or a walk on a nature trail, but what inhibits our learning isn't access to the information. It is our disinclination to bother.
Popular environmentalism, the primary way our generation has come to understand nature, has played itself out. I think that for most people, the discussion of eco-politics seems either too extremist or banal by now.
As much as I'd like to, I'm not going to join my local chapter of 'green' terrorists, don my camouflage and prowl the forest setting fire to skis resorts and driving steel
rods into redwood trees.
At least that has some pizzazz. Recycling and tree planting are the new chores of civic duty. But I surreptitiously drop Coke cans in the trash, knowing that I recycle less than I should, shunning the people who would remind me so.
The fact is, the trees in my front yard do a stand-up job of surviving without me. As someone who on occasion struggles through days without a flit of concern for other people, I am greatly pleased by their ability to take care of themselves.
Ladmire their self-reliance.
So why waste time finding the names of trees, if I'm not in the business of rescuing them? Certainly, I can walk down campus, or along the river, or drive back to Kansas City and see the trees in their autumn foliage and enjoy just the same, names or no names
Adam Roshenshield, Madison, Wis., junior, wearing shades and a bandanna in front of Strong Hall, agreed.
"I love trees," he said. "When you have big trees around, that makes everything else look nice."
But even this nature-lover couldn't identify the trees around him, and did not find it essential to know their names. He
cones that play in the leaves a time or two, but he couldn't identify the trees from which they came.
confessed that he'd been known to
Theorist Mark Poster states in The Mode of Information that information channels "that have characterized modern society for some 200 years are being shaken by the earthquake of electronically mediated communication."
Information overload
The names were extraneous
For this reason, what we may recall of a name, maple for example, will tend to be the larger idea. The word maple to us is a tree — not the specifics that make a such a tree unique.
But perhaps I shouldn't complain. Some think we'll be OK in this new environment — those who survive the information flood will be a new breed of multivalent thinkers, people able to cogitate on more than one level at a time.
To thrive, we must become technology virtuosos, not outback survivalists, so while we learn Word on our computers, reasonably, we abandon the names of trees.
commentary
Fall memories
More reflection on the changing seasons.
See page 4A
To use the terms of theorists Deleuze and Guattari, we were once "arboreal" beings, like trees rooted in time and space, relying on other people and our own five senses for news. Now we are information nomads — siphons who can gather facts fast, floating around the globe with a flutter of our fingers. We no longer need to BE anywhere. We just need to be wired in.
Yet for a few of us, being wired in isn't enough. Kelly Kindscher is one of these people. He has an orchard on his property, and not only that, he's a rare being who can name each of his trees
Kindscher is a plant community ecologist working for the Kansas Biological Survey and a professor of biology at the University of Kansas. Part of his job is creating inventories of exactly what plants grow in our state.
So the man knows his trees. And then some.
The problem is that no one else does. "I think the average person would know the names of a few trees," Kindscher said. "A major problem in our culture is that we no longer teach nature literacy. Nature isn't as big a part of the curriculum as it should be."
Kindscher thinks the lack of consciousness about plants that inhibits our understanding of nature.
"We've really disturbed the landscape," he said. "We no longer live close to the land."
Knowing the names of things is the first step, Kindscher said, but we need to change the way we look at the natural world.
"I think if you want to get to our environmental problems, you need to know what is under our feet," he said.
Local offerings
Crystal Miles, landscape supervisor for Lawrence's Parks and Forestry Department, knows just what's under our feet and all around.
The trees that line downtown, for instance, are Rosehill Ash, Greensfield Linden, Washington Hawthorn and Ivory Silk, a tree imported from Japan, she said.
"When we buy trees, we request that they be labeled," she said.
Temporary help often can't identify the plants, so the labels allow them to keep track of what and where things are planted. Miles said they need to know the identity of the tree to know how to take care of it properly.
James Hartman, English professor, said knowing true definitions links us to our environs.
Miles said her department places a great deal of importance on the nomenclature of plants.
Alas, scientists and groundskeepers aren't the only ones who have the forest figured out.
But now we hear the word "sycamore" and we know it means a species of tree, certainly, but many of us won't envision the broad, green leaves and dappled trunk of the true sycamore. The word has lost some of its specificity, something that occurs naturally in language.
"Kansas trees seem to get black in the fall or winter. They seem really black against the sky," she said. "The skies here can some times look like waves of sand — actually I know a lot about trees. It's useful to know if you're in the arts. If you are in the arts, really, you automatically understand what's around you."
Carolyn Doty, English professor and novelist, is at work on a Kansas ghost story. In her novel, the protagonist is a painter intrigued by the colors of the local trees.
But for those not artistically inclined, a dictionary can serve as a directory to the world around you. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Sycamore" has survived in more or less the same form since its first recorded use in 492 A.D. Being derived ultimately from the Greek word 'sukomoros,' the word was used in the bible to refer to a Grecian fig tree. The names "oak" and "maple" both have roots in Old English, the language
spoken in England a thousand years ago.
Hartman teaches classes about the nature and history of the English language and has edited several dictionaries.
"Knowing words is a good
Hartman said he could identify his trees in his front yard purple ash and silver maple—but for him, words, or the names of things, connect us both to our world and other people.
sign that you have paid thoughtful attention to their referents," he said.
"Knowing words helps communicate your thoughts and feelings more exactly to other people, thus giving you some potential influence on the world and making you less isolated than perhaps you might be otherwise," he said.
Comforting calm
I won't claim knowing the names of trees will cure any
alls, or save any trees—nothing that drastic. We're uprooted now, and it is most likely a condition we must learn to live with.
But I will say this. There is a path in South Park that winds its way by the swing sets and a fire engine and the wading pool with the concrete dolphin. Weekends, when the night has ended, I have been one of many figures of dejection stumbling home from downtown on this path. I smell like smoke and my money is missing. I conduct an interior cross-examination on the way home, escaping conviction but not the sentence. Call it a recurring case of self-inflicted cynicism.
On other nights I have walked at a different pace, still a far cry from sober, but steadier all the same, pointing out to a friend that the trees to the left of us are sycamores, and that ones up the middle are maples, and those framed in the streetlight there are the walnuts.
Even alone, I've privately called their roll as I passed beneath them and felt an uncanny comfort in the act. It earned me a moment of being located, as if by the trees I had determined, momentarily, where I was.
The names of trees then, or of anything steadfast and damn-near true, are nothing less than means of navigation. I've been lost before in a forest, but my names have yet to fail me.
Various trees, including cottonwoods, line the neighborhood streets around campus.
They might just be worth learning.
At left, a firey maple adds a dash of color in front of Wescoo and Budig Halls.