A tree is a lot like a shmoo. You have to be over fifty to recall the origin of the shmoo — in Al Capp’s comic strip “Li’l Abner.” Shmoos were fanciful creatures shaped like hefty Virginia hams with chubby legs and no arms. They were colorless and guileless. Unless you refused to let them sacrifice themselves for you, they wore a permanent smile. A shmoo lived for the day it could jump into your skillet and become any food you desired. They were butter and eggs, bacon and beans — whatever you wanted them to be. While they were happy to see you enjoy them alive, they were happiest when they were being consumed — servants eager to pay the ultimate sacrifice. http://www.lil-abner.com/shmoo.html

That’s a lot like trees. Trees seem to grow for little more than to provide services — in both life and in death. Dead, they provide building products, paper products, wood for useful and beautiful household items, and cooking and heating fuel. Living, they create oxygen out of carbon dioxide and sunlight, store carbon, moderate temperature extremes, enhance rainfall, collect and absorb dust and other atmospheric pollutants, protect the earth from rapid climate change, produce and protect healthy soil, provide food and healing products, provide shelter and cover for all sorts of creatures, provide “candy” for the senses, provide privacy, reduce light intensity from the sun, protect watersheds, and produce a sense of rootedness and community for people.

The trouble with shmoos, however, was that they were just too good and too available. People got lazy and did not have to think creatively about obtaining and preparing food. They just keep using and using them-taking them for granted without a thought of conservation. There were too many shmoos to even worry about their depletion.

Then they were gone. And everything changed. Some thought for the good. Others missed them tremendously-if for nothing else, for their pleasantness and good will.

Trees are the shmoos of the plant world. But the difference between shmoos and trees is that shmoos were not real. Trees are. People don’t need shmoos. But people need trees. And we need them both dead and alive. Trees need to be cut, and they need to be left standing. People need to know how many to cut, when to cut them, how to cut them, where to cut them, when to let them stand, and where to let them stand. We also need to know when to let them merely die of natural causes and then decompose to provide the elements of life for other creatures critical to forest health and human wellbeing.

To make these decisions about trees, we need to know everything we can about what trees do for the earth and what they do for people. We know we shouldn’t cut them all, and we know we can’t leave them all standing. Some feel that the best way to make the decisions about whether trees live or die is to let them all stand or fall at the whim of the free-market’s “invisible hand.” Let people motivated by the potential for financial profit determine the fate of our trees.

But there’s trouble with that: the financial worth of a tree is most easily understood in reference to a dead tree. Other than for trees grown and kept alive for the fruit they produce for financial profit, there’s no clear way to tally up the other critical non-monetary values of a tree. Yet some have sought to make an apples-to-apples monetary value calculation about trees. They say a 50-year-old tree may in its life-time produce $31,000 worth of oxygen, $62,000 in air pollution reduction, $31,000 in erosion control, and $37,000 in water recycling services. Whereas sold for timber the tree would be worth only $590. Triple that for value added after it’s cut, and you still have a living worth over 50 times its dead worth. When you realize that the annual worldwide economic value of forest products is around 300 billion dollars, you can hardly imagine their ecological value.

And that’s the trouble. It’s hard to imagine the ecological value of world’s forests-harder still to calculate it. The ecological value of our forests is provided “free” to the world’s population with few of us ever stopping to consider all their value. Most of us, in fact, have little knowledge of, or even appreciation of, their ecological value. People the world over automatically benefit from life-giving and life-sustaining live trees. But few can directly take the ecological value of a living tree and cash it in for a loaf of bread, a computer, a video game, or NASCAR race tickets. You get cash primarily from a dead tree. And if all trees of the earth were controlled by people who were free to get cash for them dead, most of us are realistic enough to know that most trees would be cut. When there are billions of trees in the world, no single individual can be convinced that the trees he or she is about to cut are needed for their ecological value to all of us. But most are.

And another problem is that trees are also essential for the other animals and living things that share the earth with us and provide their own life-sustaining functions. Unless we properly value these, we’ll have trouble making our decisions about whether a tree should stand or fall.

So there’s a lot of trouble with trees. They’re valuable to us both living and dead. But if we don’t go to the trouble of evaluating them and their worth properly, the earth and its people will suffer greatly from ill-considered decisions.

Trees are clearly worth the trouble.