Why Do We Care About Trees?
We always learned that trees were important. Save the trees. Don’t cut down trees. Plant more trees. But…why? Not only do they make us happy, they also give us what we need to survive, as long as we allow them to survive. Here’s how:
1) They’re pretty. Green spaces, such as areas with lots of trees and grass, can improve mood and reduce stress.
2) They feed us. Trees and other plants perform an important process called photosynthesis. Photo- = light and -synthesis = to make, which is an accurate name for the process of using light energy to make food. Believe it or not, all of the food we eat comes from this process. Although we can’t make food out of light energy, plants (and some bacteria) can, and everything we eat is a plant or eats plants (or eats things that eat plants). All the food we eat originated from plants.
3) They make the oxygen we breathe. Seriously. One of the coolest parts of photosynthesis is that the process creates oxygen…as a waste product! That means plants create more oxygen than they need to survive, and they release it into the air. Then we breathe it in because we need it to survive. It takes about 7 or 8 fully grown trees to create enough oxygen to support a person.
About 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from the world’s largest ecosystem: the ocean. Marine plants, like phytoplankton, algae, and kelp, provide most of the world’s oxygen. Another big chunk of oxygen (about 28%) comes from rainforest trees. That makes me very invested in the safety of the planet’s ocean life and rainforests!
4) They can save us from Global Climate Change. We know the Earth’s average temperature is creeping upwards, and we know that this is already starting to make it harder to grow food and increasing the rate of weather disasters like hurricanes. We also know that humans release a lot of carbon dioxide into the air (from breathing, but even more from burning fossil fuels like gasoline and coal) and that carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, making the planet warmer and warmer. Here’s the cool thing about trees and carbon dioxide: plants actually need carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis, and make all our food and oxygen! That’s not to say we should be making more carbon dioxide for the plants - there’s more than enough to go around. But, it means that plants can help us keep the climate under control. A full grown tree can absorb more than 48 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere! That’s a big dent, but it’ll still take more than 40 adult trees to absorb the carbon dioxide produced from the average car.
In short, we need trees (and other plants) to survive. They provide nearly everything we need, even if they won’t solve all of our problems. Let’s take are of them, k? We don’t want a Giving Tree situation; a stump may be a nice place to sit, but it won’t give us the air we breathe and food we eat.
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Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7557737/#:~:text=Synthesis%20suggests%20beneficial%20associations%20between,decreased%20psychological%20distress%20in%20adolescents
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-very-air-we-breathe
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-does-it-take-to-produce-oxygen-for-one-person/
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle#:~:text=typical%20passenger%20vehicle%3F-,A%20typical%20passenger%20vehicle%20emits%20about%204.6%20metric%20tons%20of,8%2C887%20grams%20of%20CO2.