Notes from Central France

A view of the Forêt de Tronçais, about 5 kilometers south from our house. The forest is famous for its tall, straight oak trees.

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been staying in my house in central France – in the far north of the Department of the Allier, trying to keep warm, as I coincided my stay with a decidedly cold snap. A few days after my arrival, one of my ‘prize’ rose – Madame Alfred Carrière – a lovely white climber, came crashing down under the weight of ten centimeters of snow. I had to prune her right back and hope she will survive.

An early morning view from the back window of our house in Ainay-Le-Château, overlooking the garden and the river. ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ used to climb up to this window. The overgrown ruins across the stream are an old tannery. Note the mallard ducks.

Just down the road from the house spreads the immense Forêt de Tronçais, which, at 26,000 acres, is one of the largest stands of oak in western Europe. The forest’s name derives from the old French for the sessile oak (Quercus petraea) – tronce. Although there was a natural forest here for millennia, in the seventeenth century it was established as a Royal Forest expressly to grow very tall and straight oak trees for the French navy. Today, the forest is still a ‘working’ one, actively managed to generate revenue, and is celebrated for supplying timber for wine and brandy barrels (almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais). In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris. 

My favourite oak.' ‘La Sentinelle’. Born about 1560! It won’t last much longer, alas.

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As I noted in a previous post, I’m thinking a lot about oak trees these day. I’m writing a ‘biography’ - a cultural history of the oak tree.

Of course, only we humans construct narratives of this history, and it means absolutely nothing to the oak tree, or any non-human species, flora or fauna. But then again, what Homo sapiens has done to the Earth system over the few dozen millennia of its existence on Earth, has impacted more and more forcibly over time on the lives of the oak tree in ways comparable to the five dimensions of its ecosystem: the geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The congeries of events that comprise the human historical narrative have become part-and-parcel of a sixth ecosystem: the ‘anthroposphere’, which is part-and-parcel of the Anthropocene,  humanity’s sphere of life involving a complex technical system of energy, material, and information.[1]

So, I thought it would be interesting to imagine what our history would be like if considered from the  point of view of the oak  -  say, from the perspective of the sessile and pendunculate oaks that are the main species in northern Europe:

After 56 million years of evolution, these oaks emerged from their Ice Age refuges  around 12,000 years ago, and they would have observed Homo sapiens moving out of Africa alongside them, as they both sought to colonize new terrain as the ice melted, and the landscape of our familiar world emerged.

They would soon (a mere handful of thousand years later) have observed that  the numbers of the human species had multiplied and their social lives become more complex, and  most importantly, that they were now predominantly sedentary. This development obliged the humans to fell more and more trees to make room for the fields they needed for planting crops and grazing animals.

From being one animal species struggling amongst many others, the oaks would have noted that this particular animal had very quickly become the dominant species wherever it colonized. Let’s imagine that the oaks  recognized that this success was because, although compared to them, humans lived very short and vulnerable existences, they overcame this weakness through the development of languages and the creation of sophisticated systems of belief, so could make reference to things beyond the here-and-now, and possessed the ability to discuss possible outcomes in the future.  This allowed them to pass useful knowledge on from one generation to the next.

The oaks would have perceived from interactions with these increasingly confident animals, that they had ceased to treat non-humans as kin, and instead categorised them in two very different ways:  ‘enemies’ or ‘friends’. Unwanted vegetal ‘enemies’ were described as weeds (in French, the word  is mauvaise herbe, which literally means ‘bad plant’, which conveys  more of the anthropocentric character of this distinction). If a plant was cast as an ‘enemy’, humans would consider it waste and seek to   decrease its abundance and impact on their environment. The oaks would have realized that they were usually treated as ‘friends’ by humans because they were useful natural resources. Humans used them as building material, fuel, shade, shelter, lookouts, food, and medicine. Because of this utility, they were afforded protection and respect, which manifested itself in the roles the oak played in human symbolism, ritual, and aesthetic appreciation.

This companionable behaviour obviously benefited the oaks.  Human history seemed to tell a story of protection and increasing abundance, productivity, and stability for the oaks. But they would also have noted that the vegetal ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ of humans were not always mutually exclusive. Sometimes, they were cast as a vegetal ‘enemies’, as when humans were more interested in cutting down the forests they grew in to make room for fields or habitations. This meant contact with humans had both benefits and costs, depending on the time or the context in which interactions occurred. One could say that the oak was the humans’ ‘frenemy’.

As time went by, the oaks would have seen that something fundamental was changing in their relationship with humans, and that as a result the shape of history was also being transformed. As the oaks were considered by humans as nothing more than a resource to be maximally exploited, the relationship became less and less reciprocal and flexible. The vast oak forests that once covered the Eurasian continent and north and central America were systematically reduced to small, restricted enclaves.   In some regions, oaks were organized into plantations because they were valuable economic resources, and were domesticated like cereals and farm animals. The oaks were now not so much cast as ‘friends’, or even ‘frenemies’ to humanity,  but were their ‘chattel’.

The oaks also noticed that the humans had little concern for the sustainability of the resource they were exploiting, and that as the primordial forests were destroyed, no new ones were being encouraged.  The oaks would have noticed that history had become the story of humans putting immense strain on the Earth’s biocapacity, that the story was one of rash and selfish interventions that overused ecological resources and ran down the potential of every ecosystem humans encountered. But the oaks would also have noticed how humans temporarily avoided the inevitable crises caused by this abuse through the application of science and technology, and that as the modern period developed, were allaying  its negative impact through the harnessing the power of fossil fuels, which permitted them to increase the productivity of land and labour even as they exhausted the resources of the ecosystem. 

But very recently – in the past forty years or so -  the oaks will have noticed a new phase  in human history commencing, one that has been initiated by the depletion of the non-renewable fossil fuels that were exploited for two centuries, and by the consequent emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which was causing a dangerous heating up of the planet.

Like everything else in the Earth system, the oaks were suffering the consequences of this ecological disaster. But they also sensed that the humans wanted to be ‘friends’ again. They needed the oaks, and all the other trees, to help save the planet, because the humans had realized that trees function as carbon reservoirs.  As a result, oaks discovered they were to play a salvific role in human history. But considering what had gone before, one can forgive them for being suspicious about this new overture of friendship!

This is an interesting oak in the forest. It used to be the “Marshal Petain Oak’, named after the leader of Vichy France in 1940. But in February 1944 three foresters took down the plaque and replaced it by one saying “Chêne Gabriel Péri Patriote français fusillé par les nazis” (‘The Gabriel Péri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis Oak’).  Péri was a prominent communist journalist, politician, and member of the Resistance movement.  The woodcutters also adorned the plaque with a huge red bow tie, made from a scarf, and tied to the tree with barbed wire. The rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took until 1982 for the tree to be officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’. By coincidence, I am writing these lines one day short of exactly 79 years later, and am pleased to say that this oak is still alive and well,  but ‘resisting’ a new enemy: climate change

[1] See:  ‘The Anthroposphere’, The Aspen Global  Change Institute,   https://www.agci.org/earth-systems/anthroposphere. Also: Peter Baccini and Paul H, Brunner, Metabolism of the Antroposphere. Analysis, Evaluation, Design, The MIT Press, Second Edition, 2012.