How Important Are Trees Anyway?

We say it’s time to stop and consider the importance of trees.

If there were no flowers we would not have honey and we may only last a year without honey!

Without green leafy vegetables to eat we may last only a couple of months.

Without trees that give off oxygen, we will only survive minutes.

And right there is the fact of the matter; our survival depends entirely on the life-giving benefits of vegetation. When everything is stripped back we must see our complete and utter dependence on plants. Trees can happily survive without us but we simply can’t survive without them.

We get our food, fuel, our building products, medicines, our clothing fibers, our soil stability, shade, and oxygen from plants. Plants even make all the soil. If you take away vegetation all you have left is rocks. At last assessment, these were found to be inedible.

Everything on earth depends on oxygen; trees are the only organism that can make the stuff. Every living thing on earth can trace its survival back to vegetation.

Vegetation provides shade for us and cools the places we live.  Without trees, we may as well be living on Mars.

The stuff you pour into your fuel tank is old trees. Very old trees that lived, died, decomposed, were covered and compressed a million years ago.

Without trees (let's include all other vegetation forms here), there would be no food or resting/nesting places for birds or habitat for animals.  Our world would be a sparse plain without other life forms. No butterflies, no parrots, no songbirds.

Trees modify our climate by assisting the formation of rain clouds. Terpenes released from trees as gases (seen as blue hazes over forests) stick together and ‘seed’ clouds. Rain may follow.

We may simply acknowledge the sustaining qualities of trees but then they are more than that, no? We are inspired by their majesty, the lofty trunks piercing the clouds, built cell upon cell and serenely observant of man's activities under.

We are delighted by the floral displays in season and are moved by a single opening rosebud. Floral scents move more than just insects to romance on heady summer nights.

Yes, we should stop and consider the trees and all vegetation on a daily basis, respecting, recognising, admiring and being thankful for all that they bring to us.