EVERGREEN

Their central role in American life and history.

Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, 75% of U.S. households have switched. Having absorbed this news, readers will proceed to learn that the first genuine bonanza discovered by 17th-century Europeans in North America was not gold or freedom but trees. Most will be surprised to read that pilgrim voyages to Massachusetts were financed by British timber merchants who expected to be paid back in their product. England’s forests had been logged past recovery, and the Royal Navy hated importing its masts from the Baltic. Of the miseries endured by these pious pioneers, cutting and hauling trees remained prominent. In fact, Preszler maintains that lumber was the nation’s largest industry for several centuries. “Timber framed the nation, both figuratively and literally, bankrolling America’s rapid expansion at devastating human cost.” There follows a painful account of the destruction of Eastern forests for construction as well as farming, followed by the massacre of Western pines and firs and 95% of sequoias. The author ends with another chapter on Christmas trees—the operation of a tree farm, a grueling hands-on enterprise to ensure production, after seven to 10 years, of a beautiful, fragrant, symmetrical product that keeps its needles until the New Year. Profits are slim, and most go to the retailer. An irony is that holiday evergreens, today mostly an agricultural product no less than apples, are portrayed as environmentally irresponsible, although artificial trees end up in landfills with their plastic spreading across continents and oceans and into our bodies.

Good history and science, if short on optimism.