10 Trees to Save the World (2015) - full transcript
[♪♪]
Narrator: The sun.
The life force of
our solar system.
Its photons of energy can remain
trapped in the sun's sphere
for 100,000 years.
And when finally they are
released, it will take
the photons 8 minutes to travel
from the surface of the sun
to the surface of a
leaf on planet earth.
[birdsong]
A leaf is a marvel of evolution.
It transforms the photons
into food for planet earth,
creating a foundation
for all life.
And it begins with a tree.
[birdsong]
It's time to look again at
that tree outside your door...
[ambient street noise]
...and to the forest beyond.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: What do you
know about trees and forests?
[birdsong]
When you come into
the forest like this,
the first thing that hits you
is the smell of the earth,
the smell of the
humus in the earth,
the smell of the decaying
twigs, the smell,
that wonderful smell that
rises up to you and meets you.
[birdsong]
Narrator: We all feel
better when we're around trees,
and when we walk in
a forest, but why?
For over 1,000 years, the
Japanese have been coming to
their forests to do what
they call 'forest bathing'.
From school children
to businessmen,
they all come here
to forest bathe.
Diana: Forest bathing is really
about immersing yourself in the
bath of medicinal aerosols that
make up the forest atmosphere,
and the benefits are many!
I'm on the top, no,
halfway up Mt. Kurama.
[birdsong]
I'm joining, it seems to me,
to be the rest of the Japanese
population today on this
wonderful day in
fall - forest bathing.
Narrator: If you feel refreshed
and invigorated after a walk
in the forest, there is
a chemical explanation.
Diana: A tree is
not just a tree.
Some of the most complex
chemistry that is found on
the planet is produced
in the furnace of a tree.
[drumming]
One of the most important
trees at the Shinto Shrine
is the sacred sugi tree.
[drum]
[♪♪]
And for those who speak Latin,
it's Cryptomeria Japonica,
the sacred tree of
the Shinto shrines.
The sugi and many of these
trees around me are indeed very
powerful in the work that they
do with this molecular screening
of chemical aerosols
into the atmosphere.
[♪♪]
These aerosols directly
benefit your immune system.
[♪♪]
Trees create many of the
chemicals used in the
manufacture of approximately
60% of our medicines,
from aspirin and caffeine to
paclitaxel in the treatment
of breast cancers.
And trees continue
to be rich banks of
biochemical possibilities.
These trees also have life
living within the tree itself.
It's a fungal life form and they
are called 'endogenous fungi'.
These endogenous
fungi are very clever.
They produce
extraordinary compounds,
and the compounds they
produce are very unique.
Narrator: These previously
unknown compounds are the source
of many new exciting medicines.
But you're coming in here
today to get it for free,
and that's part
of forest bathing.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: Everyone benefits.
[♪♪]
Narrator: Trees are the
secret to our existence,
because they rule this planet on
every physical plane, the land,
the sea and the air.
So much of our world
is invisible to us,
such as all of the chemicals
that are the building blocks
of a healthy balanced
and breathing world.
Diana: And of course the trees
are a key player in this
manufacturing and distribution
of these chemicals.
[bird squawking]
This spruce tree, it's
an Engelmann spruce,
it's an ancient, ancient tree,
and it has a fiery canopy of all
kinds of chemicals in it.
This tree produces a whole
treasury of aerosols.
The aerosols are Alpha
Pinene and Beta Pinene.
Then in the air there
is borneol acetate,
in the air there's a
form of camphor compound.
Liberated with that is
a limonene compound,
which aerates itself, firing
up into the atmosphere,
like the parasols
of a dandelion.
Narrator: It is an applicator
chemical, an aerosol.
So all of those
chemicals, those pinenes,
are now in my lungs.
[♪♪]
The limonene produced
by these trees
is used in chemotherapy.
Limonene is
anti-cancer compound,
the pinenes are
antibiotic compounds,
and what they are doing to me
now is they're giving me a
slightly narcotic reaction, they
have an anaesthetic reaction
on my brain, and in
my myelin sheath,
in all the message
areas of my body,
just messages just
like a computer system.
And what that is telling
me is to relax,
as my immune system
is being boosted.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: Cities
everywhere need trees...
...to bring in birds, to clean
the air of airborne pollution,
and to soften the
concrete experience.
[♪♪]
Narrator: One man who has given
this much thought and is getting
his hands in the dirt is
Professor Akira Miyawaki.
He has spent 50 years
traveling the globe,
planting and restoring native
specie forest systems.
He's turned his attention to
Tokyo, the city he calls home.
Professor Miyawaki searches for
every nook and cranny in Tokyo
to fill with native trees,
the big, small and tiny.
Creating what he calls the
world's smallest forests.
This is a perfect
example of a city forest.
Yes, yes, very
important.
City forest.Yeah, yeah.
And it's the smallest
forest in Tokyo.
[bird cawing]
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
When you're in the garden and
you're looking at a cherry tree,
and you see a Baltimore oriole
coming into the cherry tree,
or even a cardinal,
or even a scarlet tanager,
you have the garden
not because of you,
and you know you've built
the garden for the bird,
and it gives you a feeling of
completeness that in the whole
world there is gratitude to you
that you have a garden and
that you're honoured that these
birds will come and visit you,
and that you've built a habitat
for the birds and you have
maintained and protected the
habitats for those birds
and the animals and the snakes
and the creatures around you,
and, by gosh, it gives
you a really good feeling
of well-being and joy.
So, what you are doing with a
bio plan is you're working with
nature, and then when you have a
good healthy nature around you,
you actually have your health.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: In the countryside
around her farm in
Ontario, Canada, Diana
Beresford-Kroeger noticed
many tree species disappearing.
She made the decision to
preserve and protect them.
For over 40 years now, she has
devoted her life to collecting,
trialing, breeding and studying
rare North American tree species
to survive climate change.
Building a living library
to ensure biodiversity,
food and medicines.
As she did, she realized
this has to happen all over
the globe, wherever the native
forests are falling before
human need and greed.
Diana: This led me to
the outlandish notion
that we might, we must
replant the global forest.
Our cheapest and best defence
against climate change.
In my own way, I began
replanting the global
forests long ago.
I planted this black walnut as
a seedling here on my farm
almost 30 years ago now.
'Tis a tree that really grows
in all of eastern Canada
and down into the States
along the Mississippi.
It's really an extraordinary
state of affairs,
where everything around
this tree benefits from it.
It is really a medicinal tree,
and it produces a fruit,
the fruit is a nut,
and the nut is here.
The nut is like a
globe really, isn't it.
The protein of these nutmeats
is as good as any beef
on the market.
Then these nuts
have got minerals,
all kinds of unusual minerals,
but they have got
something else, three items
that are very, very scarce
in our food nowadays.
The flesh of this nut
has oleic, linoleic
and linolenic acid in them.
These are the three essential
fatty acids for the development
and repair of the brain, the
functioning of transportation
all through the body for neural
messages because these acids,
these fatty acids, protect the
myelin sheath of the human body
and of the animals, and what
you should have is maybe two
or three or four of them a day.
And also once upon a time, these
were part of the great savannah
of North America.
[♪♪]
Diana: A long time ago in the
Middle Ages and way stretching
before that in
thousands of years,
this heart of America could
do something remarkable
with the forests.
Out of this soil, the plasticity
of green grew to produce forests
beyond your thinking, beyond
the dimensions of your home,
enormous canopies of forest that
carried butternuts, walnuts,
hickory nuts, chestnuts, and
marvellous oak trees in great
canopy systems, which
were called savannahs,
and they stretched
hundreds of miles,
sucking up the
Mississippi River,
with this marvellous green
highway that the squirrels could
walk hundreds of miles
without touching the ground,
and that green highway was
there stretching the continent.
Narrator: From the Gulf
of Mexico to north of
the Ottawa River, and
from the Atlantic coast
to west of the Mississippi,
today the remnants of
these virgin hardwood
forests are miniscule.
[♪♪]
And there are no wild stands
of black walnut remaining
on record in the United States.
[♪♪]
This North American
sister of the Japanese Sugi,
the American Redwood, is one of
the world's most loved trees,
and for good reason,
its sheer size makes it
so memorable and inspiring.
It's the largest carbon bearing
living organism on earth.
[♪♪]
For an Irish woman,
this place is haunted.
It's haunted by silence, and
a certain quality of mercy.
The trees are enormous.
They are called sequoias,
evergreen sequoias,
sequoia sempervirens,
which is the redwood.
The redwood is the tallest tree,
the tallest conifer
on the planet.
It will go up to
maybe 40 stories.
It will soar right
up into the sky.
Chief Sequoia called them the
kings of the forest and they are
indeed the kings of the conifer
forest, but this is a very,
very unusual place
in all of the planet.
Well, I was working with
redwoods as a research species.
I have to tell you it's a pretty
easy tree to fall in love with.
We haven't really started to
figure out yet what's going on
in trees, and particularly
what's going on underground.
I mean we stand here and
look at these things,
and above ground is awesome,
A few weeks ago, I was sitting
at my kitchen table and
I was thinking about the volume
of a 2,000-year-old redwood.
I decided that I would, in
my mind, create a scale,
and I would put a 2,000-year-old
redwood on one side
of the scale, and what
would balance out that scale
and it would be a whole
town, and the town would be,
I figured out the volume
of about 13,000 people,
and that boggled my mind,
and then I got the idea
of the volume
of these trees.
It's just immense!
If you look at the rings, the
rings on this tree are very
small, because there's so much
diameter and there's so much
height, that the years growth
is being put on a whole lot
of very small places.
But when you add it up, a big
tree like this is growing faster
now than it has every time in
its life, they don't slow down.
Diana: We're standing on
soil containing insects,
bacteria fascias, fungal
hyphae, viruses, bacteria,
and even algae, and
there is so much more.
And we don't even fully
understand living soil,
let alone the roots, let
alone the interconnections.
It's like a huge metro
system underneath our feet.
These redwoods that remain
with us are really the runts.
[♪♪]
The straightest, biggest,
oldest trees are always
the first to be logged.
By the 1870s, most of the
remarkably big redwoods were
already taken for lumber.
[♪♪]
These were the mother trees,
2,000 to 4,000-year-old trees.
We now know that these really
big trees, the mother trees,
in any forest system essentially
nurse all of the forest
around them, by way of carbon
and nutrient transfers through
the underground network
of root and soil.
[♪♪]
And when these dominant trees
are removed from a forest,
the integrity, health and
the quality of a forest
is significantly diminished.
[♪♪]
They really are a coastal
species, aren't they?
Well, the coast redwoods
is coastal species,
but when you talk about all
those species of the redwoods,
we have giant sequoia,
which is a mountain species,
grows at elevations
between about,
oh, 1500 and
3,000 metres.
Narrator: Before
the last Ice Age,
the various redwood species
grew across the entire northern
landscape of planet earth.
After the last Ice Age, we were
down to some 2 million acres of
redwoods, mostly in California,
and now with the present and
ongoing chainsaw cycle, we are
down to about 133,000 acres.
Diana: The redwood forests
of North America stretch from
the Chetco River up in Oregon,
down to the Monterey peninsula,
and a little bit closer
maybe to San Francisco.
Think of these redwoods as
a whole series of tall green
curtains stretching
up and down the coast;
a green wall on the lower
area and a green wall on
the mountainous area.
That green wall is
connected to the atmosphere,
and in turn is connected to the
great ocean of the Pacific
in a rather extraordinary way.
In the morning
here in California,
the mist rises in from the sea,
and it is actually drawn in from
the sea by the heat of the land.
But these green
curtains trap that mist.
These trees are acting as
condenser units or green
machines for the collection
and preservation of water.
They're pulling the moisture
up from the aquifer,
but they're replenishing the
aquifer again and again
by condensation of fresh potable
water from the ocean mist.
In the past, the redwoods
provided this service here
for the west coast.
California is very dry
and it is getting drier,
and as these trees come down,
it's getting drier
and drier again.
These redwood forests
need to come back.
[water splashing]
Narrator: Along the coast, the
trees are part of a chain
or a cycle, a feeding cycle,
which feeds everything.
All the way to the
underwater forests.
Diana: These underwater forests
of kelp oxygenate the oceans,
as the trees do the atmosphere.
What we do see of this invisible
forest is the upper canopy
of its reproduction, floating
with balloons called vesicles
that are filled with
mucilage and air.
Below the surface, this kelp
forest is held in place by a
root system called 'a holdfast',
anchoring it to the ocean floor.
Amazingly, the kelp grows as
much as a foot and a half a day.
But those kelp depend
on the trees here.
And when the trees are growing
and producing leachate,
the leachate comes right
down into the water here,
and the leachate carries
iron in the water,
then they can grow and get big
and get huge and then divide.
So, it's without those trees,
there would be no leachate,
without the leachate
there would be no kelp,
and without the kelp there
would be no otters...
...no coastal marine life.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Not even the whales.
Narrator: It's another of the
chain of relationships found
throughout nature that can
be so invisible to us...
...until that chain is broken.
[♪♪]
A strange desert was created in
Japan more than a century ago.
It happened on the Erimo
Peninsula on the northern
Island of Hokkaido.
Japanese settlers clear-cut
the native forests
to create farmland.
But with the trees gone, the
rich humus layer created by the
forest was gradually blown away
by the constant high winds.
The land became a barren desert,
that desert extended
itself into the sea.
Along thousands of
kilometres of coastline,
the marine ecosystem
collapsed entirely.
It was a mystery
to everyone.
Diana: Professor Katsuhiko
Matsunaga, solved this mystery.
It all begins with
a molecule of iron.
Iron is the foundation
of the marine food chain.
You found something that was so,
so simple and yet so valid for
everything all over the world.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: Now we know the
oceans feel the effect
of a forest clear-cut
hundreds of miles away.
[♪♪]
Maybe this is why the
Japanese have come to say
'seek a fish by
climbing a tree'.
[♪♪]
This is rainforest that
predates the last Ice Age.
Only 5% of this ancient
coastal rainforest remains.
[♪♪]
Diana: Along the
wild Pacific trail,
I came upon this great
Western redcedar.
It measures over 54'
in circumference,
and is over 1,000 years old.
But as with all trees, so
much more is going on here.
The DNA is each cell of
all trees codes the tree
to produce protein.
And it produces all of the
manufacturing needed for
its health, just
like you and me.
In this ancient redcedar
and all other trees,
they are not far off you and
me in their capacity to live,
but they have lived for a very,
very long period of time.
This is a phenomenal species.
It is something worth studying,
it is something definitely
worth knowing, and in my
opinion as a botanist,
it is a miracle of this planet.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
In the 1960s, this
whole watershed was logged.
In fact, 90% of the
watershed was logged,
and at that time no protection
was afforded to creeks
and rivers and streams.
So, they actually logged
right up to the creek banks
and then threw the waste
wood into the stream.
It was littered
with logging debris,
small branches to
large cedar logs,
and piled up so debris jams
that were blocking fish access
upstream and were blocking
water flow downstream.
By opening it up, but retaining
lots of the wood in
the stream still, we're sort
of restoring it back to
a functioning habitat.
Now can I make a
comment about you?
You're just a
little woman.
[laughs]
And how did you manage to
get these huge logs around
here back up to,
what did you do?
It's really hard work, but we
used a sort of hand powered
mechanical winches and
cables and pulley systems,
and we sort of just
pull the logs back,
opening the stream up, and then
sort of anchor them against
the bank of the creek.
To my eyes as a botanist, you've
got the elders in excellent
condition, then you've got the
lower shrubs that will feed the
butterflies and the birds and
then going down into the gravel.
You've got, opened
the whole area,
and you've got the stream
running over gravel,
which means the water
is being oxygenated.
And from your elders, then
you have got lots and lots
of really good lichens.
And these are lichens on
lichens producing ursolic acid,
which sweeps the water clean
in front of the salmon
coming up here.
If they can do it, with a
very small baby in arms,
if you can do it, I can
do it, if she can do it,
we can do it and actually
we can all do it,
'cause there's
lots of us around.
[♪♪]
Diana: I was born
next to the sea.
My heartbeat is part of the
ancient conversation between
the forests and the oceans.
[waves crashing]
The tides are in the trees,
in the atmosphere
and in the aquifers.
These are the bare bone
skeletal elements of our lives.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Like so many people
from around the globe,
the Irish were a
woodland culture.
And now as with so
many of those cultures,
their natives forests
have come down.
Across Ireland, atop these
hills, are where the Irish
oak forests once stood.
But no more.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
I look around me, there
are no oak forests left.
There should be
oak forests here.
[♪♪]
What happened to make
all of these forests go?
It's a whole series of
disasters that had happened
on this island.
Narrator: Many a result of
the 500 years of invasion
and occupation by England.
The saying went at the time that
the Irish will never be tamed
while there are
leaves on the trees.
And so Ireland was left with
less than 1% forest cover.
[♪♪]
Trees and forests are
often the casualty of wars,
occupation and conquest.
[♪♪]
It's hard to believe
that 2,000 years ago
this Ireland had a
protection,
stronger protection for its
trees than it has today.
The Irish, who are
woodland people,
lost the context for their
culture, which is these forests.
The section of Brehon law,
known as the Brehar comikesa,
which is the laws
of neighbourhood,
and the resources of the forest
belonged to every person on the
condition that they took what
they needed, no more, no less.
With the abundance of forest
that we had, you know,
for a long time, 65,
70, 75% forest cover,
there was enough
for everybody.
The Brehon law was written
before the Magna Carta,
before 1215 or 1216.
That Brehon law was written
centuries beforehand
and practiced centuries
even before that.
This law system came from the
forest from the observation
of how the forest is a almost
perfect society in how it
arranges itself from the very
biggest to the smallest,
all have a place and all are
working together in harmony.
It was about people living
very close to nature,
almost in a dream-like state
where they saw that the plants,
the trees, the stones,
the water was all alive,
and they could communicate
with all of these,
that there were spirits
in all of these things.
[♪♪]
Diana: In Ireland, these forests
of native species are so rare.
This is only one of a few,
and it is a small forest,
barely 60 acres.
It seems really as though it
has survived only by chance.
I know this forest, because
close by there is a very
important tree,
and it has a name.
The tree behind me is probably
my most favourite tree
in the world.
It's the tree that
sits in my landscape,
in the landscape of my mind
when I'm living in Canada,
and it stays there in my mind
because it has a conversation
with me all the time.
This tree has borne witness
to the landscape of Ireland
for a thousand years
and maybe even more.
It is the Quercus robur.
It is the darling
of the Celtic world.
This woodland was a
favourite of our last Ard-Ri,
and that was the
High King of Ireland,
and that man's name
was Brian Boru.
The druids that
were at his side,
told him and advised
him about these trees.
Narrator: The druids of ancient
Ireland are often misunderstood.
They were the elite educated
class of this woodland culture.
They served as spiritual
leaders, lawyers, doctors,
poets, composers,
musicians and astronomers.
They had an extraordinary
ability to observe nature.
The oak on dair was
sacred to the druids.
It remains a part of
many Irish legends.
The oak could communicate with
the heavens through lightning.
Three hundred years to be born,
three hundred years to live,
and three hundred years to die,
which is the history of an oak,
almost a thousand years.
When the tree gets
to be that ancient,
it has a great
weight on the canopy,
and when the wind
comes on the canopy,
it has a torque value
on the trunk itself,
and the torque value is like
winding the top of a bottle
of a jam jar, it tightens
down on the trunk itself.
And what that produces from
the bark is something really
interesting, it's a gallotannin
produced down at the end of
the tree and pours out
like a form of molasses,
and it was called uisce dubh,
uisce dubh by the druids,
the black water, the
healing black water.
The tannic acid has also
hypertensive action on the skin.
And if you've got bleeding
on the skin, it seals it,
closes up the wound and it's
like you just had surgery.
That's what the druids
had in ancient Ireland.
Medicine came from here.
[♪♪]
Medicines still do come
from nature, from trees.
We've just forgotten.
[♪♪]
Narrator: The Celts
heard the song of nature.
The song of the power of nature.
And they heard it
through the trees.
[thunder]
That forest song was
transcribed into an alphabet
called the 'Ogham Script'.
I'm sitting in front of the
newspaper of the druids,
the newspaper of
about 2,000 years old,
possibly the largest
newspaper in all of Ireland.
Narrator: Hundreds of these
ancient stone newspapers
survive, most of them
in southern Ireland.
This is one of the tallest.
I would come along here 2,000
years ago and I'd know the news
of the day, I'd know
who had conquered whom,
how many cows did somebody
have, who married who.
I'd find it on the stone.
Narrator: It is one of the
oldest scripts of Europe.
It is an alphabet
based on trees.
One tree is the Scots pine.
The Romans had a name for it,
Pinus silvestris, of course.
But the Irish have their name
for it, and the name is
'an Ailm', the sacred tree
'an bile', of the druids.
Their birch tree, birch is
called beithe in this language,
and it goes on like that.
The oak tree, the sacred tree
of the Celts, is the script
of D, dair, similar
to Daru of Sanskrit.
So it goes right down
the whole of the alphabet.
An bile in old Gaelic
are sacred trees,
and sacred trees were the sacred
trees of the Ogham script.
Each one of them was a sacred
specie, but that's nothing new,
because sacred trees are
found in North America.
They are the trees without
chlorophyll in them.
They are the blond trees,
the trees that are
called 'alba trees'.
Narrator: In the
global garden,
some trees are treated
as being special.
A deep reverence has emblazoned
their image on the landscape
since the beginning
of human history.
[♪♪]
And across the world,
there were trees of water.
They were called the 'water
fir' or 'dawn redwood'
in the sacred
temples of China.
The Cryptomeria Japonica, the
great sugi trees of Japan...
...found around the Shinto
shrines where the trees still
hold sacred significance.
[drumming]
Diana: These are
ancient species,
but there's always
medicine at the back of it.
There is always a reason why
these trees were called sacred.
[♪♪]
Narrator: And in Ireland, it
was certain ancient families
that kept this knowledge alive.
Diana: My family elders
passed this knowledge
of the trees to me.
I grew up here.
I was brought in here
when my family died.
According to Brehon thinking,
an orphan is everybody's child.
So everybody who lived
here, the high and the low,
felt they had a
responsibility to tutor me.
They taught me all the old laws,
the old cures, the pisogaries,
the thinking for
remedies for medicines.
All of the laws of the druids,
the laws of the trees,
an understanding of nature was
passed to me, a sacred trust.
This was my
apprenticeship in nature.
I worked as a scientist where I
had developed a non typing blood
substitute, an artificial blood,
and found that there was a
similarity in the chemistry of
plants and the human being.
The haemoglobin of blood and the
green chlorophyll of plants
are remarkably similar
in form and function.
[bird squawking]
[splash]
[birds squawking]
The science has spoke
to the sacred in me,
creating a synthesis for
my philosophy of nature.
Narrator: E. O. Wilson, Harvard
Entomologist and considered
the father of modern
environmentalism,
calls Diana's ideas
'A rare, entirely new
approach to natural history'.
That revolutionary approach led
to her series of groundbreaking
books about trees
and forest systems.
Arboretum America, A
Philosophy of the Forest.
Arboretum Borealis, A
Lifeline of the Planet.
Diana: And the little Global
Forest, that's a prayer book,
you know, a prayer
book of the forest.
[♪♪]
Christian is my
editor and photographer.
[♪♪]
I thought it was
just for a joke.
Yeah, yeah.
We've been working on the
forest for a very long time now,
with the idea of peace
in our heart, haven't we,
for an awfully long time?
Yes, we have.
Diana: An intact forest
is a mighty act of peace.
Christian: And it's fundamental
to who we are and to what we do.
[♪♪]
Diana: Christian's father
has had a great influence
on our thinking.
His job was to oversee the safe
return of the Apollo astronauts
from the moon.
So through their eyes, he
saw the earth from a very
different vantage point.
News footage: Eagle,
you're looking great.
Your father made an interesting
comment to us once.
Do you remember
that comment?
And it was about the astronauts
when they came back from space.
Oh, he said that when the
astronauts go into space
and then view the world
when they have come back,
they fundamentally change the
way they look at the world.
[♪♪]
Diana: We're carrying
his message.
We're carrying the message
of man being on the moon
and seeing how fragile
and how small earth is.
It is a very fragile
closed system.
Christian: And if we don't treat
it right, it'll get rid of us.
Diana: It will get
rid of us, yeah.
[♪♪]
Diana: I imagine you've
never really thought about
the atmosphere as being clean,
unless of course you live
downtown in a city, or you
live in Beijing, China,
where the atmosphere is
very, very bad with a lot of
particulate pollution.
[♪♪]
Trees themselves, they
can clean the atmosphere.
This is what all of these trees
do for us on a daily basis.
The forests function in
absorbing carbon dioxide out
of the atmosphere.
They have been doing that
for 400 million years.
Trees have been
banking carbon dioxide.
The carbon is digested into the
body of the tree from the leaf,
and the oxygen floats
out into the atmosphere.
The real banking of
nature is carbon banking.
It is the one element that is
used and reused and vaulted
and banked and stock shared
all over the planet.
Even in you.
There is carbon found in every
part of every living system all
over the world, and the trees
are the facilitators for this.
The forests are the
great banks of nature,
a carbon flow that
is extraordinary.
[birdsong]
Narrator: All over the
world we've taken down
too much forest.
In some instances what's
gone up are non-native trees
into native spaces, monoculture.
For example, here in Ireland,
you'll see great plantations,
well let's call it plantations,
because they're not really
forests, it's of Sitka spruce.
They are the green evergreens
you see as you drive around
the coastlands and right
through the country.
The problem is that Sitka spruce
comes from the west coast
of Canada and the United States.
Narrator: They've brought here
for cheap and easy lumber.
Like barley or corn, the tree
plantation is a cash crop.
It's not the heart and bones
of a rich ecosystem that turns
a group of trees into a forest.
For that, we must look to
the remains of the ancient
native woodlands.
We don't have much
native forest here at all
in terms of hardwoods.
We have a huge increase in
commercial tree farming all over
the world, of plantations of
monocultures that are usually
exotic trees that are not
adapted to local conditions.They're deserts.
They're deserts, they're not
providing for biodiversity.
Again we need to emphasize why
are the native trees and natural
forests so important, it's
because they're adapted to
the place, extremely
custom, customized.
We forget that this planet was
a rock a long, long time ago,
and it was through plants and
eventually trees that the soil,
humus was created
and built up.
And with the major loss of
soil, with the clear felling
of forests in uplands all
over the world causing major
flooding problems, erosion, the
loss of natural forest has led
to major infertility.
So, it's important again
that communities can protect
themselves and their soil
by creating their own local
community mixed
native woodlands.
[birdsong]
Native species are
always value added.
This is the
Scots pine.
It has been planted
in North America,
throughout North America, and
it's an invasive specie there.
But in all of Europe, up to the
boreal forest, including Russia,
this tree is the
king of the forest.
These seeds are edible, and
this area is full of birds,
and they'll plunge in here
and they'll take their food
from this supermarket.
The supermarket of this
tree holds a fatty acid,
a linolenic kind of acid
that builds their brains
and it builds their babies.
Why does Ireland now not
plant this native species,
or supply the supermarket
for all of the migrations of
birds and let us not forget
all of the butterflies
and the insects?
Where you have native species,
you have biodiversity.
If you've got biodiversity,
you have health.
Standing here at the foot of a
native species, the Scots pine,
Pinus silvestris to you all.
[train chugging]
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: Fairy tales are
filled with enchanted forests.
Places of danger
and transformation,
home to witches and fairies.
[♪♪]
[children laughing]
But few forests evoke
enchantment more than
the Black Forest of Germany.
[moo]
[♪♪]
Like Ireland, German culture
is deeply rooted in the forest.
Germany has managed to remain
more than 30% forest covered.
[♪♪]
Germany is a highly
industrialized nation,
yet for them, sustainable
resource management
is a way of life.
In 2013, Germany
celebrated 300 years of
sustainable forest management.
We have 50% needle trees
and we have 50% leaf trees,
and half of all the leaf
trees is the beech tree.
We are looking forward that we
don't have stands with one,
only one tree.
We have no monoculture.
In Germany it's very important
where you get the drinking
water, and the forests
are a very important area
for clean water.
And we don't get
compensation for this,
but we do this for our people
and for all of
our wellness also.
And we have a discussion in
whether there must be a change
that the forest owner should
get money also for this...
Yeah, like a grant.
...get a grant for, for this
job he do for, for example,
for drinking water,
for our good air.
We have very much
people on this area,
and so we have also
a lot of emissions,
and the forests are important
to get to absorb the emissions.
[birdsong]
We are thinking a very,
very long time schedules
when we think about forests.
I mean we inherited the forest
from our grand grandfathers,
and we are benefiting
from it now,
that we consider it our duty to
leave the quality or to leave
the possibilities for the next
generation to do just the same
as we do today, that's our
understanding of sustainability.
[♪♪]
Diana: When I was a
young girl in Ireland,
there seemed to be
no end to everything.
And I remember being told that
the hair on a person's head,
you couldn't count their
hairs, it was endless.
And the same kind of thinking
was applied to the fresh water
lakes, and the fish in the sea,
there was no end to the fish
and the trawling that
could take place,
and the forests could
come down everywhere.
There was such a richness
on this planet that there
was no end to it.
The same goes for mining, ores
of all kind could be taken out
of the earth and there
was no end to them.
[♪♪]
But today, it is not
infinite, it is finite.
There is an end to the forest,
there is an end to the great
ocean, the saline ocean,
the fish in the sea,
there is an end to mining,
there is an end to
all of these things.
We have to manage our
resources sustainably.
[♪♪]
Narrator: This is one
forest in need of preservation,
not restoration.
It is the largest forest
system in the world.
It is holding its breath, and
all we need do is preserve it.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: The boreal is the
last great working forest
in the world.
It is about 30,000 years old.
This forest system feeds the big
and the small; caribou, bears,
deer, wolves and wolverines,
beaver and snow leopards,
down to the minute mammals,
just to name a few.
It is the breadbasket for
migration and nesting for many
of the planets
songbirds and waterfowl.
[♪♪]
The boreal entombs a vast
tonnage of cold carbon storage
in the permafrost of the
ground and waterways.
In order to survive its
seven-month harsh winter,
with short days and
reduced sunlight,
the boreal has evolved over time
into a complex web of cold hardy
species, each dependent on all
the others for its survival.
[birdsong]
That's why I call the
boreal forest the mastermind
of the world.
[birdsong]
Lots of people are
aware and know of the Amazon.
But the planet holds this
giant secret to the north.
Narrator: The boreal sits
upon the north of the globe
like a crown, right across
northern Canada and Scandinavia,
and then across into Russia,
where it is known as the Taiga.
It even touches northern
Asia, and Hokkaido,
the most northern
island of Japan
and into the Kuril Islands.
The boreal accounts for
30% of the global forests.
Diana: In Canada, the backbone
of that forest holds a pine tree
called the Jack pine,
or the pinus banksiana.
They are lean and
frugal, these trees.
They're conifers,
remember.
They hang onto the
needles for up to 7 years.
So it means their pull of
nutrients out of the soil
isn't very great.
They can survive in
very tough conditions.
[wind blowing]
[♪♪]
There is a secondary
forest of lichens,
which covers the forest floor as
a carpet and surfaces the trees.
These lichens clean the
atmosphere and pull nitrogen
out of it.
And the forest lays down needles
over vast periods of time,
and those needles don't
decompose but they are a source
of protein for the lichens,
which take about a
hundred years to grow.
Then there are the
tripe lichens on rocks,
and they take more than
a hundred years to grow.
And then there are the bryonia
lichens on all the trees,
just lacing the trees,
and they take an awfully
long time to grow.
[♪♪]
Narrator: Its remote northern
location has largely saved
the boreal from the fate
of the southern forests,
but the age of mega projects
is rapidly changing that.
In the boreal forest of
northern Alberta, Canada,
are the tar sands.
[♪♪]
A resource extraction project
of immense proportions...
...with plans to expand
over an area almost
twice the size of Ireland.
[♪♪]
Diana: This once living
landscape...is now dead.
[♪♪]
Giant hydroelectric projects are
flooding on a similar scale...
then mining and logging.
In all of the forests
all over the world,
there are trees that represent
a biomass of about 300 billion
tonnes of carbon dioxide, about
a quarter to a third of it in
and under the boreal.
If the boreal forest comes down,
we are looking at the release
of an enormous tonnage of
carbon dioxide into the air.
Enough carbon dioxide into the
air that it will make it
toxic for us.
[♪♪]
You see, you can't replace
or replant that boreal forest.
You can never replace
this complexity.
Once it's gone, it's gone.
[♪♪]
[birdsongs]
Narrator: In the heart
of North America,
bordering the east shore of Lake
Winnipeg, is Pimachiowin Aki,
similar in size to the
country of Denmark.
It holds a forest growing
to its full potential.
And it is by no accident this
forest remains pristine.
The Aboriginal people
have fought to keep
this land untouched.
If the voices of its
people are heard,
it will become a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
The Aboriginal peoples have
been guardians of this land
for thousands of years.
Narrator: Sophia Rabliauskas,
from the Ojibway nation,
has spent her life in the
Poplar River area in the heart
of Manitoba's boreal forest.
Bird.Bird, yes.
Diana: For somebody to come in
and say to you well we're going
to cut all your trees,
we're going to log this area,
well it's going to destroy your
health first and destroy your
families, it will be...
Sophia: It's a threat even
just to say, you know,
we're gonna do that.
This is our plan
and it's a threat,
it was a threat to
our way of life.
Diana: It must be very scary.
And it is, and that's why
we took it upon ourselves
that we are not gonna
allow this to happen.
And we were very fortunate that
we were able to find people
who are out there to stand with
us against these developments
that continue to take
and take and take,
and that's the mentality
that's out there.
And I would, you know,
get people saying to me,
you will continue to keep your
people in poverty because you're
stopping development, you know,
you're stopping the community
from benefiting
from these projects.
In the past, there were all
these developments going on near
indigenous communities and none
of those indigenous communities
ever benefited from these
projects or gained.
We continue, those people
continue to live in poverty.
Those people continue to have
their resources extracted
from their lands.
So, the idea came that maybe we
should do a land use planning,
how the land is continued
to be used to this day.
Narrator: To help in the
protection of their land,
five Anishinabe Ojibway
First Nation territories,
provincial and
federal governments,
have all come together to
propose Pimachiowin Aki,
'the land that gives life', as a
designated UNESCO World Heritage
Site to ensure mindful
protection of both their culture
and of these lands
into the future.
Diana: They realized the land
is most valuable to everyone
left as it is, with the
trees growing in the earth.
We have been able to maintain
that land for thousands of
years, the way it is,
untouched by development,
pristine boreal forest,
healthy ecosystem.
When I was walking through the
bush with my father and when he
said, "You know, don't forget
to stop and look around you
and feel the earth
around you, the beauty."
So each generation has
its responsibility.
[speaking Ojibway]
[♪♪]
Be grounded, don't lose that,
that's the wisdom of the land.
It reminds you of who you are.
Once you connect
to that land,
you will do anything
to fight for it.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
We look around us here,
we've got how many thousands
and thousands of tons of
material in this oak wood,
where has it come from?
It hasn't quarried from it; it
hasn't taken from anything.
Yeah, it's taken
from the atmosphere.It's taken from the air,
it's taken from the
water and the sun.
And it's created
this wealth.
The earth needs over
one-third cover, forest cover,
and more to have a balance and
to ensure fertility of soil...
And oxygenation
of the air....and oxygenation
of the air.
So, we can't wait
for organizations,
we can't wait
for politicians.
It's not rocket science
to put the forests back.
Communities could be trained to
engage in the restoration
and collecting the seed,
creating the nurseries.
There's plenty of work to be
done restoring the forests.
Yeah.
[♪♪]
Diana: Once you connect
with that land,
you will do anything
to fight for it.
[♪♪]
A Bioplan for Biodiversity.
A Bioplan to reverse pollution.
Evergreen.
Evergreen, yeah,
evergreen species.
One more!
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
I didn't want to
damage the root.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: At times
and long ago, I saw,
touched and heard that which
was being born, a heartbeat,
a sound amongst the stones,
was that which was being born.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: The sun.
The life force of
our solar system.
Its photons of energy can remain
trapped in the sun's sphere
for 100,000 years.
And when finally they are
released, it will take
the photons 8 minutes to travel
from the surface of the sun
to the surface of a
leaf on planet earth.
[birdsong]
A leaf is a marvel of evolution.
It transforms the photons
into food for planet earth,
creating a foundation
for all life.
And it begins with a tree.
[birdsong]
It's time to look again at
that tree outside your door...
[ambient street noise]
...and to the forest beyond.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: What do you
know about trees and forests?
[birdsong]
When you come into
the forest like this,
the first thing that hits you
is the smell of the earth,
the smell of the
humus in the earth,
the smell of the decaying
twigs, the smell,
that wonderful smell that
rises up to you and meets you.
[birdsong]
Narrator: We all feel
better when we're around trees,
and when we walk in
a forest, but why?
For over 1,000 years, the
Japanese have been coming to
their forests to do what
they call 'forest bathing'.
From school children
to businessmen,
they all come here
to forest bathe.
Diana: Forest bathing is really
about immersing yourself in the
bath of medicinal aerosols that
make up the forest atmosphere,
and the benefits are many!
I'm on the top, no,
halfway up Mt. Kurama.
[birdsong]
I'm joining, it seems to me,
to be the rest of the Japanese
population today on this
wonderful day in
fall - forest bathing.
Narrator: If you feel refreshed
and invigorated after a walk
in the forest, there is
a chemical explanation.
Diana: A tree is
not just a tree.
Some of the most complex
chemistry that is found on
the planet is produced
in the furnace of a tree.
[drumming]
One of the most important
trees at the Shinto Shrine
is the sacred sugi tree.
[drum]
[♪♪]
And for those who speak Latin,
it's Cryptomeria Japonica,
the sacred tree of
the Shinto shrines.
The sugi and many of these
trees around me are indeed very
powerful in the work that they
do with this molecular screening
of chemical aerosols
into the atmosphere.
[♪♪]
These aerosols directly
benefit your immune system.
[♪♪]
Trees create many of the
chemicals used in the
manufacture of approximately
60% of our medicines,
from aspirin and caffeine to
paclitaxel in the treatment
of breast cancers.
And trees continue
to be rich banks of
biochemical possibilities.
These trees also have life
living within the tree itself.
It's a fungal life form and they
are called 'endogenous fungi'.
These endogenous
fungi are very clever.
They produce
extraordinary compounds,
and the compounds they
produce are very unique.
Narrator: These previously
unknown compounds are the source
of many new exciting medicines.
But you're coming in here
today to get it for free,
and that's part
of forest bathing.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: Everyone benefits.
[♪♪]
Narrator: Trees are the
secret to our existence,
because they rule this planet on
every physical plane, the land,
the sea and the air.
So much of our world
is invisible to us,
such as all of the chemicals
that are the building blocks
of a healthy balanced
and breathing world.
Diana: And of course the trees
are a key player in this
manufacturing and distribution
of these chemicals.
[bird squawking]
This spruce tree, it's
an Engelmann spruce,
it's an ancient, ancient tree,
and it has a fiery canopy of all
kinds of chemicals in it.
This tree produces a whole
treasury of aerosols.
The aerosols are Alpha
Pinene and Beta Pinene.
Then in the air there
is borneol acetate,
in the air there's a
form of camphor compound.
Liberated with that is
a limonene compound,
which aerates itself, firing
up into the atmosphere,
like the parasols
of a dandelion.
Narrator: It is an applicator
chemical, an aerosol.
So all of those
chemicals, those pinenes,
are now in my lungs.
[♪♪]
The limonene produced
by these trees
is used in chemotherapy.
Limonene is
anti-cancer compound,
the pinenes are
antibiotic compounds,
and what they are doing to me
now is they're giving me a
slightly narcotic reaction, they
have an anaesthetic reaction
on my brain, and in
my myelin sheath,
in all the message
areas of my body,
just messages just
like a computer system.
And what that is telling
me is to relax,
as my immune system
is being boosted.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: Cities
everywhere need trees...
...to bring in birds, to clean
the air of airborne pollution,
and to soften the
concrete experience.
[♪♪]
Narrator: One man who has given
this much thought and is getting
his hands in the dirt is
Professor Akira Miyawaki.
He has spent 50 years
traveling the globe,
planting and restoring native
specie forest systems.
He's turned his attention to
Tokyo, the city he calls home.
Professor Miyawaki searches for
every nook and cranny in Tokyo
to fill with native trees,
the big, small and tiny.
Creating what he calls the
world's smallest forests.
This is a perfect
example of a city forest.
Yes, yes, very
important.
City forest.Yeah, yeah.
And it's the smallest
forest in Tokyo.
[bird cawing]
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
When you're in the garden and
you're looking at a cherry tree,
and you see a Baltimore oriole
coming into the cherry tree,
or even a cardinal,
or even a scarlet tanager,
you have the garden
not because of you,
and you know you've built
the garden for the bird,
and it gives you a feeling of
completeness that in the whole
world there is gratitude to you
that you have a garden and
that you're honoured that these
birds will come and visit you,
and that you've built a habitat
for the birds and you have
maintained and protected the
habitats for those birds
and the animals and the snakes
and the creatures around you,
and, by gosh, it gives
you a really good feeling
of well-being and joy.
So, what you are doing with a
bio plan is you're working with
nature, and then when you have a
good healthy nature around you,
you actually have your health.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: In the countryside
around her farm in
Ontario, Canada, Diana
Beresford-Kroeger noticed
many tree species disappearing.
She made the decision to
preserve and protect them.
For over 40 years now, she has
devoted her life to collecting,
trialing, breeding and studying
rare North American tree species
to survive climate change.
Building a living library
to ensure biodiversity,
food and medicines.
As she did, she realized
this has to happen all over
the globe, wherever the native
forests are falling before
human need and greed.
Diana: This led me to
the outlandish notion
that we might, we must
replant the global forest.
Our cheapest and best defence
against climate change.
In my own way, I began
replanting the global
forests long ago.
I planted this black walnut as
a seedling here on my farm
almost 30 years ago now.
'Tis a tree that really grows
in all of eastern Canada
and down into the States
along the Mississippi.
It's really an extraordinary
state of affairs,
where everything around
this tree benefits from it.
It is really a medicinal tree,
and it produces a fruit,
the fruit is a nut,
and the nut is here.
The nut is like a
globe really, isn't it.
The protein of these nutmeats
is as good as any beef
on the market.
Then these nuts
have got minerals,
all kinds of unusual minerals,
but they have got
something else, three items
that are very, very scarce
in our food nowadays.
The flesh of this nut
has oleic, linoleic
and linolenic acid in them.
These are the three essential
fatty acids for the development
and repair of the brain, the
functioning of transportation
all through the body for neural
messages because these acids,
these fatty acids, protect the
myelin sheath of the human body
and of the animals, and what
you should have is maybe two
or three or four of them a day.
And also once upon a time, these
were part of the great savannah
of North America.
[♪♪]
Diana: A long time ago in the
Middle Ages and way stretching
before that in
thousands of years,
this heart of America could
do something remarkable
with the forests.
Out of this soil, the plasticity
of green grew to produce forests
beyond your thinking, beyond
the dimensions of your home,
enormous canopies of forest that
carried butternuts, walnuts,
hickory nuts, chestnuts, and
marvellous oak trees in great
canopy systems, which
were called savannahs,
and they stretched
hundreds of miles,
sucking up the
Mississippi River,
with this marvellous green
highway that the squirrels could
walk hundreds of miles
without touching the ground,
and that green highway was
there stretching the continent.
Narrator: From the Gulf
of Mexico to north of
the Ottawa River, and
from the Atlantic coast
to west of the Mississippi,
today the remnants of
these virgin hardwood
forests are miniscule.
[♪♪]
And there are no wild stands
of black walnut remaining
on record in the United States.
[♪♪]
This North American
sister of the Japanese Sugi,
the American Redwood, is one of
the world's most loved trees,
and for good reason,
its sheer size makes it
so memorable and inspiring.
It's the largest carbon bearing
living organism on earth.
[♪♪]
For an Irish woman,
this place is haunted.
It's haunted by silence, and
a certain quality of mercy.
The trees are enormous.
They are called sequoias,
evergreen sequoias,
sequoia sempervirens,
which is the redwood.
The redwood is the tallest tree,
the tallest conifer
on the planet.
It will go up to
maybe 40 stories.
It will soar right
up into the sky.
Chief Sequoia called them the
kings of the forest and they are
indeed the kings of the conifer
forest, but this is a very,
very unusual place
in all of the planet.
Well, I was working with
redwoods as a research species.
I have to tell you it's a pretty
easy tree to fall in love with.
We haven't really started to
figure out yet what's going on
in trees, and particularly
what's going on underground.
I mean we stand here and
look at these things,
and above ground is awesome,
A few weeks ago, I was sitting
at my kitchen table and
I was thinking about the volume
of a 2,000-year-old redwood.
I decided that I would, in
my mind, create a scale,
and I would put a 2,000-year-old
redwood on one side
of the scale, and what
would balance out that scale
and it would be a whole
town, and the town would be,
I figured out the volume
of about 13,000 people,
and that boggled my mind,
and then I got the idea
of the volume
of these trees.
It's just immense!
If you look at the rings, the
rings on this tree are very
small, because there's so much
diameter and there's so much
height, that the years growth
is being put on a whole lot
of very small places.
But when you add it up, a big
tree like this is growing faster
now than it has every time in
its life, they don't slow down.
Diana: We're standing on
soil containing insects,
bacteria fascias, fungal
hyphae, viruses, bacteria,
and even algae, and
there is so much more.
And we don't even fully
understand living soil,
let alone the roots, let
alone the interconnections.
It's like a huge metro
system underneath our feet.
These redwoods that remain
with us are really the runts.
[♪♪]
The straightest, biggest,
oldest trees are always
the first to be logged.
By the 1870s, most of the
remarkably big redwoods were
already taken for lumber.
[♪♪]
These were the mother trees,
2,000 to 4,000-year-old trees.
We now know that these really
big trees, the mother trees,
in any forest system essentially
nurse all of the forest
around them, by way of carbon
and nutrient transfers through
the underground network
of root and soil.
[♪♪]
And when these dominant trees
are removed from a forest,
the integrity, health and
the quality of a forest
is significantly diminished.
[♪♪]
They really are a coastal
species, aren't they?
Well, the coast redwoods
is coastal species,
but when you talk about all
those species of the redwoods,
we have giant sequoia,
which is a mountain species,
grows at elevations
between about,
oh, 1500 and
3,000 metres.
Narrator: Before
the last Ice Age,
the various redwood species
grew across the entire northern
landscape of planet earth.
After the last Ice Age, we were
down to some 2 million acres of
redwoods, mostly in California,
and now with the present and
ongoing chainsaw cycle, we are
down to about 133,000 acres.
Diana: The redwood forests
of North America stretch from
the Chetco River up in Oregon,
down to the Monterey peninsula,
and a little bit closer
maybe to San Francisco.
Think of these redwoods as
a whole series of tall green
curtains stretching
up and down the coast;
a green wall on the lower
area and a green wall on
the mountainous area.
That green wall is
connected to the atmosphere,
and in turn is connected to the
great ocean of the Pacific
in a rather extraordinary way.
In the morning
here in California,
the mist rises in from the sea,
and it is actually drawn in from
the sea by the heat of the land.
But these green
curtains trap that mist.
These trees are acting as
condenser units or green
machines for the collection
and preservation of water.
They're pulling the moisture
up from the aquifer,
but they're replenishing the
aquifer again and again
by condensation of fresh potable
water from the ocean mist.
In the past, the redwoods
provided this service here
for the west coast.
California is very dry
and it is getting drier,
and as these trees come down,
it's getting drier
and drier again.
These redwood forests
need to come back.
[water splashing]
Narrator: Along the coast, the
trees are part of a chain
or a cycle, a feeding cycle,
which feeds everything.
All the way to the
underwater forests.
Diana: These underwater forests
of kelp oxygenate the oceans,
as the trees do the atmosphere.
What we do see of this invisible
forest is the upper canopy
of its reproduction, floating
with balloons called vesicles
that are filled with
mucilage and air.
Below the surface, this kelp
forest is held in place by a
root system called 'a holdfast',
anchoring it to the ocean floor.
Amazingly, the kelp grows as
much as a foot and a half a day.
But those kelp depend
on the trees here.
And when the trees are growing
and producing leachate,
the leachate comes right
down into the water here,
and the leachate carries
iron in the water,
then they can grow and get big
and get huge and then divide.
So, it's without those trees,
there would be no leachate,
without the leachate
there would be no kelp,
and without the kelp there
would be no otters...
...no coastal marine life.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Not even the whales.
Narrator: It's another of the
chain of relationships found
throughout nature that can
be so invisible to us...
...until that chain is broken.
[♪♪]
A strange desert was created in
Japan more than a century ago.
It happened on the Erimo
Peninsula on the northern
Island of Hokkaido.
Japanese settlers clear-cut
the native forests
to create farmland.
But with the trees gone, the
rich humus layer created by the
forest was gradually blown away
by the constant high winds.
The land became a barren desert,
that desert extended
itself into the sea.
Along thousands of
kilometres of coastline,
the marine ecosystem
collapsed entirely.
It was a mystery
to everyone.
Diana: Professor Katsuhiko
Matsunaga, solved this mystery.
It all begins with
a molecule of iron.
Iron is the foundation
of the marine food chain.
You found something that was so,
so simple and yet so valid for
everything all over the world.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: Now we know the
oceans feel the effect
of a forest clear-cut
hundreds of miles away.
[♪♪]
Maybe this is why the
Japanese have come to say
'seek a fish by
climbing a tree'.
[♪♪]
This is rainforest that
predates the last Ice Age.
Only 5% of this ancient
coastal rainforest remains.
[♪♪]
Diana: Along the
wild Pacific trail,
I came upon this great
Western redcedar.
It measures over 54'
in circumference,
and is over 1,000 years old.
But as with all trees, so
much more is going on here.
The DNA is each cell of
all trees codes the tree
to produce protein.
And it produces all of the
manufacturing needed for
its health, just
like you and me.
In this ancient redcedar
and all other trees,
they are not far off you and
me in their capacity to live,
but they have lived for a very,
very long period of time.
This is a phenomenal species.
It is something worth studying,
it is something definitely
worth knowing, and in my
opinion as a botanist,
it is a miracle of this planet.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
In the 1960s, this
whole watershed was logged.
In fact, 90% of the
watershed was logged,
and at that time no protection
was afforded to creeks
and rivers and streams.
So, they actually logged
right up to the creek banks
and then threw the waste
wood into the stream.
It was littered
with logging debris,
small branches to
large cedar logs,
and piled up so debris jams
that were blocking fish access
upstream and were blocking
water flow downstream.
By opening it up, but retaining
lots of the wood in
the stream still, we're sort
of restoring it back to
a functioning habitat.
Now can I make a
comment about you?
You're just a
little woman.
[laughs]
And how did you manage to
get these huge logs around
here back up to,
what did you do?
It's really hard work, but we
used a sort of hand powered
mechanical winches and
cables and pulley systems,
and we sort of just
pull the logs back,
opening the stream up, and then
sort of anchor them against
the bank of the creek.
To my eyes as a botanist, you've
got the elders in excellent
condition, then you've got the
lower shrubs that will feed the
butterflies and the birds and
then going down into the gravel.
You've got, opened
the whole area,
and you've got the stream
running over gravel,
which means the water
is being oxygenated.
And from your elders, then
you have got lots and lots
of really good lichens.
And these are lichens on
lichens producing ursolic acid,
which sweeps the water clean
in front of the salmon
coming up here.
If they can do it, with a
very small baby in arms,
if you can do it, I can
do it, if she can do it,
we can do it and actually
we can all do it,
'cause there's
lots of us around.
[♪♪]
Diana: I was born
next to the sea.
My heartbeat is part of the
ancient conversation between
the forests and the oceans.
[waves crashing]
The tides are in the trees,
in the atmosphere
and in the aquifers.
These are the bare bone
skeletal elements of our lives.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Like so many people
from around the globe,
the Irish were a
woodland culture.
And now as with so
many of those cultures,
their natives forests
have come down.
Across Ireland, atop these
hills, are where the Irish
oak forests once stood.
But no more.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
I look around me, there
are no oak forests left.
There should be
oak forests here.
[♪♪]
What happened to make
all of these forests go?
It's a whole series of
disasters that had happened
on this island.
Narrator: Many a result of
the 500 years of invasion
and occupation by England.
The saying went at the time that
the Irish will never be tamed
while there are
leaves on the trees.
And so Ireland was left with
less than 1% forest cover.
[♪♪]
Trees and forests are
often the casualty of wars,
occupation and conquest.
[♪♪]
It's hard to believe
that 2,000 years ago
this Ireland had a
protection,
stronger protection for its
trees than it has today.
The Irish, who are
woodland people,
lost the context for their
culture, which is these forests.
The section of Brehon law,
known as the Brehar comikesa,
which is the laws
of neighbourhood,
and the resources of the forest
belonged to every person on the
condition that they took what
they needed, no more, no less.
With the abundance of forest
that we had, you know,
for a long time, 65,
70, 75% forest cover,
there was enough
for everybody.
The Brehon law was written
before the Magna Carta,
before 1215 or 1216.
That Brehon law was written
centuries beforehand
and practiced centuries
even before that.
This law system came from the
forest from the observation
of how the forest is a almost
perfect society in how it
arranges itself from the very
biggest to the smallest,
all have a place and all are
working together in harmony.
It was about people living
very close to nature,
almost in a dream-like state
where they saw that the plants,
the trees, the stones,
the water was all alive,
and they could communicate
with all of these,
that there were spirits
in all of these things.
[♪♪]
Diana: In Ireland, these forests
of native species are so rare.
This is only one of a few,
and it is a small forest,
barely 60 acres.
It seems really as though it
has survived only by chance.
I know this forest, because
close by there is a very
important tree,
and it has a name.
The tree behind me is probably
my most favourite tree
in the world.
It's the tree that
sits in my landscape,
in the landscape of my mind
when I'm living in Canada,
and it stays there in my mind
because it has a conversation
with me all the time.
This tree has borne witness
to the landscape of Ireland
for a thousand years
and maybe even more.
It is the Quercus robur.
It is the darling
of the Celtic world.
This woodland was a
favourite of our last Ard-Ri,
and that was the
High King of Ireland,
and that man's name
was Brian Boru.
The druids that
were at his side,
told him and advised
him about these trees.
Narrator: The druids of ancient
Ireland are often misunderstood.
They were the elite educated
class of this woodland culture.
They served as spiritual
leaders, lawyers, doctors,
poets, composers,
musicians and astronomers.
They had an extraordinary
ability to observe nature.
The oak on dair was
sacred to the druids.
It remains a part of
many Irish legends.
The oak could communicate with
the heavens through lightning.
Three hundred years to be born,
three hundred years to live,
and three hundred years to die,
which is the history of an oak,
almost a thousand years.
When the tree gets
to be that ancient,
it has a great
weight on the canopy,
and when the wind
comes on the canopy,
it has a torque value
on the trunk itself,
and the torque value is like
winding the top of a bottle
of a jam jar, it tightens
down on the trunk itself.
And what that produces from
the bark is something really
interesting, it's a gallotannin
produced down at the end of
the tree and pours out
like a form of molasses,
and it was called uisce dubh,
uisce dubh by the druids,
the black water, the
healing black water.
The tannic acid has also
hypertensive action on the skin.
And if you've got bleeding
on the skin, it seals it,
closes up the wound and it's
like you just had surgery.
That's what the druids
had in ancient Ireland.
Medicine came from here.
[♪♪]
Medicines still do come
from nature, from trees.
We've just forgotten.
[♪♪]
Narrator: The Celts
heard the song of nature.
The song of the power of nature.
And they heard it
through the trees.
[thunder]
That forest song was
transcribed into an alphabet
called the 'Ogham Script'.
I'm sitting in front of the
newspaper of the druids,
the newspaper of
about 2,000 years old,
possibly the largest
newspaper in all of Ireland.
Narrator: Hundreds of these
ancient stone newspapers
survive, most of them
in southern Ireland.
This is one of the tallest.
I would come along here 2,000
years ago and I'd know the news
of the day, I'd know
who had conquered whom,
how many cows did somebody
have, who married who.
I'd find it on the stone.
Narrator: It is one of the
oldest scripts of Europe.
It is an alphabet
based on trees.
One tree is the Scots pine.
The Romans had a name for it,
Pinus silvestris, of course.
But the Irish have their name
for it, and the name is
'an Ailm', the sacred tree
'an bile', of the druids.
Their birch tree, birch is
called beithe in this language,
and it goes on like that.
The oak tree, the sacred tree
of the Celts, is the script
of D, dair, similar
to Daru of Sanskrit.
So it goes right down
the whole of the alphabet.
An bile in old Gaelic
are sacred trees,
and sacred trees were the sacred
trees of the Ogham script.
Each one of them was a sacred
specie, but that's nothing new,
because sacred trees are
found in North America.
They are the trees without
chlorophyll in them.
They are the blond trees,
the trees that are
called 'alba trees'.
Narrator: In the
global garden,
some trees are treated
as being special.
A deep reverence has emblazoned
their image on the landscape
since the beginning
of human history.
[♪♪]
And across the world,
there were trees of water.
They were called the 'water
fir' or 'dawn redwood'
in the sacred
temples of China.
The Cryptomeria Japonica, the
great sugi trees of Japan...
...found around the Shinto
shrines where the trees still
hold sacred significance.
[drumming]
Diana: These are
ancient species,
but there's always
medicine at the back of it.
There is always a reason why
these trees were called sacred.
[♪♪]
Narrator: And in Ireland, it
was certain ancient families
that kept this knowledge alive.
Diana: My family elders
passed this knowledge
of the trees to me.
I grew up here.
I was brought in here
when my family died.
According to Brehon thinking,
an orphan is everybody's child.
So everybody who lived
here, the high and the low,
felt they had a
responsibility to tutor me.
They taught me all the old laws,
the old cures, the pisogaries,
the thinking for
remedies for medicines.
All of the laws of the druids,
the laws of the trees,
an understanding of nature was
passed to me, a sacred trust.
This was my
apprenticeship in nature.
I worked as a scientist where I
had developed a non typing blood
substitute, an artificial blood,
and found that there was a
similarity in the chemistry of
plants and the human being.
The haemoglobin of blood and the
green chlorophyll of plants
are remarkably similar
in form and function.
[bird squawking]
[splash]
[birds squawking]
The science has spoke
to the sacred in me,
creating a synthesis for
my philosophy of nature.
Narrator: E. O. Wilson, Harvard
Entomologist and considered
the father of modern
environmentalism,
calls Diana's ideas
'A rare, entirely new
approach to natural history'.
That revolutionary approach led
to her series of groundbreaking
books about trees
and forest systems.
Arboretum America, A
Philosophy of the Forest.
Arboretum Borealis, A
Lifeline of the Planet.
Diana: And the little Global
Forest, that's a prayer book,
you know, a prayer
book of the forest.
[♪♪]
Christian is my
editor and photographer.
[♪♪]
I thought it was
just for a joke.
Yeah, yeah.
We've been working on the
forest for a very long time now,
with the idea of peace
in our heart, haven't we,
for an awfully long time?
Yes, we have.
Diana: An intact forest
is a mighty act of peace.
Christian: And it's fundamental
to who we are and to what we do.
[♪♪]
Diana: Christian's father
has had a great influence
on our thinking.
His job was to oversee the safe
return of the Apollo astronauts
from the moon.
So through their eyes, he
saw the earth from a very
different vantage point.
News footage: Eagle,
you're looking great.
Your father made an interesting
comment to us once.
Do you remember
that comment?
And it was about the astronauts
when they came back from space.
Oh, he said that when the
astronauts go into space
and then view the world
when they have come back,
they fundamentally change the
way they look at the world.
[♪♪]
Diana: We're carrying
his message.
We're carrying the message
of man being on the moon
and seeing how fragile
and how small earth is.
It is a very fragile
closed system.
Christian: And if we don't treat
it right, it'll get rid of us.
Diana: It will get
rid of us, yeah.
[♪♪]
Diana: I imagine you've
never really thought about
the atmosphere as being clean,
unless of course you live
downtown in a city, or you
live in Beijing, China,
where the atmosphere is
very, very bad with a lot of
particulate pollution.
[♪♪]
Trees themselves, they
can clean the atmosphere.
This is what all of these trees
do for us on a daily basis.
The forests function in
absorbing carbon dioxide out
of the atmosphere.
They have been doing that
for 400 million years.
Trees have been
banking carbon dioxide.
The carbon is digested into the
body of the tree from the leaf,
and the oxygen floats
out into the atmosphere.
The real banking of
nature is carbon banking.
It is the one element that is
used and reused and vaulted
and banked and stock shared
all over the planet.
Even in you.
There is carbon found in every
part of every living system all
over the world, and the trees
are the facilitators for this.
The forests are the
great banks of nature,
a carbon flow that
is extraordinary.
[birdsong]
Narrator: All over the
world we've taken down
too much forest.
In some instances what's
gone up are non-native trees
into native spaces, monoculture.
For example, here in Ireland,
you'll see great plantations,
well let's call it plantations,
because they're not really
forests, it's of Sitka spruce.
They are the green evergreens
you see as you drive around
the coastlands and right
through the country.
The problem is that Sitka spruce
comes from the west coast
of Canada and the United States.
Narrator: They've brought here
for cheap and easy lumber.
Like barley or corn, the tree
plantation is a cash crop.
It's not the heart and bones
of a rich ecosystem that turns
a group of trees into a forest.
For that, we must look to
the remains of the ancient
native woodlands.
We don't have much
native forest here at all
in terms of hardwoods.
We have a huge increase in
commercial tree farming all over
the world, of plantations of
monocultures that are usually
exotic trees that are not
adapted to local conditions.They're deserts.
They're deserts, they're not
providing for biodiversity.
Again we need to emphasize why
are the native trees and natural
forests so important, it's
because they're adapted to
the place, extremely
custom, customized.
We forget that this planet was
a rock a long, long time ago,
and it was through plants and
eventually trees that the soil,
humus was created
and built up.
And with the major loss of
soil, with the clear felling
of forests in uplands all
over the world causing major
flooding problems, erosion, the
loss of natural forest has led
to major infertility.
So, it's important again
that communities can protect
themselves and their soil
by creating their own local
community mixed
native woodlands.
[birdsong]
Native species are
always value added.
This is the
Scots pine.
It has been planted
in North America,
throughout North America, and
it's an invasive specie there.
But in all of Europe, up to the
boreal forest, including Russia,
this tree is the
king of the forest.
These seeds are edible, and
this area is full of birds,
and they'll plunge in here
and they'll take their food
from this supermarket.
The supermarket of this
tree holds a fatty acid,
a linolenic kind of acid
that builds their brains
and it builds their babies.
Why does Ireland now not
plant this native species,
or supply the supermarket
for all of the migrations of
birds and let us not forget
all of the butterflies
and the insects?
Where you have native species,
you have biodiversity.
If you've got biodiversity,
you have health.
Standing here at the foot of a
native species, the Scots pine,
Pinus silvestris to you all.
[train chugging]
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: Fairy tales are
filled with enchanted forests.
Places of danger
and transformation,
home to witches and fairies.
[♪♪]
[children laughing]
But few forests evoke
enchantment more than
the Black Forest of Germany.
[moo]
[♪♪]
Like Ireland, German culture
is deeply rooted in the forest.
Germany has managed to remain
more than 30% forest covered.
[♪♪]
Germany is a highly
industrialized nation,
yet for them, sustainable
resource management
is a way of life.
In 2013, Germany
celebrated 300 years of
sustainable forest management.
We have 50% needle trees
and we have 50% leaf trees,
and half of all the leaf
trees is the beech tree.
We are looking forward that we
don't have stands with one,
only one tree.
We have no monoculture.
In Germany it's very important
where you get the drinking
water, and the forests
are a very important area
for clean water.
And we don't get
compensation for this,
but we do this for our people
and for all of
our wellness also.
And we have a discussion in
whether there must be a change
that the forest owner should
get money also for this...
Yeah, like a grant.
...get a grant for, for this
job he do for, for example,
for drinking water,
for our good air.
We have very much
people on this area,
and so we have also
a lot of emissions,
and the forests are important
to get to absorb the emissions.
[birdsong]
We are thinking a very,
very long time schedules
when we think about forests.
I mean we inherited the forest
from our grand grandfathers,
and we are benefiting
from it now,
that we consider it our duty to
leave the quality or to leave
the possibilities for the next
generation to do just the same
as we do today, that's our
understanding of sustainability.
[♪♪]
Diana: When I was a
young girl in Ireland,
there seemed to be
no end to everything.
And I remember being told that
the hair on a person's head,
you couldn't count their
hairs, it was endless.
And the same kind of thinking
was applied to the fresh water
lakes, and the fish in the sea,
there was no end to the fish
and the trawling that
could take place,
and the forests could
come down everywhere.
There was such a richness
on this planet that there
was no end to it.
The same goes for mining, ores
of all kind could be taken out
of the earth and there
was no end to them.
[♪♪]
But today, it is not
infinite, it is finite.
There is an end to the forest,
there is an end to the great
ocean, the saline ocean,
the fish in the sea,
there is an end to mining,
there is an end to
all of these things.
We have to manage our
resources sustainably.
[♪♪]
Narrator: This is one
forest in need of preservation,
not restoration.
It is the largest forest
system in the world.
It is holding its breath, and
all we need do is preserve it.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Diana: The boreal is the
last great working forest
in the world.
It is about 30,000 years old.
This forest system feeds the big
and the small; caribou, bears,
deer, wolves and wolverines,
beaver and snow leopards,
down to the minute mammals,
just to name a few.
It is the breadbasket for
migration and nesting for many
of the planets
songbirds and waterfowl.
[♪♪]
The boreal entombs a vast
tonnage of cold carbon storage
in the permafrost of the
ground and waterways.
In order to survive its
seven-month harsh winter,
with short days and
reduced sunlight,
the boreal has evolved over time
into a complex web of cold hardy
species, each dependent on all
the others for its survival.
[birdsong]
That's why I call the
boreal forest the mastermind
of the world.
[birdsong]
Lots of people are
aware and know of the Amazon.
But the planet holds this
giant secret to the north.
Narrator: The boreal sits
upon the north of the globe
like a crown, right across
northern Canada and Scandinavia,
and then across into Russia,
where it is known as the Taiga.
It even touches northern
Asia, and Hokkaido,
the most northern
island of Japan
and into the Kuril Islands.
The boreal accounts for
30% of the global forests.
Diana: In Canada, the backbone
of that forest holds a pine tree
called the Jack pine,
or the pinus banksiana.
They are lean and
frugal, these trees.
They're conifers,
remember.
They hang onto the
needles for up to 7 years.
So it means their pull of
nutrients out of the soil
isn't very great.
They can survive in
very tough conditions.
[wind blowing]
[♪♪]
There is a secondary
forest of lichens,
which covers the forest floor as
a carpet and surfaces the trees.
These lichens clean the
atmosphere and pull nitrogen
out of it.
And the forest lays down needles
over vast periods of time,
and those needles don't
decompose but they are a source
of protein for the lichens,
which take about a
hundred years to grow.
Then there are the
tripe lichens on rocks,
and they take more than
a hundred years to grow.
And then there are the bryonia
lichens on all the trees,
just lacing the trees,
and they take an awfully
long time to grow.
[♪♪]
Narrator: Its remote northern
location has largely saved
the boreal from the fate
of the southern forests,
but the age of mega projects
is rapidly changing that.
In the boreal forest of
northern Alberta, Canada,
are the tar sands.
[♪♪]
A resource extraction project
of immense proportions...
...with plans to expand
over an area almost
twice the size of Ireland.
[♪♪]
Diana: This once living
landscape...is now dead.
[♪♪]
Giant hydroelectric projects are
flooding on a similar scale...
then mining and logging.
In all of the forests
all over the world,
there are trees that represent
a biomass of about 300 billion
tonnes of carbon dioxide, about
a quarter to a third of it in
and under the boreal.
If the boreal forest comes down,
we are looking at the release
of an enormous tonnage of
carbon dioxide into the air.
Enough carbon dioxide into the
air that it will make it
toxic for us.
[♪♪]
You see, you can't replace
or replant that boreal forest.
You can never replace
this complexity.
Once it's gone, it's gone.
[♪♪]
[birdsongs]
Narrator: In the heart
of North America,
bordering the east shore of Lake
Winnipeg, is Pimachiowin Aki,
similar in size to the
country of Denmark.
It holds a forest growing
to its full potential.
And it is by no accident this
forest remains pristine.
The Aboriginal people
have fought to keep
this land untouched.
If the voices of its
people are heard,
it will become a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
The Aboriginal peoples have
been guardians of this land
for thousands of years.
Narrator: Sophia Rabliauskas,
from the Ojibway nation,
has spent her life in the
Poplar River area in the heart
of Manitoba's boreal forest.
Bird.Bird, yes.
Diana: For somebody to come in
and say to you well we're going
to cut all your trees,
we're going to log this area,
well it's going to destroy your
health first and destroy your
families, it will be...
Sophia: It's a threat even
just to say, you know,
we're gonna do that.
This is our plan
and it's a threat,
it was a threat to
our way of life.
Diana: It must be very scary.
And it is, and that's why
we took it upon ourselves
that we are not gonna
allow this to happen.
And we were very fortunate that
we were able to find people
who are out there to stand with
us against these developments
that continue to take
and take and take,
and that's the mentality
that's out there.
And I would, you know,
get people saying to me,
you will continue to keep your
people in poverty because you're
stopping development, you know,
you're stopping the community
from benefiting
from these projects.
In the past, there were all
these developments going on near
indigenous communities and none
of those indigenous communities
ever benefited from these
projects or gained.
We continue, those people
continue to live in poverty.
Those people continue to have
their resources extracted
from their lands.
So, the idea came that maybe we
should do a land use planning,
how the land is continued
to be used to this day.
Narrator: To help in the
protection of their land,
five Anishinabe Ojibway
First Nation territories,
provincial and
federal governments,
have all come together to
propose Pimachiowin Aki,
'the land that gives life', as a
designated UNESCO World Heritage
Site to ensure mindful
protection of both their culture
and of these lands
into the future.
Diana: They realized the land
is most valuable to everyone
left as it is, with the
trees growing in the earth.
We have been able to maintain
that land for thousands of
years, the way it is,
untouched by development,
pristine boreal forest,
healthy ecosystem.
When I was walking through the
bush with my father and when he
said, "You know, don't forget
to stop and look around you
and feel the earth
around you, the beauty."
So each generation has
its responsibility.
[speaking Ojibway]
[♪♪]
Be grounded, don't lose that,
that's the wisdom of the land.
It reminds you of who you are.
Once you connect
to that land,
you will do anything
to fight for it.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
We look around us here,
we've got how many thousands
and thousands of tons of
material in this oak wood,
where has it come from?
It hasn't quarried from it; it
hasn't taken from anything.
Yeah, it's taken
from the atmosphere.It's taken from the air,
it's taken from the
water and the sun.
And it's created
this wealth.
The earth needs over
one-third cover, forest cover,
and more to have a balance and
to ensure fertility of soil...
And oxygenation
of the air....and oxygenation
of the air.
So, we can't wait
for organizations,
we can't wait
for politicians.
It's not rocket science
to put the forests back.
Communities could be trained to
engage in the restoration
and collecting the seed,
creating the nurseries.
There's plenty of work to be
done restoring the forests.
Yeah.
[♪♪]
Diana: Once you connect
with that land,
you will do anything
to fight for it.
[♪♪]
A Bioplan for Biodiversity.
A Bioplan to reverse pollution.
Evergreen.
Evergreen, yeah,
evergreen species.
One more!
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
Woman: Shiinoki.
Crowd: Shiinoki.
I didn't want to
damage the root.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]
Narrator: At times
and long ago, I saw,
touched and heard that which
was being born, a heartbeat,
a sound amongst the stones,
was that which was being born.
[♪♪]
[♪♪]