We recently
watched The Third Man, a cynical tale
of moral relativism filmed entirely in bombed-out Vienna in 1948. There is a famous line about cuckoo clocks spoken
by Orson Wells, the anti-hero Harry Lime:
“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they
had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love
– they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The
cuckoo clock.”
Great line;
false premise. According to the Smithsonian Magazine (Smithsonian
Mag):
And
though he may have been a genius, Welles was wrong about the history of the
cuckoo clock. “When the film came out,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “the Swiss
very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks!”
Indeed, although often associated with Switzerland, the cuckoo clock was more
likely invented in Germany sometime in the 17th century. I use the word “likely” because the origins
of the cuckoo clock are unclear and its invention is still a topic of debate
among horologists.
For
a long time, the cuckoo clock was attributed to Franz Anton Ketterer, a clock maker of some repute from the Black Forest village of Schönwald [in Bavaria]. It was
believed that Ketterer created the cuckoo in the 1730s, inspired by the bellows
of church organs to adapt the technology in lieu of the chimes then typically
used in clocks…. For such an iconic timepiece, there is surprisingly little
written about the cuckoo clock, but, as recently noted by the National
Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, modern scholarship does not
support the Ketterer theory. While the full origins of the cuckoo clock remain
unknown, evidence dates similar, though more primitive, objects to at least the
mid-17th century – around 100 years before Ketterer’s supposed invention. In
any case, the familiar cuckoo clock that we know and love today, the clock that
hangs in our grandparents’ houses, was certainly developed and refined by the
talented craftsman and clock makers of the Black Forest.
Which
brings me to my point. Cuckoo clocks are
made of wood, and the Black Forest, so thick with spruce that they block out the
sun, historically provided that wood.
Now the Black Forest—the dense woodlands that gave us German Romanticism, Nordic mythology, Wagnerian
opera, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, AND the cuckoo clock--is on
the brink of environmental collapse.
It’s being eaten alive by bark beetles.
Two years of extremely hot, dry summers followed by warm winters are ideal
breeding grounds for bark beetles, which attack spruce more than other trees
and are threatening the forest’s very existence. This is what they look like.
Roughly
1,000 beetles can live in a tree at a given time. Each produces about 60 eggs,
meaning 60,000 newly hatched beetles can fly out of one tree in the spring. “If there are three generations, then 6 million
beetles can be
produced from one tree in one summer season,” says Jörg Ziegler, head forester
of the Black Forest National Park. “See the dimension of the problem?”
I do! And it’s not a one-off thing, either. It’s a consequence of climate change. Germany has already seen a temperature
increase of 1.5°C. above pre-industrial 1881 levels. The increase didn’t wait for 2050. It’s here.
Now. And, among other things, it threatens forests,
timber, and the production of everything made of wood—including the cuckoo
clock.
And it’s
not a small thing, either. Almost
one-third of Germany is covered with forests.
Since 2018, more than 1 million established trees have died as a result
of drought, fires, winter storms, and bark beetle plagues. This is a very big deal economically, because
the timber industry accounts for about 1.3 million jobs and annual revenue of
about $184 million. It’s suffered a gut punch. (There is a very good report on this in Deutsche Welle: temperature rise.)
Last
August, the situation was so bad that the German army (see the soldier below) was deployed to fell
diseased trees early, before the wood became unsalable as timber. But that massive felling brought a lot of wood
onto the market all at the same time, which caused a drastic drop in prices, putting some timber
companies out of business and threatening the industry at large.
At the
heart of the bark beetle plague is drought.
In 2018 the navigability of German rivers was severely impaired. In fact, American friends who booked a Danube
cruise last year had to disembark near Dresden and take a bus to Budapest. (That's the Danube below.)
Even parts of the Rhine, a major shipping artery
that connects the Ruhr Valley manufacturing heart of the country to the North
Sea, were affected. Acres and acres of
cornfields outside of Berlin were as brown as wrapping paper and nowhere near
as high as an elephant’s eye.
Helge
Bruelheide, co-director of Germany's Center for Integrative Biodiversity,
warned: "If the trend prevails and the annual precipitation sinks below
400 millimeters (15.7 inches) then there will be areas in Germany that will no
longer be forestable."
Lüdenscheid,
a densely forested area in central Germany, [saw its] precipitation …[decline]
from one-meter (39 inches) in 2017 to only 483 millimeters [19 inches] last
year.
What
… the forestry trade union termed "dramatic tree deaths" began
with winter snow dumps in early 2018 which broke branches, weakening the
trees' natural defenses and letting in fungal infections," followed by
drought and bark beetle infestation" that killed off European spruce
trees.
One
million older trees have since died — not only heat susceptible spruces, but
even Germany's prized European Red Beech which had been widely planted
over the past decade in the hope of creating climate stable forests….
Germany is trying
various mitigation efforts to save its forests.
The long-term plan is to plant more drought-tolerant species, improve
the forest floor’s water-retention capacity, and introduce a variety of species
with differing growth requirements. Some
reforestation advocates even go so far as to insist that horses be used instead
of heavy machinery to protect the top organic layers of soil and underground rhizome
networks that store and distribute nutrients.
Others stress the need to introduce diversity in German forests, whose
primeval woods were cleared centuries ago and replaced with faster-growing
pines that are less resilient to rising temperatures.
The German
government is on board with funding, partly through the efforts of the Green
Party, which was born in 1980 during the last forest crisis, one attributed to
pollution. This year the federal government
approved a nearly $889 million forest package.
Per an article in today’s New York
Times (German
Forests):
Cornelius
Meyer-Stork [that's him and his son below] is among the many private foresters who own nearly half of all
woodland in Germany. He welcomed the government’s support, pointing out that
farmers in the European Union receive about $288 in subsidies for every 2.5
acres they work and are eligible for more if they meet certain requirements. By
contrast, he said, “we foresters receive nothing.”
In
previous years, he opened his forest to allow people to cut down young pines as
Christmas trees if they were crowding others. [Germans are credited with
starting the tradition of Christmas trees in the 16th century.] He also groomed
the paths to set up basic infrastructure and earn certification for his land as
a sustainable forest for rest and relaxation.
But
after bark beetles ravaged a hillside once covered with pines, Mr. Meyer-Stork
was forced to raze the land and sell the damaged wood to make paper or particle
board for half of the usual price.
Allocating
money to plant trees on a massive scale is all well and good, but will it
work? The native beech trees planted in
conifer forests over the last decade because of their hardiness and for diversity
have shown signs of climate stress. The
number of German forestry workers over the past 20 years has declined by 50% and
more personnel are needed. Where will
the seedlings be planted in an era of urban and suburban sprawl? And can seedlings survive until they are
established in a climate with declining rainfall, battering storms, and
explosions of insect populations?
Since
the creation of Baden-Württemberg’s first and only national park in 2014,
[forest managers] are conducting an experiment to see if nature can heal itself
if it is left alone. To
appease the timber industry, they have created a one-third-mile buffer zone
around the perimeter of the 25,000-acre national park. If a tree within the
buffer zone becomes infected by beetles, it is cut down, the bark is destroyed
and the wood is sold.
However,
if the tree falls inside the park, the rangers leave it and observe how nature
handles its wounds. More than 7,000 acres of forest sit inside the observation
zone.
After
the beetles have eaten the spruce, there’s more light on the forest floor. The
rotting wood becomes a habitat for insects, fungi and lichen. Moor grass,
bracken and blueberries take root. Seedlings from rowan berries pop up. In
their shade, shade-tolerant species like the silver fir and the beech arrive.
New spruce appear. But everything takes time. As the spruce mature, the beetles
attack again, but the firs, pines and beech trees can survive for centuries.
Left alone, the beetles essentially do the job of the timber industry by
clearing away weakened trees.
Interesting
approach; false premise? The beetles are
eating the spruce. But it’s climate
change and drought that are weakening them and the other trees. My experience with seedlings is that they need
water, more than they can get from normal precipitation. (Or should I say abnormal precipitation?) We planted three young peach trees in Tuscany
and all three died within a year because they weren’t watered while we were away over the winter and spring. My experience with mature trees is much the
same. They need water, too. This year in Berlin, our street trees developed
curled, brown leaves by the beginning of August. They were so stressed by water shortages this
summer that neighborhood groups sprang up to form watering brigades to keep them
alive. I would be curious to know how the
$889 million forest package addresses watering young and old trees in the
middle of the woods. Sounds challenging.
Queries,
worries, and doubts aside, the fact is that we cannot afford to be cynical like
Harry Lime. Let's face it. We're scrambling here. We have a crisis on our
hands without all the information we need to choose the best mitigation
measures. We have to try everything and
see what works and jettison what doesn’t.
We have to consider the cuckoo clock.
If we want it to remain part of our culture, like the Christmas tree,
then we have to try our very best to save the Black Forest and every forest.
Merry
Christmas! By the way, that's our cuckoo clock below.
Keep it
real!
Marilyn
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