Trees Are Overrated
Updated at 1:10 p.m. on July 29, 2022
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Once upon a time, not a blade of grass could be found on this planet we call home. There were no verdant meadows, no golden prairies, no sunbaked savannas, and certainly no lawns. Only in the past 80 million years—long after the appearance of mosses, trees, and flowers—did the first shoots of grass emerge. We know this in part because a dinosaur ate some, and its fossilized poop forever memorialized the plant’s arrival.
Grass then was still an odd little weed, vying for a spot on the forest floor. It took ages for grasses to grow in numbers that might constitute a grassland. And grasslands only started to occupy serious real estate in the past 10 million years—basically yesterday. They now cover roughly one-third of Earth’s land area.
We humans arrived in the midst of grass’s heyday, and it is doubtful we would exist otherwise. Homo sapiens evolved in and around the savannas of Africa, then spread around the world, often following grassy corridors. With the invention of agriculture, many societies fed themselves on domesticated grasses like wheat and corn, and on livestock that turned wild grasses into edible protein. We are, many of us, grass people.
But for all grass has done for us, we haven’t done much for grass lately. Grasslands rank among the most imperiled and least protected biomes on Earth. They are disappearing even faster than forests, and much of what remains has suffered varying degrees of damage. Their decline threatens a huge chunk of the planet’s biodiversity, the livelihoods of roughly 1 billion people, and countless ecological services such as carbon and water storage. Yet these losses don’t register with the same force as deforestation. Perhaps because we do not notice, or perhaps because we do not care.
The tendency to overlook and undervalue grasslands is a product of their reputation as degraded and thus disposable landscapes—a misperception rooted in centuries of scientific confusion and cultural bias. It reflects a deeply held preference for forests, mainly among people of European descent, that has warped global grassland science and policy. Some scholars have described the problem as “arboreal chauvinism.” Joseph Veldman and his colleagues have called it the “tyranny of trees.”
Veldman is an ecologist at Texas A&M University. Tall and athletic, with a low, booming voice and a voluble disposition, Veldman earned his Ph.D. in 2010 by studying the tropical forests of Bolivia. Then, as now, scientists feared that logging and fires were turning the Amazon into savanna. But when Veldman began looking at true savannas—which are just grasslands with more trees—he learned that they were distinct ecosystems governed by a completely different set of rules. And they did not deserve to be maligned as run-down forests.
So Veldman proposed the term old-growth grassland to differentiate ancient, intact grasslands from those that form after humans clear a forest or abandon farmland. In a 2015 paper, he and his co-authors explained that old-growth grasslands, like their forest counterparts, take centuries to develop biological diversity and build up carbon stores, and that they are effectively irreplaceable once lost. (Coincidentally, the word veld refers to a common type of grassland in southern Africa.)
When I visited
