They’re gorgeous, right? Particularly the old ones. Towering majestically into the sky, encanopying our roads, each tree is a self-replicating fractal pattern — with each leaf a scale model of the branching structure of the tree itself. This is partly why, when he wrote his book Biophilia, Edward O. Wilson argued that trees are the sort of nature that captivates: Their design patterns were laid down long before humans came into existence.
The beauty of trees is partly why, whenever we talk about building carbon sinks, we focus on them.
Trees are the forms of natural CO2-capture that we can see — that we admire. The idea of reforesting the planet makes immediate sense. As does fiercely protecting the old-growth we’ve got left. Indeed, protecting those existing old trees is particularly crucial: There’s an increasing amount of science that suggests really old trees are tentpoles of the flora and fauna around them, hubs in the ecological network of a forest. Younger trees don’t fulfill those central roles.