How are you planting your future?
A few weeks ago, I listened to a German podcast talking about the future of trees on this planet. It wasn’t pretty.
In particular, the reporters talked about vast tree forests in the eastern part of Germany that were particularly hard hit by climate change through sufficient rain, higher temperatures bringing insects and disease, and, ultimately, the threat of forest fires.
Yet, the podcast said something else made these forests particularly fragile and vulnerable to these threats: the forests contained only the same kind of tree.
A century or two (or three) ago, Germans planted vast spruce forests to use the trees for building houses and making furniture. They cleared the land, planted the trees in nice, orderly rows, and expected to come back decades later for a harvest.
This strategy worked wonderfully well for producing trees as a form of agriculture, but it was a horrible decision in terms of sustainability. Had the forests been even slightly more diverse, a blight of beetles with a hunger for spruce bark would not be able to destroy the entire forest biome. Likewise, having a few trees that don’t need as much water or can handle heat better than others can help the whole forest ride out the dry season.
But as the podcast pointed out, realizing the problem is one thing. Figuring out how to fix it is another.
This story has a number of interesting lessons, but two come immediately to mind. The first and maybe most obvious point is about the importance of diversity within organizations and communities. We can’t have an entire organization of nothing but spruce trees.
The second point is more subtle. The story also reminds us of the limitations of our ability to see into the future and how even the best, most well-intentioned plans can lead to unforeseen risks. We need to walk humbly, knowing that we don’t know what we don’t know.
And we need to make sure our plans are open enough to change so that if we’ve planted a spruce forest by mistake, our great-great-grandchildren still have space to plant an apple orchard, too.
