The Eucalyptus craze
Coming to the Bay Area has brought many of the strange delights of a new world: new foods, new customs, and new organisms. Many are the days that N remarks that she has seen a new bird, and we spent one evening hiking up to campus while attempting to discover the nature of the numerous ground squirrels (longer bodies, shorter tails, less haunch-sitting) that have the run of the place.
But one of the most interesting new species is a beautiful, tall, gracefully winding tree startling in its ubiquity. It has a smooth gray bark, droops its branches like a willow, and sprouts thin sickle-like leaves by the ton. And it’s everywhere. Along the roadsides, bordering Golden Gate park, running up and down the slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains. What species of tree is this?
When we visited this past summer, colleagues of mine identified this as a eucalyptus tree, the famous mistake of Australian Gold Rushers which has developed an invasive monoculture throughout California (more on this below). But N was confused — these trees looked and smelled nothing like the ornamental eucalyptus we see in florists, and th efact that neither of us attend zoos pretty much ruled out the asking of the koalas. We must have described the tree incorrectly, we figured. (Although, I contended, we should see the famous eucalyptus around us everywhere anyway, and surely we don’t see the ornamental trees running rampant.)
Well, it turns out we were wrong to doubt. Not only is central CA overrun with the eucalyptus we saw, it also has the opportunity to turn this resource into something profitable — biodiesel [search for "Taming the Australian Weed"]. The Salon.com report summarizes the history alluded to above: eucalyptus was brought to the U.S. by gold prospectors from Australia. It is unclear if the trees were brought to aid in extraction of gold (via eucalyptus oil flotation) or for timber resources, but it is important to note that eucalyptus grows both fast and tall, something that would have been attractive to prospectors coming to the denuded post-settlement Bay Area. The famous (around here) irony was that eucalyptus proved practically useless as a timber crop, since while it grows tall and broad, it doesn’t grow straight. In particular, hopes of making it the timber of choice for railroad ties quickly faded when it was noticed that the wood easily warped and rotted away. But before that came exuberance by speculators, sending the eucalyptus up and down the coast, all but assuring its dominance (it’s apparently rather invasive). While that’s bad for all sorts of biodiversity reasons, more pragmatically worrisome is the fact that eucalyptus is such an oil-rich tree, making forests of it wildfires waiting to happen. Instead, Salon.com recommends, follow Thailand and turn the trees into bio-fuel.
I have to say as a recent transplant myself, I find the eucalyptus groves incredibly beautiful though, and would hate to see them uprooted for the sake of energy profiteering. But then, this is a disconnect we often feel here. For example, the UCSC campus is truly littered with deer; I often see them within 15 feet as I am on my way to class, and recently one came within 5 feet of the car when N was dropping me off. We never fail to be awed by these encounters, but locals decry them as pests. And yet, these are the same people that shrug their shoulders at flooding streets (more specific details when that happens this winter) and landslides blocking their two-lane highways. The disconnect is interesting: I would happily let deer munch on my tomatoes in order to see deer up close, but I’d surely agitate for repairs to my street’s drainage system. The locals here seem to have opposite predilections.
