The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 California eucalyptus 1032 “absolute security and absolute certainty” of investing in land
speckled with eucalypts.
It wasn’t just greasy salesmen buying in. Jack London, who was
to become one of America’s first writers of world renown, studied
endless pamphlets about the promise of eucalypts. “I know of no
legitimate investment that will compare,” he wrote. He cited his
eucalyptus investments as a financial justification for an advance
of “a couple of thousand dollars” in a letter to his publisher. “I don’t
want to write short stories,” he told him. His eucalypts were to af-
ford him time to write meaningful novels instead of commercial
bestsellers, to get him out of debt, to change his life.
I remember standing in the shade of eucalyptus trees wishing
life were different, too. In 1996 1.15m Americans got divorced, in-
cluding my parents. A wave of hospital closures—23 in California
between 1995 and 2000—shuttered the one where my mom
worked as a dietician. We started getting free lunches at school. My
mom sold her van and bought a used car; she brought home Mc-
Donald’s hamburgers for dinner, 29 cents on Wednesdays. We
moved into a house off a dirt street which led into the depths of the
forest Lukens had created. It was called Eucalyptus Road.
I could see the trees across the vacant lot next door from my
bedroom window. I could hear them creaking as I lay awake in bed.
One afternoon when I was about nine, looking out of the window, I
decided things had to change, and that the first step was to find my
grandmother, who had vanished after my parents’ divorce. I
looked up the number of her Baptist church in the phone book. The
pastor’s wife answered. I asked her—my Korean terrible—where
my grandmother was. She held the line for a while as if she were
thinking what to do. Then she said she couldn’t tell me anything
about where my grandmother had gone.
I crossed the vacant lot and walked into the forest. Eucalyptus
trees are messy, especially blue gums, Eucalyptus globulus, the sort
Lukens planted in Nipomo. They shed their bark like divas change
clothes: dramatically, peeling back layers and switching colours
for all to see. As they get old and massive, their branches and leaves
twine like the columns of a baroque cathedral. I waited under one
until it got dark, ripping the leaves so they stained my hands as I
prayed. I wish I could say that I prayed for my grandmother. But at
that age, I just prayed that I might move somewhere different.
The blue gums I hid among were not meant to have grown that
old. They had been planted for harvest. But the eucalyptus bubble
burst in 1913, when the government’s Forest Products Laboratory
concluded that blue-gum wood grown in California was worthless
as timber. No matter how it was cut or cured, the wood warped,
cracked and twisted. Staff at the American consulate in Melbourne
asked the conservator of forests for the state of Victoria what might
be happening. They were told that however quickly they might put
on girth, eucalypts needed decades to mature into the sort of wood
that could be used for anything but pulp or mine props. Australia’s
lumber industry relied on old-growth forests, not green logs like
those from California’s young plantations.
The news was devastating. The industry imploded. Lukens, al-
most alone, kept the faith, arguing that the bust had simply ex-
posed honest dealers from shysters. But losing its job did not stop
the eucalyptus. Ordered plantations turned into untended groves.
Native species adapted to them. The monarch butterflies that find
shelter in California each winter could cling more easily to their
spear-shaped leaves than those of native trees.
Many humans were less keen. The eucalyptus is a tree that posi-tively relishes burning. California’s native flora are
quite capable of burning on their own—but adding
trees that think they are candles hardly helps. In Octo-
ber 1991 a fire in eucalyptus-covered hills in the East
Bay killed 25 people. That aside, today’s conservation-
ists tend to think that plants from elsewhere are always
a bad idea. They want some areas cleansed of all trace
of the eucalyptus.
But most families that consider themselves Califor-
nian have spent less time in the state than the euca-
lypts. To the native-born Californian a state without
them is hard to imagine. The move to get rid of the trees
as an invasive species has prompted a range of pro-eu-
calyptus demonstrations. As Chris Thomas, an ecolo-
gist, suggests in his book “Inheritors of the Earth”
(2017), the flourishing of the eucalyptus and its atten-
dant butterflies in California goes some way to offset-
ting the dire prospects that some species of the genus
could have faced in their ancestral home down under.California soul
We eventually found my grandmother. She had moved
to a trailer park on the edge of a nearby town. Spear-
shaped leaves and dried seedpods littered the asphalt
outside her white trailer. It took her a few years to re-
build a relationship with my mother, but now they are
closer than at any point in their lives. I don’t think I will
ever completely understand how my grandmother felt
about what happened in Nipomo or why she stayed
away for so long. But I do know that sometimes the
dreams that bring people across oceans and the lives
they end up leading are very different, and that there
are gains to be had amid disappointment.
*Most families that consider themselves
Californian have spent a lot less time in
the state than the eucalypts have