Braiding Sweetgrass

diminishes the household budget.
Just about everything we use is the result of another’s life, but
that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society. The ash
curls we make are almost paper thin. They say that the “waste
stream” in this country is dominated by paper. Just as much as an
ash splint, a sheet of paper is a tree’s life, along with the water and
energy and toxic byproducts that went into making it. And yet we
use it as if it were nothing. The short path from mailbox to waste
bin tells the story. But what would happen, I wonder, to the
mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had
been? If John was there to remind us of the worthiness of their
lives?
In some parts of the range, basket makers began to observe a
decline in the numbers of black ash. They worried that
overharvesting might be to blame, a decline caused by too much
attention for the baskets in the marketplace and too little for their
sources in the woods. My graduate student Tom Touchet and I
decided to investigate. We began by analyzing the population
structure of black ashes around us in New York State, to
understand where in the trees’ life cycle the difficulty might lie. In
every swamp we visited, we counted all the black ash we could find
and wrapped a tape around them to get their size. Tom cored a few
in every site to check their ages. In stand after stand, Tom found
that there were old trees and seedlings, but hardly any trees in
between. There was a big hole in the demographic census. He
found plenty of seeds, plenty of young seedlings, but most of the
next age class—the saplings, the future of the forest—were dead
or missing.
There were only two places where he found an abundance of
adolescent trees. One was in gaps in the forest canopy, where