Why are California’s thousands of eucalyptus trees demonized & targeted for destruction?
Targeted for eradication by many so-called “native” plant advocates for being everything from “flammable” to “invasive” to drinking too much groundwater (!), California’s hundreds of thousands of eucalyptus trees have come under histrionic attack for years.
In defense of California’s thousands of eucalyptus trees.
Yet all eucalyptus trees provide these ecological services:
• produce oxygen
• sequester carbon
• create shade
• condense fog into dripping rain
• blocks winds which drive wildfires
• stabilize hillsides with their root systesm
• are homes for countless birds and mammals
• are breeding habitat for threatened monarch butterfly populations
• cool local temperature, mitigating local heat, which is critical in our era of global heating, which caused in large part by deforestation — including cutting down tens of thousands of eucalyptus trees
Their environmental and biological service is a fact — but ignored. These trees brought to the United States about 150 years ago from down under (Australia and New Zealand) have been targeted by those who want to cut them down, or kill them, even kill them all. What’s really going on here?
The simple truth is, much like with immigrants entering America in the era of Trump-ism, a disparaging lie repeated often enough, then relayed and amplified by the media, is easily perceived as truth by a busy, distracted public inundated with information. (Just ask your neighbor who watches Fox News and thus believes the 2020 election was stolen.)
What’s especially bizarre and inconsistent is that the eucalyptus trees are especially demonized in the SF Bay Area, yet not so much in Los Angeles and San Diego counties. This inconsistency has no biological or scientific explanation, it’s apparently just the result of where lies and aspersions about a tree species are spread, which is to say repeated more.
This page is not a scientific treatise or overview or evaluation of Eucalyptus globulus, or its variants. Once people have it in for a person — or a tree — rational discourse is mostly meaningless. This page was created for people who don’t yet have it in for these magnificent, fast-growing, hardy, adaptive trees, who understand the common sense that all trees have incredible value. And that no tree poses such danger that it should be killed based on its species alone. And for those who don’t understand how people can hate an entire species of tree, enough to advocate extermination during a climate crisis when eucalyptus trees, like ALL trees, are more essential and necessary than ever before in human history.
