William Bryant Logan on the Ancient History of Managed Woodlands

10/31/22 • 51 min

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike. Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he was given the task of pollarding trees. Pollarding is an ancient technique for pruning trees that, along with coppicing, was used for millennia to cull woodlands without having to destroy the forest. These techniques were an integral part of managed woodlands, in which people kept livestock, harvested different kind of food and cut wood that was used for everything from energy to building ships and houses to creating floating walkways. This managed cultivation was not only productive for humans; it also allowed trees to live longer and created more biodiversity than existed in unmanaged woods. All of this, as Logan explains to us, was possible because of the remarkable regenerative property of trees, which allows many species of trees to resprout in the most unlikely situations and in the most unlikely ways. In theory, at least, Logan tell us, trees can live indefinitely and, in some unusual cases, they seem to do just that.

William Bryant Logan is the author of Sproutlands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is a long-time faculty member of the New York Botanical Garden where he teaches pruning. He is a certified arborist and the founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. He has also been a regular garden writer for the New York Times and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden and Garden Design magazines.

Previous Episode

John Roulac on Agroforestry

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground.

Roulac’s latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are sometimes called food forests.

Food forests mimic the structure and diversity of natural forests; they have the ability to restore ecosystems and bring diversified nutrition and economic development to rural communities.

This approach to farming – new by contrast with post-World War II industrial-style farming but based on techniques that are thousands of years old – is a relatively inexpensive way to make farming sustainable and, in fact, beneficial with respect to carbon capture, climate resilience and biodiversity, among other impacts. Ironically, Roulac notes, there is little investment in this low-hanging fruit among the solutions to our environmental problems.

Next Episode

The Invention of the Alphabet with Johanna Drucker

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me. But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language. All modern alphabets can be traced back to this origin.

Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and author of numerous books, including her most recent, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), talks to me about this fascinating history, from what archeology has uncovered to the alphabet’s central role in information technology. We also discuss a theory put forth by David Abram, in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, that the alphabet opens “a new distance [...] between human culture and the rest of nature,” as it turns our powers of perception inward and focuses our attention on human-made sounds and words.
Links to some of the things we discuss: Two key archeological sites where inscriptions of the first alphabet have been found: Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol. Sandstone sphinx at the British Museum with Proto-Sinaitic letters. The Acrophonic principle. The Ahiram sarcophogus and shards found in Israel. Unicode. See also in-the-weeds.net.