I’d like to kill every blue gum eucalyptus in California. What’s more, I think the state should pay me a lot of money to do it.
When I was a kid, most of our back yard was a steep hillside that we did almost nothing with. If I had it today I would plant avocados, assuming the HOA would allow it. But in those days it was dominated by three eucalyptus trees that smothered the hillside with bark and leaf litter; their roots secreted a toxin into the soil that prevented any native plants from competing with them.
Every so often the HOA would send tree trimmers to absolutely massacre the eucalypts, giving us the worst of both worlds — invasive trees that destroyed the local ecology and substantially increased wildfire risk, trimmed to their ugliest possible forms.
I want those trees dead.
I know the timber business, the trucking business, the paper business, and I have the added benefit of not caring where the trees go — whether they’re shipped to Chinese plywood mills or pulped locally for paper, or simply thrown into the ocean — as long as they’re dead.
The trees also take up massive amounts of water from the soil, which exacerbates drought conditions. In a wildfire, strips of eucalyptus bark, full of flammable oils, become airborne, drifting several miles and starting spot fires wherever they land. They also form massive pitch pockets that explode when they heat up, sometimes throwing fireballs a hundred yards or more.
You might think that trees that burn so readily would eventually be consumed by wildfires, problem solved, but the blue gum also has exploding seed pods that are heat activated, so for every one that’s killed in a fire, many thousands more can be planted in its place.
They may pose this same fire risk in their native Australia, but numerous ecological and environmental factors exist there to keep them in check. In California, the factors that would limit their dominance are all but absent. Those first seeds brought to North America in the 1800s have grown into the gift that keeps on taking.
If California doesn’t want to give me millions of dollars to wipe them out, they should still give it to someone. Such a project would create jobs and tax revenue for decades, significantly reduce wildfire risks, and allow for the reestablishment of native trees — trees that actually feed birds and other wildlife.
In some California communities, “environmentalists” have vehemently opposed the removal of eucalyptus forests, I suppose to prove that stupidity cannot be bound by ideology. People would rather have a forest of the wrong trees today than to wait fifty years for the right trees to mature, and I suspect that no amount of environmental, ecological, or economic benefit will ever change that.
It is, in fact, the reason the railroad companies planted eucalyptus in California in the first place, believing their rapid growth would provide a ready supply of railroad ties. Then they learned that the young wood warps, rots, and splits when you drive a spike through it, and the costly experiment was over. Then the trees escaped the lab.
Today, when I look at a eucalyptus monoculture, I don’t see a forest. I only see the cost.