How Trees Defined America


(Library of Congress)


How has Americans’ relationship with trees shaped our character?


How has this relationship shifted over time?






A 1652 pine tree shilling from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (From the author's collection)
Boston’s Liberty Tree was a famous elm tree that became a symbolic rallying point for American colonial resistance to the British. In this image, American revolutionaries tar and feather a Royal Stamp Act officer under the Liberty Tree. (Library of Congress)
Horses pull a heavy cart of logs to market, traveling from Michigan to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. (Library of Congress)
Logs on their way to market along Oregon’s Columbia River. (Library of Congress)
Trees have long been vital to American industry. Here, loggers are shown sitting atop the stump of a huge fir tree. (Library of Congress)
Teddy Roosevelt, left, and Gifford Pinchot on board the steamer Mississippi during a tour of the Inland Waterways Commission. They worked together to greatly expand the national forest system and preserve natural resources through conservation programs. (Library of Congress)
In 1938, an advertisement ran in American Forests to help prevent the spread of Dutch elm disease. (From the author's collection / American Forests)
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stands in front of a dedication of the Survivor Tree at the 9/11 memorial site in Manhattan. The Callery pear was found alive amidst the wreckage at of the World Trade Center at Ground Zero. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Eric Rutkow, author of American Canopy, which traces the history of the United States through Americans’ relationship to our trees and forests. (© Alyssa Reichardt)


I don’t think the book should necessarily be read as a polemic. The real takeaway is that it’s very hard to understand the American experience if you don’t understand our relationship to trees. This book is about understanding who we are and how we got there.

What could be done to boost consciousness about deforestation?

There’s a sensibility among a lot of people that many of the issues concerning our forests and how we use trees have largely been settled. These are things that are now taken care of by the government, by corporations, by the environmental movement. But there are plenty of active and unfolding issues, and it’s always worth being active and lending your voice. Certainly in the last 20 years, we’ve seen an increase in wildfires and the loss of trees to disease, and this trend is something that would really benefit from more civic engagement.

Does history suggest there’s hope for American forests?

There was a time in the United States that we were chopping down trees and planting almost no trees to replace them. We were net-losing trees every year. And that trend transformed over the course of the 19th century such that now there are more trees planted than being cut down. That’s a bright spot we have made progress in.

What might American forests look like in the future?

If the trends linked to global warming continue, we may see trees slowly migrating northward, while some species living at the edges of ecosystems, like the bristlecone pine, might go extinct. New advances in genetics, if applied, will raise ethical questions about the introduction of modified trees that might crossbreed in the wild. Given all of this, Americans in the future may someday wander through forests types that don’t yet exist. And they may struggle to find remnants of certain types of forests that we now think of as common. 

Now that you know so much about trees and the history of forests, has that knowledge changed how you relate to trees and forests in your daily life?

Oh, absolutely. Five or ten years ago, I don’t think I could have identified many trees. I could probably have identified an oak tree and a maple tree by their leaves, and I knew that acorns were associated with oak trees, but I didn’t know much more than that. But once you start looking at trees in the landscape, once you start to see it this way, you really can’t un-see it. I find myself walking through New Haven or New York City and constantly asking questions: if I recognize the tree, how did it get there and why, and what can we say about what was happening in America at the time the tree was planted? So it’s gotten a little bit annoying, I suppose, with some of my friends. I have a hard time walking from A to B without stopping and pondering trees.

About Amy Crawford
Amy Crawford


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