By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

GENERALLY speaking, there are two kingdoms in the world of organisms and living things – the plant king­dom or Plantae and the animal kingdom or Animalia. As far as I can see, the plant kingdom would have lived together with the ani­mal kingdom or even alive earlier than it since the very existence of this world. Whatever is said, vast numbers of plant species belong to the plant kingdom as well, and they are still natural presents to human beings today. According to Biology, plants are often clas­sified as trees or big tall plants, shrubs or medium-sized plants of medium height, and herbs or small short plants, but in this article, I will use the term `trees’ only to cover all the plants as a whole. In actual fact, trees are our closest best friends in terms of food, clothing, and shelter, to put it simply.

It can be seen that thou­sands of diverse plant species grow very well here and there all around the globe. In particu­lar, they live in groves, forests, tropical forests, and rainforests in the woods, woodland, or jungle, even though some are standing in trace numbers or alone on the ground. Although some trees are short-lived plants, other trees that are well preserved in the wildlife sanctuary have taken more than 100 years of age in many parts of the world. As we all know, trees all over the world give birth to colourful flowers of beauty, fruits or vegetables of unique flavours or scents, inte­rior decoration, leaves for pack­aging, shade to lay for, the timber of easy workability, toughness or hardness, vehicles for trans­portation like boats and ships, grand domestic furniture, wood for the fire, and even fossil fuels which have existed for millions of years after dead huge plants were compressed under the ground due to its pressure and geothermal energy excepting that humans should not live to­gether with some plant species such as weeds. Do you remember `The Quiet Life’ by A. Pope? It said, `Whose trees in summer yield him shade, in winter fire’, of course. Like this, trees are spreading distributively all the way on the Earth with world life, beauty and energy.

How are trees working on Earth? According to my infor­mation, a scientific hypothesis tonce stated that the beginning of human life would be the fusion of a kind of algae and solar energy. This might lead to humans of today, from the point of view of evolution. Let it be. It is certain that trees are constantly provid­ing infinite support to both living humans and the world day after day. In the main, the trees are able to carry out gas exchange, i.e. the inhaling of carbon dioxide and exhaling of oxygen into and out of plants during their process of photosynthesis. Of course, this process metaphorically means that trees are helping breathe on behalf of the living world that cannot do so. In the industrial­ized world, such poisonous gases as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are being emitted from industries and construction sites day by day, and this emission is becoming worse and worse from year to year. Figuratively speaking, the persons who are watching and paying back this carbon debt are trees only. What is more, trees are autophytes; in other words, their `master chef’ leaves mostly make their own food from sunlight, carbon diox­ide and water using their pigment chlorophyll, which is also called autotrophic nutrition of plants in Biology. Hence, we humans and other animals that are het­erophytes do not need to fight for food against trees. There is no interspecific competition be­tween us and trees for nourish­ment at all!

In today’s world, `climate change’ is not a sheer term; it is a global threat to all animals and humans living on the Earth. The year 2024 is supposed to be the world’s hottest year by almost all people from every corner of the globe. Undoubtedly, the coming years after 2024 will be hotter than now, as far as I am concerned. And nowadays, mass flooding, landslides or storm-tossed death and destruction in the monsoon season, and drought or glacier melting in hot summer become much worse natural disasters in the world than expected. Really, greenhouse gases like carbon di­oxide, which is even used for dry ice and chloroform, are naturally good for humans by giving the whole world adequate warmth after sunset, especially if they are contained in small amounts in the atmosphere. But `enough is enough’, as the saying goes. Ow­ing to urbanization and industri­alization, the amount of GHGs is extremely rising in nearly every area of the world, especially in developed countries. Now, Ching Mei City in Thailand is stand­ing on the top of the list of the hottest ASEAN countries by the year 2024. As far as I am aware, Chauk in the Magway Region of Myanmar shot to the top of the hottest world region list this year. Clearly, such climate changes always have a close relation with trees. After all, climate change is simply the world’s cry of despair on neglected human activities, most notably overlogging.

The roots of a tree tend to fix firmly at any place where it grows. This by itself can prevent soil damage from strong river wa­ter flow and high winds. Also, the dense growth of trees automat­ically stops fierce storms from intensely entering inland parts, and such growth acts as a natural barrier to these parts, making less storm damage break out than normal. But without trees – particularly mangrove forests in coastal regions _ natural dam­age limitation cannot be done as mentioned above. Even worse, when trees are cut down or burnt for fuel, carbon is given to break loose from the trees to my cer­tain knowledge. By the time this carbon combines with oxygen from the atmosphere, gases like carbon monoxide and carbon di­oxide are formed, as usual. Too many of those gases will certainly make the world a scorched en­vironment in the not-too-distant future. Out of human activities re­lated to the natural environment, coal mining or burning fossil fu­els – petroleum, coal and natural gas – is the worst. We cannot or must not control nature, yet we are able to conserve nature as much as we can. All animals, in­cluding humans, must rely on nature for their survival chances. Quite apparently, trees will give off moisture and have a cooling effect on humans, mainly those who are feeling blistering heat in the summer.

To cut a long story short, almost every tree all around the world keeps the natural environment green, beautiful, clean and healthy. Without any deforestation, the entire world would turn out to be greener and cleaner even than before, caus­ing little or no natural damage. And animals will not face the loss of their habitats. Also, trees are home to birds and leopards. Global climate change depends on forests to an obvious extent. As to trees, there can be found some Myanmar sayings: Weather and climate depend upon forests (ဥတုရာသီ တောကို မှီ၏), Plants keep the wind clean as well as gardens and woods make the mind fresh (ပန်းမန်သစ်ပင် လေသန့်စင်၍ ဥယျာဉ် တောတန်း စိတ်ရွှင်လန်း၏), Plant trees in our world to make it scenic and greenish (သစ်ပင်စိုက် ပါ တို့ကမ္ဘာ၊ သာယာလှပ စိမ်းမြမြ). Of course, trees even play an essen­tial role in the non-living world, which means that the beauty of trees is put forth and written in poetry and stories by nature-lov­er authors.

Try to think. Rarely does the whole body of a tree have any useless thing. Thus, we ought to plant as many trees as possible for our lifetime happiness.