Myth, tradition, inspiration, culture, religion and many other aspects of human life are written into the rings of history within a tree's trunk. Trees would do just fine if humans ceased to exist—but humans would most definitely not survive without trees. They reduce carbon dioxide while producing oxygen, moderate ecosystems, prevent erosion, and provide shelter, building materials, energy and even nutrition. They are simply amazing.
In partnership with NBCUniversal's Green is Universal program and the Arbor Day Foundation, we bring you a breathtaking (or rather, breath-giving) tree gallery. When you share this gallery and use #ShareATree, you're helping the Arbor Day Foundation plant real trees. For every 25,000 shares, NBCUniversal will donate $5,000 to the Arbor Day Foundation, up to $25,000.
Share this awesome gallery and make our planet a little greener.
Rainbow Eucalyptus
This showstopping tree looks like it was painted by a graffiti artist, but its bold colors are derived from the natural shedding of bark. Layers of bark peel away at different times of the year, revealing undertones ranging from bright green to orange. These beauties can be found all over the world but mainly in the South Pacific in tree plantations, where the eucalyptus' pulpwood is used to make paper. The tree grows six feet wide and more than a hundred feet tall and it's photogenic, to boot.
Photo credit: Libero
The Tree of Life
Because of trees' nearly innumerable benefits, people throughout time have attributed greater meaning to them. A common motif in various cultures and religions is that of the Tree of Life. Depending on where you look, the Tree of Life offers the threshold between life and death (Egypt), grants immortality once every 3,000 years (China) or supports and connects the underworld, the earth and the stars (Mesoamerica).
The Tree of Life pictured here is found in the middle of a desert in Bahrain, miles from any other living organism or source of water. It is a 400-year-old mesquite, whose roots can grow to more than 160 feet, making it resilient in arid climates. While some like to think it is the tree of good and evil mentioned in the Bible, locals attribute other spiritual powers to it and have their own occult practices surrounding it.
Whatever the case may be, astounding trees like this cause legends to flourish and attract visitors from around the world to catch a glimpse of their leafy awesomeness.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
Bodhi Tree
Ever heard of the Buddha? Yeah, well, this fig tree in Bodh Gaya, India, is believed to be the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment approximately 2,500 years ago. According to Buddhist texts, right after the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he gazed up at the tree in gratitude with unblinking eyes for an entire week. Talk about a staring contest.
Even during the lifetime of the Buddha the Bodhi Tree was seen as a sacred shrine by King Asoka, who held a festival every year in its honor. However, his queen was what some would call "the jealous type" and had it killed by Mandu thorns. But the Bodhi Tree had the last laugh when it regrew in the same spot and had a magnificent temple built next to it. Even today, the tree is the most important of four Buddhist pilgrimage sites.
Photo: Ken Wieand / Flickr
Major Oak
Depending on your age, you may think of Robin Hood as a dastardly fox, a witty Cary Elwes or a pouty Russell Crowe. But the locals of Edwinstone, in the heart of the Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England, don't really care what your image of him is. Robin Hood has been an important folk figure to them since the medieval period, long before movies were invented.
Some records portray him as a farmer, while others identify him as a wealthy man whose lands were wrongfully taken from him, forcing him to become an outlaw. Whatever Robin Hood's origins, the Major Oak tree is fabled to be the shelter in which he and his Merry Men slept after a long day's work of "stealing from the rich and giving to the poor."
Photo credit: Philip Wallbank / Geograph
Baobab
While it may look like Baobab trees are shaped into their odd forms by imaginative horticulturists, the only hand of manipulation here is evolution. These large trees can grow up to 50 feet tall and are the natural equivalent of water towers. The trees are native to arid regions such as mainland Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar and Australia and have been used in dry seasons for the water supplies stored in hollows in the trees. The white powder in their seed pods can be used as food and their leaves have medicinal purposes.
Photo credit: iStock
Cotton Tree
What possible connection could a tree in the capital city of Sierra Leone have to the American Revolutionary War? Well, just as the Americans won independence from Great Britain, a group of African American slaves won their freedom by fighting for the British during the war.
Legend has it that the newly freed slaves landed on the shore, walked up to the giant tree and circled around it, giving thanks for their deliverance to a free land. On March 11, 1792, they founded Freetown and today it is the capital city of Sierra Leone. The Cotton Tree stands directly in front of Freetown's Supreme Court building.
Photo credit: Christian Trede / Wikimedia
Anne Frank Tree
This horse chestnut in Amsterdam provided a glimmer of beauty to Anne Frank when she needed it most. In The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank's book about the time she and her family spent hiding from the Nazis during World War II, she describes the tree:
"Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs. From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."
The iconic tree was blown down by high winds during a storm on Aug. 23, 2010, but it missed the historic annex in which Frank and her family stayed.
Photo credit: Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect
Methuselah
Methuselah is like the estranged grandfather that no one in your family talks about. It is the oldest known living tree on the planet, but its location will not be revealed.
This is because an older tree, nicknamed Prometheus, was accidentally cut down in 1964. At 4,843 years old, the bristlecone pine is worth protecting, even if it means anonymity.
Photo credit: Rick Goldwasser / Flickr
El Árbol del Tule
With a bit of imagination, animals, goblins and monsters can be seen trapped in this tree's gnarly trunk, and although the trunk has the look of multiple trees fused together, it is just one amazing tree. El Árbol del Tule or the Tree of Tule, towers over Santa María del Tule, a small church in Oaxaca, Mexico. The massive Montezuma cypress may be the biggest—as in widest—tree on the planet. The circumference of the trunk spans 170 feet and the tree weighs more than 500 tons. At approximately 2,000 years old (legend has it that it was planted by an Aztec storm god), this massive tree is among the eldest in the world.
Photo credit: Cezzie901 / Flickr
Reposted with permission from our media associate TakePart.
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.