Madagascar’s sacred trees face existential threats in a changing world

2023-02-04

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

If you visit the southwest corner of Madagascar, you might find a tree so old its name is Grandmother. She has three stems, fused together, so that her trunk resembles a massive rounded pot rather than a solitary sentinel. The oldest stem dates to A.D. 1,600, meaning she took root a few decades before Atilla the Hun launched his rampage.

Grandmother is a baobab tree, one of a species beloved worldwide not only for its longevity but also for its distinctive crown: a tangle of scraggly branches extends from the trees’ top like electrocuted hair. Or, less flamboyantly, like misplaced roots. In creation myths, the baobab is known as the tree the gods planted upside down.

“When you’re close to the trunk, you feel something powerful,” says William Daniels, a photographer who traveled through Madagascar’s forests to capture the stunning images of the baobab’s mystic charisma that appear with this story. “It’s some good energy.”

But baobabs are in trouble, potential victims of the warming globe. Scientists sounded the alarm more than five years ago, when they investigated why some of the oldest and largest baobabsin southern Africa had died. In subsequent studies, scientists found these long-lived mammoths are vulnerable to climate change and predicted that four of the world’s baobab species could become extinct by 2021. That includes Grandmother, one of the Malagasy species.

Scientists are still sorting out if baobabs can adapt to their changing environment or if baobab forests could be replanted. They are also assessing what the loss of baobab forests would mean for the plants and animals that live in them. Baobabs are considered a keystone species,meaning they hold ecosystems together. When a keystone species is diminished, the change affects the entire system.