Surprise! Real Christmas trees really are green

For me, nothing says Christmas more than those pop-up Christmas tree sellers dotting street corners and church parking lots — that pine smell takes me back to my Long Island youth, six of us kids piling into a station wagon to pick out a tree, inevitably one always too large for our living room.

But as the director of a nature center where we try hard to preserve thousands of trees, you can imagine my struggle with cut Christmas trees, growing trees for the explicit reason of chopping them down — and throwing them away. Disposable trees? For a long stretch, I couldn’t think of anything less, well, green.

But I had an epiphany a few years back, and while I still worry about the notion of disposable trees, I do see a fantastic upside.

Hundreds of Christmas tree farms in Pennsylvania grow Christmas trees on over 30,000 acres, making the Keystone State America’s fourth largest Christmas tree grower. More than 1 million trees will be “harvested” from these farms this month (compared to almost 30 million trees nationwide). As many are in rural areas, tree farms provide a critical source of income for some in the poorest areas of the state — which is only one of many reasons in support of Christmas trees.

For every tree cut, an average of three seedlings are typically planted the next spring, says the website of the National Christmas Tree Growers Association, and while some trees are cut within four years, the average tree isn’t brought to market until its seventh year.

Given that trees are a renewable resource — they just grow back at longer timelines than broccoli or corn — and given that tree farms preserve thousands acres of open space, buying real trees is a preference to the plasticized version manufactured from heavy metals and petroleum.

The Collegeville pumpkin patch — which is also a tree farm — that my family has been visiting over the last 25 years is a case in point: in the early ‘90s, it was surrounded by farmland. Each October we’d visit, a new subdivision had sprouted nearby — then shopping malls, then industrial parks and now even corporate headquarters. Today, that pumpkin patch is a veritable island of greenspace drowning in an exurban ocean.

The 350 million Christmas trees growing on American farms — that’s a little more than one for each American — provide so many other services. They pump out oxygen, remove carbon dioxide and pollutants from the air, offer habitat to a wide variety of animals and homes to nesting birds and their cones feed a huge spectrum of creatures great and small, from the obvious squirrel to bizarre birds like the crossbill. In the years they are growing in the farm, they are doing serious work on behalf of the environment, work that should be supported.

And let’s face it: if that tree farmer didn’t grow trees, it’s not like the land would revert to an allnatural version of Penn’s woods. That land is a farm, and if Christmas trees failed, more likely it would become a cornfield or soybeans or, worse, be given over to natural gas production. Or get subdivided like in Collegeville. So a Christmas tree farm is a sustainable use of land, as it can grow crops of trees for decades — and remember, when a farmer is growing trees, most of his fields will be left alone for this year — only a small portion gets harvested. And that portion goes right back into production. Most of the farmer’s trees are untouched, providing those ecosystem services.

But once you make the commitment to purchase a tree, you can make that tree even greener than it already is. Finding someone who sells local Pennsylvania trees is a great start — beats having a tree shipped here from Vermont or the Carolinas using all those petrochemicals. Driving out to a tree farm is also important, as supporting these close-in farms is the work of the angels.

And disposing of your tree is another important consideration. Some people place Christmas trees outside in their yards, tossing bird seed in and around the tree, the needle-filled branches serving as great cover for sparrows, finches and doves. IKEA has recycled Christmas trees for many years, though here the word “recycling” is loosely applied exurban the trees are pulped to return to life as mulch. While nice, this is more reuse than recycling. But the bottom line is to avoid throwing trees into the trash to be landfilled or incinerated

And please, please don’t toss your tree out covered by a giant trash bag. Yikes!

So when you see trees for sale in makeshift lots along the Ridge, stop in. Buying a Christmas tree is an inherently green act. It supports sustainable agriculture, keeps farms in production and farmers employed, brings nature into the home, even cleans the air.

So enjoy your tree, and have a green Christmas. Your next task: recycling all that wrapping paper!