Trees have supported us ever since we descended from them, but we’ve become estranged. How can climate activists exploit our love story now, to avoid our grandkids playing in dead forests?

The Sycamore Gap Tree – Good News or Bad News? 

It happens from time to time. In September 2023, it happened again in the UK.

For a few days, the fate of a single tree dominated headlines. Old and New Media festooned ‘The Sycamore Gap Tree’ with a dazzling range of powerful emotional attachments, rekindling an ancient love affair. 

How can the story of one of Britain’s three billion trees, briefly thrust into the limelight, guide us, in our increasingly urgent need for effective climate action?

The Sycamore Gap Tree, AKA The Robin Hood Tree, now has its own Wikipedia page. For those unfamiliar with the story, here are three, equally truthful, headlines:

• NEUTRAL NEWS: Photogenic tree felled overnight, for reasons still unknown.
• GOOD NEWS: Volunteers coppice invasive species defiling World Heritage Site, sequestering carbon.
• BAD NEWS: Mindless vandals slaughter priceless national treasure.

Guess which version grabbed the headlines. If the news dictum for human tragedy is ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, when it comes to individual trees, it’s ‘If it drops, it pops’. Just substitute a tree for a person – no need to change the language.

In this case, the ‘national outpouring of grief’ was at the ‘irreplaceable loss’ of a tree planted in a rubble-strewn dip in Hadrian’s Wall (the barrier built by Roman Emperor Hadrian in AD 122 to keep Hibernian barbarians at bay). The coverage’s tone was indistinguishable from that used following a political assassination. 

The ‘outrage at the evil perpetrators’ for their ‘vile action’ in chopping down ‘a precious jewel beloved by all’ could have been taken from reports about child-killers. 

The chainsawing of a 150-year old tree prompted the kind of ‘Why oh why?’ bewailing of ‘modern society’s moral decline’ the breast-beating and beard-stroking pundits usually reserve for football hooligans.

So what’s the story with this tree? 

Secret storytelling formula revealed

We’re all expert story consumers, but here’s a trick storytellers don’t like to reveal.

Journalists are often accused of ‘not letting the facts get in the way of a good story’. This is usually understood to mean actively lying, or making things up. 

While this can happen – and increasingly does, as misinformation and disinformation permeates from social media into journalism – the truth is more subtle, and more instructive. It’s more often a case of omission, than commission.

This secret formula squeezes the most juice from any given story by optimising the Positive (ie. ‘Good News’) and negative (i.e. ‘Bad News’) input values, in order to generate the greatest output (i.e. ‘Best Story’). 

The Sycamore Gap Tree story rigorously obeys this formula. All such tragedies do, artfully straddling Good News and Bad News by following this simple storytelling formula:

The more past Good News was attached to the victim when alive, the more current Bad News is generated by their death.

If you test this formula by reversing it, it remains robust. When Baddies die, it’s a cause for celebration. The more towering their past crimes, the greater the jubilation when they fall. 

Compare the language when celebrities or infants are ‘tragically taken before their time’ with that of dictators or criminals who ‘get their just desserts and won’t be mourned’. 

For Baddies, the more Bad News was attached to them in the past, the more powerful the redemptive Good News of their passing becomes.

Secret storytelling formula applied

Let’s now apply this Good News/Bad News storytelling formula to the Sycamore Gap Tree coverage. 

Sift through the news reports, and you’ll soon come up with a Sycamore Gap Tree Top Five Good News Facts, that might look something like this:

1. Featured in Hollywood’s 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood (despite being 273km from Sherwood Forest).  

2. Appeared in the music video for Bryan Adam’s soundtrack mega-hit, (Everything I Do) I Do It For You. 

3. Had for decades been the focus for photographers and stargazers, and backdrop for countless marriage proposals, weddings and spreading of loved ones’ ashes.

4. Was voted England’s Tree of the Year in 2016. 

5. Came 5th in 2017’s European Tree of the Year competition.

That’s a lot of Good News ballast to leverage into current Tragedy.

Our secret formula predicts that there will be no mention of any prior Bad News. Sift through the coverage all you like, and you’ll barely find any mention of a Sycamore Gap Tree Top Five Bad News Facts, which might look something like this:

1. Acer pseudoplatanus is a non-native species, introduced from the Continent around 1500. 

2. Invasive/exotic/imported/non-native species, like Japanese knotweed, Asian hornets, African killer bees, or North American grey squirrels, usually get bad press.

3. Publications featuring stories about such invasive species also tend to be unhappy with human immigration.

4. Even tree-lovers show little affection for Acer Pseudoplatanus. Alan Mitchell, in his magnificently opinionated ‘The Trees of Britain and Northern Europe’ (1982) dismisses the ‘false plane’ thus:

It invades woods on rich damp soils and shades out the other trees while its heavy leaf-fall destroys the flowers beneath – a dull tree.

5. A search for ‘sycamore’ in news archives usually generates stories of unhappy homeowners railing against the ‘weeds’ undermining or overshadowing their houses. 

Bring out your dead!

Another notable feature of the Sycamore Gap Tree coverage was that virtually none of the solemn obituaries mentioned the awkward fact that the victim wasn’t actually dead.

Sycamore is a coppice tree. That is to say, it’s one of those tree species whose stump (foresters say ‘stool’) sprouts new shoots that re-grow. Think ‘cut-and-come-again’ lettuce, except for timber, and taking years rather than days between cuts.

Any forester, had they been consulted, might have quoted Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, explaining that the Sycamore Gap Tree, far from being deceased, was actually merely ‘resting’.  

Sure enough, within a couple of years new shoots appeared from the Sycamore Gap Tree’s stump. 

In a few decades, it will probably have regenerated, freeing some other ‘vandals’ to harvest the timber and sequester carbon. The same root system can continue to be harvested in this manner for centuries. The oldest coppiced stools in the UK are at least 1,000 years old, possibly twice that.

Subsequent ‘follow-up’ stories about The Sycamore Gap Tree have sheepishly acknowledged this inconvenient truth, with reports of new shoots growing, or seeds being propagated to plant elsewhere. 

I told you I was ill

Another British comedian, Spike Milligan, when alive, used to say he wanted the epitaph to be carved on his gravestone to read ‘I told you I was ill’.

The church authorities were unamused, but Milligan’s family eventually honoured his wish, smuggling it past the gravestone censors by writing it in Irish.

But what if, like the Sycamore Gap Tree, you’re not actually dead? That’s a different story, and extricating yourself presents a different storytelling challenge.

Rowing back on obituaries is actually a familiar storytelling problem. One of the greatest ever storytellers, Mark Twain, famously responded to his own newspaper obituaries by saying that reports of his death had been ‘greatly exaggerated’. 

It’s easier in fiction, of course. 

• The long-running BBC sci-fi drama Doctor Who owed its longevity to the main character’s ability to periodically ‘regenerate’ into a completely different actor. 
• When the soap opera Dallas’ writing team had to revive Bobby Ewing, they turned to the old ‘it all turned out to be a dream’ trick. 
• We’ve yet to discover how Amazon is going to explain away James Bond’s on-screen demise in No Time To Die (2021), unless they’ve paid $1Bn for the rights to put the franchise spy’s funeral arrangements on screen. 

Journalists, faced with corpses unexpectedly turning out to still be alive, can’t reach for the same tools as screenwriters. In the real world, when hacks find themselves obliged to ‘bring back’ characters they’ve previously killed off, they need a bit more finesse, usually involving lying by omission.

The British media calls this a ‘reverse ferret’, a sudden reversal of an editorial or political line on a certain issue, with as little acknowledgement of the previous position as the bounds of credibility permit. Thus the stories about the Sycamore Gap Tree producing shoots, or seedlings being propagated 

What has this sneak-peek in various storytellers’ toolboxes got to do with the Sycamore Gap Tree in particular, and forestry in general? 

And, what lessons do both have for nudging ordinary people from our default inertia, into taking effective climate action?

Bridging The Sycamore Gap 

The point of recycling all this old newsprint is not to pass judgement on which response was right or wrong, or to speculate on the motivations of the tree fellers. 

Rather, the Sycamore Gap Tree saga is a case study in the extraordinary depth of emotional response the felling of a single tree can provoke in humans.

Anyone who’s mourned the death of a pet knows how emotional attachments can be transferred from human to animal. Exposing children to the finite nature of a dog or cat’s life, is emotional training to help us cope when family and friends die, but few pet owners like to think of their canine or feline ‘family’ in such dispassionate terms.

Childless adults are particularly likely to refer to their pets as their ‘babies’, ‘little boy’ or ‘little girl’. It comes naturally.

Nor does it stop at fellow-mammals, or even animals. We’re constantly projecting emotional attachments onto inanimate objects. Movie animators’ expertise lies in applying ‘personality’ to broomsticks, chandeliers or desk lamps. Games designers invest digital avatars with the same ‘character’ we usually ascribe to humans.

As the Sycamore Gap Tree, and countless other examples have demonstrated, trees are highly effective hosts for our emotional projections.

A sci-fi storytelling staple is imagining what an alien, landing on Earth with zero context, might make of our species.

Our tendency to apply emotions that have clearly adapted to benefit our own species to other species, even inanimate objects, might be one of the more baffling conundrums facing any extraterrestrial researcher.  

Their first question might be:

Even if they do live in Europe’s third-baldest country, why are all these humans getting so upset about one tree out of three billion?

Deep Roots

The fact that we humans find the alien’s question weird, but not our own behaviour, reveals much about Homo sapiens’ ancient, if recently neglected, love affair with trees.

Our ‘connection’ to trees, at some deep, atavistic, evolutionary level, should come as no surprise.

Trees have been around for more than 300 million years, humans for maybe 300 thousand. 

We’ve only ever known a world with trees. For all but the last couple of centuries, trees were absolutely central to all of our lives. For billions, they still are. They’re the Swiss Army Knife for human survival, providing everything from shelter to fuel, food, medicine – and stories. 

For as long as humans have told stories, trees have appeared as critical characters with strange powers: 

• Vedic scripture has the Tree of Jiva and Atman, which ‘stands without roots and bears fruits without blossoming’. 
• In the Bible, the Garden of Eden contains two trees – the one from which Adam and Eve are permitted to eat, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which they’re prohibited. 
• China’s Yi Ching features ‘withered poplars which put forth flowers’. 

Even as the Industrial Revolution started to distance trees from our daily lives, they lingered in our stories. 

• In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Horse Chestnut Tree is ever-present at key moments in Jane and Rochester’s relationship, including (spoiler alert) being splintered by lightning.

Trees’ position in our collective unconscious remains just as powerful today. Long after people in industrialised societies have forgotten the names, characteristics and uses of our neglected arboreal colleagues, they appear in modern myths:

• JK Rowling’s Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter series appears violent, but conceals secret passages. 
• Treebeard, and the other Ents in the Lord of the Rings, turn out to be nurturing ‘shepherds of trees’ in arboral form. 
• Weirwood trees in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, are mystical conduits to the Old Gods.

Explain all this to our baffled alien, and it might start to make some crazy kinda sense. 

Trees are bigger than humans, outlive us, and have helped us survive since we can remember. 

Why wouldn’t trees loom large in our imaginations? Why wouldn’t we see them as ‘human’?  

And why wouldn’t climate activists exploit this human behaviour to speed up carbon drawdown?

Exploiting individual tree love for a higher purpose

Our proverbial alien, emerging from their spacecraft in Britain in September 2023 to scan local media in order to research Earth’s dominant species, might well have been surprised to find an adult human telling other grown-ups, with a straight face, they should email their MPs, support petitions, pay membership fees or invest their free time in becoming activists, just because one tree was chopped down.

Yet, as Britain mourned the loss of the Sycamore Gap Tree, the regional director of Hadrian Wall landowner, the National Trust, to give but one example, did exactly that. 

The outpouring we’ve seen shows just how important the connection is between people and nature in its many forms, and as we consider plans for this special tree, and this very special place, we’ll also look to harness that support for trees, landscapes and nature all across the country, and use the sycamore as a symbol of recovery.

This press statement harnessed specific individual tree-grief to promote the National Trust’s general mission. It’s a model of PR storytelling, nudging ordinary people into turning a specific emotional attachment into an opportunity to promote a general, less ‘sexy’, policy shift. 

It understands that our emotional response to a single case dwarfs our rational response to data, however authoritative, or comprehensively compiled. We’ve evolved to deal with numbers and scales that tribes encounter, not civilisations. 

As numbers go from an individual, to a handful, to a dozen, the impact, perversely, diminishes. We’re really not very good at imagining anything at a scale that exceeds a village, or a small tribe on a vast plain.  

Once we’re required to respond to any quantity of anything exceeding a few dozen, we leave the sweaty, intimate realm of Emotion, and enter the sterile, distant laboratory of Reason. 

• It’s why we can easily visualise one aircraft carrier, can just about manage 10 of them, really struggle to imagine a hundred, and don’t have a clue what a thousand might look like. 
• Or a single image of one infant corpse, lifeless in the arms of a Turkish police officer, shifted European immigration policy in 2015, and countless documented reports of hundreds or thousands of dead children in South Sudan, Congo or Gaza since, have failed to have the same impact.

Lessons for our baffled alien

Let’s return to our baffled alien visitor, trying to make sense of how the felling (in fact, as we now know, coppicing) of one tree out of three billion attracted so much attention.

What other lessons might Baffled Alien – and current climate activists – take from the Sycamore Gap Tree, and how might they be applied in other contexts to trigger change?

For one thing, plenty of storytellers recognise the power of such stories. The National Trust was far from the only NGO or pressure group which sought to ride the Sycamore Gap Tree gravy train to reach its own favoured destination. 

Any journalist who’s covered an earthquake, famine or flood in a poor country knows the queue of charity PR officials and spokespeople that forms, using this particular emergency to solicit donations to their particular NGO. 

This doesn’t diminish their sincerity or integrity, but it may be hard to explain to our baffled alien visitor how this differs from competing fizzy drink brands competing for our disposable income.

Any high-profile news story is quickly pounced on by activists seeking to attach it to their particular activist campaign outcome. Their objectives can differ widely, or even contradict each other.  

Examine the response to the 2024/5 Californian forest fires, and take your pick of activists queuing up to explain how it proves their point, including:  

• Banning construction in fire-prone areas. 
• Making federal disaster insurance mandatory and permanent. 
• Californians are instruments of the Devil, punished by God for their moral turpitude.  
• Those affected voted for the wrong political party.

The Sycamore Gap Tree incident didn’t provoke quite this diversity of response, but the National Trust’s spokesperson provided a good example of deploying storytelling subterfuge for the greater good. 

It subtly leveraged the emotion attached to a single tree and transferred it to a broader cause. 

It maximised its appeal by avoiding obvious preaching, lecturing, trolling or triggering.

In short, it exploited human behavioural psychology, to turn inaction in action.

Case studies for climate activists

The See Through network has different programmes, all sharing the common Goal of:

Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping The Inactive Become Active

See Through News, the publisher of this article, is the journalism/outreach arm of the network. See Through Together is the social media video content arm, See Through Games the online game division. See Through Carbon the technical, carbon measuring programme.

Whatever their focus, all See Through projects share the same underlying methodology, combining hard science with sophisticated storytelling, and exploiting the techniques described in this article, and in many others on the See Through News website. 

Trees are unambiguously beneficial to pretty much every climate, environment, biodiversity or sustainability mission – try to think of any problem being created by too many trees, or any that wouldn’t be helped by more trees. 

Search the See Through News website for ‘trees’, and you’ll find many case studies of See Through projects involving them. 

Readers of this article will now be able to identify the ‘transparent Trojan horse’ storytelling trickery used in any of the following:

• Ben Law’s Woodland Year: Playlist on the See Through Together YouTube channel, featuring a fly-on-the-bark documentary following Britain’s ‘greatest living woodsman’ passing on his coppicing knowledge and woodcraft skills to two apprentices over an annual cycle 

• A Documentary Seed Matures: a See Through News article about the remarkable genesis and story of how this series was made.

• Safely Plant More Diverse Tree Species In New Woodlands Now: an article on the See Through News website about the policy change that needs to occur so our grandchildren don’t have to play in dead forests.

• Is Planting More Trees The Answer to Carbon Drawdown?: a See Through News article examining the numbers and science behind the role trees can play in creating a sustainable future.

• I’m Dreaming Of A Green Christmas, Just Like The Ones We’re Going To Know: a See Through News article about an early test to leverage STN’s social media reach, due to pass 1 million globally in early 2025, to measurably reduce carbon

• Ben & Sven – How To Explain Our Crazy Building Supply Chain To A Child: an adult children’s story about our unsustainable construction timber supply chain, and how to fix it.

• The Downsizing Sow: a podcast re-telling the story of The Three Little pigs, also available as a See Through News article.

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volunteer@seethroughnews.org and ask for details

The network is composed of a wide variety of different people with different expertises, experiences and degrees of commitment with the shared Goal of:

Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown By Helping The Inactive Become Active

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