The past few days I have been extremely busy doing concentrated nothing. Nothing is hard work if you're really serious about it. It's also enthralling and hard to stop. On my breaks from doing nothing, I looked for a job. No luck yet, though.
So anyway, trees are pretty cool. They protect us from the sun and the wind, the drown out noise, and they give us, well, wood. Of course, they're deathtraps in a lighting storm, they give birds something to sit on while they line up their asses with our heads, and without them we wouldn't have forest fires, but nothing's ALL roses (except me).
You'll notice I didn't put oxygen production on that list. Well, I did it for a reason. Trees are irrelevant to us as far as oxygen goes. As long as we produce enough food to feed ourselves, our oxygen needs are taken care of. The plant breaks carbon dioxide and shits oxygen (so to speak), we eat the plant and return all of the carbon dioxide it consumed back into the atmosphere. Meat's the same way. The cow gets it from the plants and we eat the cow. In case you haven't caught on, all of this global warming fuss is because we're freeing the CO2 that has been out of circulation for awhile, trapped in fossil fuels.
I digressed again. Damn I'm consistant.
Some time ago, I thought of an interesting question. Where would we be if trees never developed? I asked my mom, who said that "we'd figure something out" but didn't get into specifics. Typical. Then I asked a couple of other guys at the camp out on Mt. Nittany a couple of weeks ago, and they didn't know either. They seem perturbed that I would think ups such a question. No one has any inquisitiveness anymore.
My own take on it is that we'd still be in the stone age. We need wood for so many damn things it's unreal. We used it for spears and early tools, shelter, fuel, and primitive machines. Oh sure, you say, we could make tools out of bones, houses out of stone, and burn animal parts or other plants for fuel (inefficient as they may be). But what, for example, would we make chariots out of, hmm? Wagons? Catapults? Furniture? Ships? Scaffolding? We wouldn't be able to transport goods or ourselves, we couldn't build any serious constructions, and we'd be screwed. We also might not be able to extract metals from ores, since I doubt if softer plants can give us high enough heat for long enough times to melt iron. Mining would be more difficult, too, since we use wood planks to shore up mining.
Yep. Trees were instrumental in our development as a sentient race. Hell, even today if aliens came and took all of our trees, we'd be crippled, although better able to deal with it. Trees are cool, but their greatest utility comes after we've cut them down.
Some of them give good fruit, too. Except coconut trees. Those can all burn for all I care.