We had a rare snowstorm yesterday that dumped a goodly amount of wet, heavy snow. 6+ inches for New England is not very unusual in January but it was still October. The trees still had leaves on them. At 2:00 AM that morning, (don’t ask!) the environment sounded like a war zone. It took a while to realize that the “gunshots” were actually trees cracking all around.
With the first light of the day, the damage was clearer. The pine trees, with their thin needles, mostly survived. The leafy ones: oaks, elms, ashes, maples had a harder time. We have a 30+ ft. elm in our back yard that cracked and is now leaning on the back deck.
But what if we framed the story differently?
The climate has changed and The Elms et al are no longer suitable for this area.
It wasn’t that the storm was early, the trees were late — they failed to anticipate climate change and to adapt. And a lot of them are dead as a result.
It happens to companies all the time. The Four Horsemen of the internet bubble were Sun, Cisco, Microsoft and Dell. Somewhere along the line Microsoft and Dell were replaced by Oracle and EMC. Sun was absorbed into Oracle a couple of years ago. The buzz now is all about Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.
Hearken back to another era and the pride of New England: Digital, Wang, Data General, Prime Computer. All gone! Was that a failure of management, as most of my friends will tell you?
Or was it, as with our elm tree, a failure to adapt?
