Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1980 book Cosmos that there were more stars in the universe than grains of sand on beaches on Earth — a statement that’s both wondrous and impossible to prove. But some scientists pondering similar ideas believe that there may be more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The theory stems from a 2015 study that attempted to determine how many living trees could be found on the planet, by estimating the number of trees living in different environments. Tropical and subtropical forests appear to have 43% of the world’s tree population, nearly double that of frosty boreal forests found in places such as Canada, Russia, and Norway. Other regions, including the temperate biome (central Europe and the U.S. Northeast), generally have the fewest number of trees. The combined estimates per zone lead some scientists to believe that Earth is home to roughly 3 trillion trees. Compared to NASA’s estimate of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, it appears that trees far outnumber the Milky Way’s sparkling orbs.
However, the scientific community acknowledges that we’ll likely never know the true number of stars in the sky or how many trees are rooted in the Earth, because there are too many factors at play. Astronomers can guess at the number of stars by observing how the galaxy rotates and calculating its mass, though not all stars are visible from Earth, and it’s impossible to count them individually to confirm the math. On Earth, humans cut down 15 billion trees annually but replace some, with an estimated 1.3 billion saplings produced in the U.S. each year in the hopes of balancing the count. After all, even if we have trillions of them, each tree on the planet is precious.
You gotta hand it to grunge rockers: Their sullen and disaffected nature isn’t for show. They really do want to escape life.
Because many of its heroes never got to grow old, Generation X has never gotten to watch the grunge icons of its youth surrender to age, time, mortality — and thus into a beloved memory from a ripped one.
It wasn’t just Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Scott Weiland, frontman of the Stone Temple Pilots, who died young. Consider the artists on the soundtrack to the 1992 Cameron Crowe romantic comedy “Singles,” which served as an early, hugely successful guide to commercial grunge. Even before the album’s release, it was something of a tragic collection, thanks to the presence of Mother Love Bone, whose lead singer Andrew Wood overdosed in 1990. The premature deaths of Alice In Chains frontman Layne Staley (overdose, 2002) and Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell (suicide, 2017) compounded the tragedy.
And now there’s Mark Lanegan, former leader of the psychedelic grunge pathbreakers Screaming Trees and an acclaimed solo artist, who died of undisclosed causes at his home in Killarney, Ireland, on Tuesday at age 57.
Lanegan was one of the genre’s greatest singers, thorniest lyricists and most troubled figures. In December, he released “Devil in a Coma,” a slim volume of prose and poetry detailing his near-death battle with COVID in the spring of 2021. It was an unofficial companion piece to his excellent, endurance test of an autobiography, “Sing Backwards and Weep,” released as the pandemic set in the year before. “Sing Backwards” detailed Lanegan’s childhood in an abusive home in rural Ellensburg, Wash. He was a small-time criminal with nascent addictions to alcohol, gambling and porn by the time he was 12 — yes, 12. A few years later, he formed Screaming Trees with brothers Van and Gary Lee Conner, and his life got exponentially worse.Advertisement
The Trees had one major hit (“Nearly Lost You,” featured on the “Singles” soundtrack) and a life of roiling misery. Nobody hated anything more than the guys in Screaming Trees hated each other; compared to them, the Gallagher brothers are monks on a yoga retreat. The only time in “Sing Backwards” Lanegan seems truly happy is when he is describing the time Lee Conner suffered an accidental electrical shock. (He lived.) By the time the band imploded in 2000, Lanegan seemed to have outgrown grunge, anyway. His early solo albums “The Winding Sheet” and “Whiskey for the Holy Ghost” were marvels, spartan and sad. “My idea was I wanted to make music with the feeling of blues, without being blues,” Lanegan later told the Seattle Times. “The Winding Sheet” contained a cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” a traditional song popularized by Lead Belly, featuring Cobain and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic; that band would use a similar arrangement of the song for their appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”
Lanegan and Cobain were pre-fame friends. As Lanegan wrote in “Sing Backwards,” the Nirvana frontman called him repeatedly right before he died, asking Lanegan to come over. In what would prove to be one of the most fateful decisions in rock history, Lanegan listened in real time as Cobain left messages on his answering machine — in the ’90s, you could do that — but never picked up. He was trying to avoid Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife.
Lanegan’s post-Trees career occasionally thrived. He became a sometime member of Mad Season, a grunge supergroup co-founded by Staley and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and collaborated with Moby, Greg Dulli, Isobel Campbell of Belle & Sebastian. He served as a vital connector between grunge and desert rock when he briefly joined Queens of the Stone Age, whose lead singer, Josh Homme, had been an adjunct member of Screaming Trees. Lanegan and Homme wrote the theme song for “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” for Bourdain, a fan who plainly adored them.
In Lanegan’s personal life, things were grim. He struggled with a years-long addiction to heroin and crack, and became a dealer to support his habit. He once came close to having his arm amputated and occasionally lived on the streets. Most of his 30s could be considered a near-death experience. “I was the ghost that wouldn’t die,” he writes in “Sing Backwards.” It would take a year in rehab to outrun his demons. Love paid for it.
In his last years, Lanegan seemed older than he was. He appeared careworn and weathered, at once eternally pugilistic and resigned to his fate. He was consumed by his own mortality, worried about government tracking devices and 5G. He was the embodiment of what grunge would have looked like if it had had the chance to grow old.
It got to the point where most interviews with Lanegan included some version of the question: How are you still alive? Lanegan seemed to wonder about it, too. “My days are numbered/ Eternal slumber/ Death is my due,” he sang on “Ballad of a Dying Rover,” the centerpiece of his last official release, “Straight Songs of Sorrow,” the spare, ghostly companion album to “Sing Backwards.”
With Lanegan’s death, most of grunge’s remaining living icons are the no-nonsense guys in the middle, such as Tad Doyle and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, too dependable to die, and dedicated self-preservationists such as Eddie Vedder, hopefully unkillable, and Love.
In a pre-COVID interview with Spin, Lanegan didn’t like his own chances. “I may have dodged a bullet. For now,” he told the reporter. “But you can’t last forever.”
In the world of grunge, and, more importantly, for Generation X, maybe 57 is forever.
