I See Trees of Green
April 18th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday
“[People have] made at least a start on discovering the meaning
of human life when [they] plants shade trees
under which [they know] full well [they] will never sit.”
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Problem:
I made the mistake of watching mindless television the other day, and I caught a show called Flip This House. The premise of the show is this: a hot-shot buys a dump of a house, renovates the hell out of it, and tries to sell it for a sizeable profit pronto. On this particular episode, the temporary far-too-capitalistic owner decided to cut down an 80-year-old maple to, and I quote: “Make the property look, I don’t know, you know, more modern.” And I literally thought: Poor tree. It was like watching someone chainsaw and wood-chipper my grandma. Well, okay, it wasn’t quite like that, but it still sucked like a Dirt Devil. I had to change the channel, and instead I watched a woman get a tattoo of a fire-breathing butterfly on her chest. (I wish I could make up stuff like that.)
We’ve written about trees a lot already (see here, here, here and here). But we’re here again today, getting a jump on April 27: Arbor Day. And besides, there’s much more — more than we can even cover this Wednesday — to type about the topic. Why? Two reasons:
1. We’re kind of addicted to tree products: toilet paper, sheds, pink tissues, paintings, houses, paper towels, Christmas napkins, fences, Coaco Puffs cereal boxes, chairs, tables, barns, books, Happy Birthday banners, park benches, condos, Marlboro Ultra Lights, wallpaper, ceiling fans, hell, even letters to our aforementioned grandmothers. We’re not trying to suggest we don’t need this stuff (especially the Coaco Puffs). Most of it we do. But we (and by “we” I mean almost every single one of us including your friendly-neighborhood editors at Progressive Wednesday) forget about how this stuff came to be.
2. Trees are beautiful. We treat them like they’re not.
And, if we needed more reasons to reconsider our treatment of trees, then there are these six brand-spanking-new troubling and weird facts about trees:
- The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at twice the rate once suspected.
- Billboard owners in
- The second largest rainforest in the world is located in the
- Global warming — which is partially fueled by Amazon deforestation — is actually causing spruce trees to grow in the Artic tundra, endangering animals that thrive on this land normally covered by permafrost.
- According to a recent article in Time, “900 million [trees] every year become pulp and paper.”
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Make Progress:
When I sat down and thought about it this week (and I don’t mean on the couch in my shrink’s office), I realized that I have fond memories of trees. I spent much of my youth in very, very rural
Swamp elms, silver maples, crabapples, pines, a redbud, a king crimson maple, ornamental pear trees, a little leaf linden, arborvitae, ash, and a river birch thrived in our yard. My parents planted a dwarf red delicious tree, an early Macintosh, a peach tree. We picked fresh fruits and gobbled them up, often able to eat an apple a day. Come early autumn, my mother peeled, pulverized and presser-cooked the fruits into jars of homemade applesauce.
My sister and I called the undeveloped land next to our house “the woods,” and we climbed trees, played with our pals, built forts, swung on vines, and sought out rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels. When a tree died in our yard, my old man pulled out an ax, and we stacked firewood to warm us during the frigid winters. Summers, our trees filled with robins, sparrows, and doves, and I woke, not to an alarm clock, but to the songs of birds.
As stewards of the environment, we have a duty to help trees, those towering plants, flourish. For the sake of the air, the animals, and, lest we forget, ourselves, let us celebrate Arbor Day the right way.
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