Lately there’s been lots of media coverage about “helping,” “cleaning up,” applying “treatments” (usually means herbicides), and that perennial favorite Orwellian euphemism, “managing,” forests, or urban rows of trees. All of these terms boil down to one thing: KILLING TREES.
The trees supposedly needing human “management” might be healthy, or labeled “sick” or “dying” or even “dead.” They might even be diagnosed by an arborist as “diseased.” And of course sometimes trees are diseased. But many times they are not, or not terminally so, and not beyond giving them care, or just leaving them alone to the care of the rest of the forest. We are slowly getting wise to an ancient wisdom, that a forest is far more than just a group of trees, but a complex web of living organisms and interactive systems both seen and almost unseen.
By now, including on this arborphile’s website, you’ve all likely heard about the “wood wide web” of microscopic mycorrhizal fungal networks that connects the roots of a forest’s trees to each other via the soil. A microscopic system as vast and mysterious as the cosmos beyond our planet. And yet the label “diseased” is applied, the diagnosis is implicitly terminal, and, if unchallenged by wiser foresters, the human diagnosticians will carry out their death sentence.
Bureaucrats love these terms, if bureaucrats can be said to love as they choose language that misleads, minimizes wildlife and environmental harm and obscures how many complex living organisms they kill. The most jaw-dropping term, used to describe trees in any condition that the bureaucracy wants killed — excuse me, I mean “removed” — is… “hazardous.” Clearly the public will want us to “remove” something we label hazardous, right? This appellation is now routinely used to justify killing scores and, eventually over months and years, hundreds and even thousands of trees in San Francisco’s Sutro Forest alone. Each and every tree that is cut down, including those decades old or over a century old, is said to pose a danger to people… walking in the forest. Think about that. Think how far we’ve come, or perhaps fallen, in labeling so many large trees as hazardous in one of America’s supposedly most progressive and environmentally aware cities. This is the big-plant version of so-called “native plants” extremists who now routinely emply herbicides to kill wild plants they say shouldn’t be here,” and “don’t belong,” and are “invasive” and so on. READ MORE about this horticultural xenophobia, aka, Invasion Biology.
Because you know, let’s face it, trees can be dangerous. They can be blown over by the wind and land on you, your car, your house. From this mindset, so much of nature, from poisons oak & ivy & hemlock, to poisonous snakes, to ticks and insects and bats and rats and feral cats — Oh My! — all pose real threats that should be addressed, often by killing the Bad creatures. Oh my Old Testament God. And let’s not forget about lightning and cliffs and high winds and drowning in ponds. Really, when you think about it, anything outside your home, beyond your control, is dangerous. Run away! Stay inside, people!
And then there’s California’s terror du jour, sensationalized in a sensationalizing media, wildfire. If this italicized word triggers you, NOW READ THIS entire webpage devoted to this, uh, hot, topical topic: READ ABOUT WILDFIRE being natural, inevitable, and necessary. And if you don’t want to read more about wildfire just know that, in short, cutting down lots of trees, or forests, or systematically denuding forests of other vegetation (including “cleaning up” or “raking” the forest floor), only decreases forest precious to forests and INCREASES the likelihood of wildfire ignition.
Now c’mon Jack, you treehugger you, some of you may be thinking. You’re going to far with this. Trees can and do fall on people, and also on cars and houses. To which I reply, sure they do. But let’s cut through the insinuations with statistical facts that put tree danger in rational perspective. Because growing public fear of trees, and media coverage of it, vastly outweighs the actual danger.
Guess how many of our 325,000,000 Americans are killed each year, on average, by falling trees? HINT: It’s 1/10th the number killed by falling down staircases. The stats: 1000 deaths by falling down stairs. 100 deaths by falling down trees. So, statistically speaking, you are 10x more likely to die falling down a staircase than by being under a falling tree. Another stat: your chances of being struck (and not even killed) by lightning is 1 in 10 million. Which means you’re 3x more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a falling tree.
I’d add, this time without any statistical substantiation, you’re more likely to die from sitting indoors 24/7 watching TV, while avoiding thunderstorms and trees and all other natural perils lurking out your front door. But where’s the fun in that kind of sedentary, indoor life? Where’s the life in that, assuming you’re able-bodied?
A life thoroughly managed and controlled is a life not fully lived. Environmentalist and monkeywrencher Edward Abbey, decades ago, wrote volumes about the necessity for wildness in our lives, and visiting wild places outdoors to stir that wild aliveness inside us. (Read Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” and “The Monkey Wrench Gang” for starters.)
BEWARE & BE WARY of any prescriptions to kill wild plants and animals of any kind. The quotations used in this essay’s first paragraph are just some of the insidious justifications, and language, propaganda really, now regularly used, even by self-described environmentalists, to justify routine chainsawing and rampant herbicide use. All are ways of killing wild creatures that frighten those fearful, consciously or unconciously, of wild nature. The euphemisms mislead the public and spread fear. Fear of trees. Think about that. Fear of trees.
Sadly, this is how far some currents of our mainstream culture have come from feeling affection for trees, a connection to every living thing in the natural world. Hence my constant advocacy for spending more time among trees, or anywhere in nature, to rekindle a heartfelt relationship with the natural world. My flashes of anger come from the pain I feel upon seeing the destruction we humans wreak on the natural world of which we are an interdependent part. Leave “managing” to retail stores and banks and the like. Get out of your chair and into the great outdoors. Come alive. You’ll be glad you did. If more of us do, we just might preserve what’s left of this glorious planet of which we are an integral part.
– Jack Gescheidt, January 2019
