Think About The Trees

This is not a good time to be a tree.

It’s about this time of the year that I start feeling sorry for trees. Unbidden urges of sympathy well up from some hidden depths. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m vaguely uncomfortable with this business of dead trees cluttering up our hearths and homes during what it supposed to be a happy holiday season. 

It strikes me as a somewhat barbaric custom not entirely proper for a civilized society. I’m quite sure we would frown on such a practice if our roles were reversed; imagine the popular outrage if trees suddenly were to start draping human bodies about their forests – and then decorating them while young oaks and maples and beeches and other saplings oohed and aahed over the magical beauty of the elaborate displays.

Still, I have to admit that few things are lovelier than a Christmas tree in full decoration, so every year one goes up in my home, and I simply try to ignore the feeling that I’m operating some sort of medieval torture chamber for tall woody creatures: “Tighten those screws down there. I think we’re going to have to lop off a branch or two up here. What? It wants more water; why, I just gave it some last week.”

Oh, I’ve gone the live tree route, but the feeling that some poor adolescent pine is merely dying a slower, more painful death (a couple of weeks being scorched by a furnace followed by interment in frozen soil seems a fate we shouldn’t wish on even the lowliest shrub) tends to dampen the holiday spirit.

Too, I must confess that I have sap on my hands: A few years back I went out and felled a tree myself. I don’t know what came over me; it was when my children were younger, and I guess I felt they would somehow equate arboreal assassination with wholesome family fun. Needless to say, it was not a pretty sight: Needles flying everywhere, sawdust spilling out onto the cold, hard ground, and the chilling image of a small stump sticking forlornly out of the snow. My guilt was not assuaged even by my smug acceptance of congratulatory comments from family and friends as to its beauty. “Yep,” I would proudly proclaim while inwardly wincing, “got that baby myself. Just went out in the woods with only a chainsaw and came dragging it back. It put up quite a struggle, I don’t mind telling you, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it mounted in my living room.” 

It was with an especially heavy heart, too, when later I returned the tree to nature, albeit in a living-impaired state, and I couldn’t help but wonder at such capricious use of even brainless life. 

This remorse, I think, is an important distinction, although maybe not for the tree. No doubt there are your more remorseless types who would join organizations, if they existed, such as the National Ax Association, to embrace the belief that there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with mindless tree massacre, and earnestly maintain that it is a constitutional right to indiscriminately wield axes, hatchets and even machetes while hacking down anything with roots. It is groups such as NAXA that spend millions annually lobbying the government against blade control, persuading politicians that axes don’t kill trees, people do.

I suspect they’re right, given the number of trees lost to cold steel each year, but I think motive should matter, too. I try not to think about the trees that gave their lives to become the paper used in newspapers and magazines and books, but I’d like to think they died for a worthy cause.

Christmas tree growers probably feel little guilt about the ultimate fate of all those little pines they have carefully nurtured since seedlinghood, and they shouldn’t, since they are merely supplying a demand and, more importantly, perpetuating the life cycle; every tree they cut down, remember, was one deliberately planted. Growers understand that while trees technically may be renewable resources, they can also be finite ones.

Curiously, this simple fact is not universally known. Vast forests the world over are being slashed and burned into treeless plains with little thought given to the consequences: If we lose all our forests, we lose more than some irreplaceable species of flora and fauna that just might hold the key to the cure for cancer, we lose the very air we breathe and – in this age of global warming – any chance of maintaining the precarious balance of nature.

Yet too often trees are cut down in their prime for trivial reasons; in the Third World, where you can still find trees growing in the wild, it is common for people to eradicate entire forests just to try their hand at a little subsistence farming, never realizing without the benefit of some high-tech soil sampling apparatus that the dirt wouldn’t sustain a shopping mall. These poor souls simply can’t be made to understand that they’re playing with the planet’s climate control and should leave the trees alone, but then hunger can give one a distorted view of geopolitical niceties.

It’s all depressingly clear that too many among us can no longer see the forest for the trees. As long as we have Christmas, I am confident we’ll have trees. I’m not so sure about the forests.