The Embarrassment of the Earth

I must have sensed that the tree's days were numbered, because I started noticing it in earnest about a year ago. I'd say hello each morning as I drove past, thank it for being there, being beautiful.

It was a type of pine tree that naturally grows with the same sort of asymmetrical grace cultivated in Japanese gardens. It stood behind the sign to a gas station I passed frequently--a typical older gas station, its exterior dirty with layers of cigarette ash, spilled soda and gasoline. The tree's magic elevated the grime and gave the place a certain homey charm.

Though it was surrounded by an ever-growing continuum of parking lots, fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and big box stores, it reminded me of other places I'd lived. Where the lights of a gas station sprung out of the darkness hopeful and welcoming. Offering a point of convergence and community in a world otherwise isolated among the trees.

It reminded me that this place had once been that way, too.

As a child, in the summertime, I'd come to the region where I now live, travelling down roads limned with cathedral pines, signs for kids' summercamps, and fire roads with hand-painted signs listing residents' lakeside camps.

Each year, we'd marvel at the new building projects that had cropped up since the summer before. A doughnut shop! A mini-mall! Little bits of civilization amidst a pleasant sea of trees.

We ate at restaurants owned by local people, each spot with its own personality. The parking lots were gravel, the buildings surrounded by lush green grass, flower boxes and hanging plants.

And still there were trees--some restaurants were even huddled amongst the tall pines, while others had banished them to the distance. The latter made me sad even then, though, as the naked branches of innermost trees were suddenly, permanently exposed to the world. It was like they'd been robbed of their dignity. People explained that new little trees would grow to give them shelter once again. I waited, years passed, but that never happened.

Those ugly, razed treelines remain as some sort of constant, though they have surely receded and changed over the years.

In fact, the environment is now so paved over, it bears no correspondence to the places of my memories. Those old images float in my mind, from time to time, disoriented from the places of my daily travels--though they share the same roads. The landscape has been stripped of all identifiers, and is simply a mile-long parking lot, growing year by year.

The denuding of the surroundings is now in a meta-stage, with properties from one wave of conquest being swallowed by the next. The tree in question belonged to a lot with a Pizza Hut, which closed last year. About a month ago, the "For Lease" sign on the old-school hut was replaced by four spray-painted letters: DEMO.

The writing was literally on the wall, yet I refused to read it.

Or, truly, I saw their meaning. I'd seen the meaning, to some degree, all along. There's a part of me that's inclined to take a darker tone, and believe that loving the tree marked it for destruction. But that's not it. Love, properly harnessed, might have saved it from destruction. And that makes me cringe to my core.

The new tenants will be Starbucks and Chipotle, two businesses that like to lull customers into a sense that they are dedicated to socially-responsible, sustainable consumption, even as they squeeze out locally-owned businesses and contribute to mountains of unrecycled plastic waste and sub-urban sprawl, to say nothing of their offenses against and appropriations of peoples and cultures of color. Surely they would have heeded a petition to save a tree.

The irony hangs strongly there, emanating a varied stench indeed. But I'm pretty sure both Starbucks and Chipotle would have clambered at the chance to show 'how much they care.' Perhaps they'll even trump me here, with a dramatic plot twist, and wheel out the tree once again when all their excavation work is complete. I must admit, I would be grateful, empty marketing move though it would be.

Either way, it illustrates an important point: this is far from the first time this place has been used cruelly, and just as the land is exploited, as much or more are the people. The trees of my childhood were not that old--probably most were only 100 years or less, in fact. And it was in large part for the wonder of its ancient trees that this land was taken from its rightful, indigenous custodians, hundreds of years ago. Underscoring the thieving, rapacious means by which the forests were acquired, they were mostly all cut down by the mid-1800's.

And that exploitative mentality just keeps evolving, imprisoning more and more of us with each cycle. I see the Earth trapped beneath miles of decaying asphalt, with so few places to breathe and grow freely. So little silence. So little shelter. So little beauty.

Nonetheless, the Earth, for her part, is nothing if not a survivor. She has been misused many a time before, and always she is ready to arise, with new beauty, particularly when we help her. And given that it was, in part, for the want of trees that this whole mess began, might saving trees help us to undo it? Plenty more trees stand in peril, I just hope that next time, I'll be there to save one.