05-02-09

Chopping Trees

Last week was Earth Week.  Yeah, I know that, technically, there isn't an Earth Week, that it's really Earth Day, and it was last Wednesday, but, since the festivities (and advertising) went on all week, I'm just going to pretend that it was officially a week.  Anyway, I mention this because I noticed that there was a lot of noise about planting trees.  There was also a new brand of paper towels and bathroom tissue that made a very strident point about how their disposable paper product was made with almost entirely recycled paper.  Whoop-de-flippin'-do.  Every paper product available is mostly recycled.  High-quality bond and library-quality book paper are made from recycled materials.  The tiny bits that aren't recycled come from tree farms where the trees are grown for the specific purpose of being used in paper and lumber.

The truth is, helping the environment by planting a tree in the United States is like helping the obesity problem by passing out brocolli at a Vegan convention.  The US currently has more forestland than it did in 1900, and almost as much forest land as it did when Westerners first appeared 500 years ago.  Part of this is due to heavily-regulated tree farms, but a certain amount can be attributed to soil-conservation attempts that date back to the end of the Dust Bowl.  Fence row plantings and other fallow areas have gone unaccosted for years, allowing them to form mixed woodlands of various types.  There is, in fact, less farmland in the US providing about ten times as much food.

I'm not saying that there isn't a deforestation problem in the world.  But, unfortunately, that deforestation is happening outside of our legal boundaries, and there isn't a whole lot we can do about it short of invading those countries in which it is occurring to force our desires on them.  Anyway, that deforestation is not happening for wood and paper production, it's mostly occurring in places with rapid population growth and is occurring as clear-cutting in order to expand living and farm space, most notably in Brazil, where sugar cane plantations to provide sugar ethanol have been sprouting up like weeds.

So, I'm sorry to tell you, but if you're concerned about the environment, there aren't a lot of big, showy things you can do that will have any kind of difference.  True environmentalism comes from things your parents told you (if you're my age) when you were a kid:  turn off the light, put on a sweater, you don't need the car if you're just going to the corner.  If the 300 million people in the United States did just those few simple things then we'd all be a lot better off (we'd use less oil, too).

Anyway, that wasn't the point of today's rant.  Okay that was the point of the ranty part of today's rant but there's more to this than just my momentary frustration with pseudo-environmentalists who want to look like heroes for their ability to use a shovel (insert Mystery Men reference here).  See the thing is, I live pretty close to a couple of those tree farms, and they're kind of fascinating.

I live a short drive from the Sam Houston National Forest, which is a wide swath of land owned by the Federal Government but leased and exploited by various private concerns from tree farms to small cattle ranches.  A few years ago, my wife and I, in our endless quest to find new paths to wander on until we get lost and die drove up to a little used public trail through part of the Forest.  Now, when I say little-used, I mean that this trail just existed as a trail, and wasn't maintained by anyone.  You followed the "trail" by finding blazes on the trees, and it (allegedly) led around in a semi-circle back to the state highway where it began.  Unfortunately, the part of the forest the trail was in (a tree farm), was, at that time being marked for thinning, and the blazes they used for that purpose were identical to the trail bazes, so it wasn't long before we were nowhere near any place we were supposed to be.  We wandered for the better part of the day, and had many wacky adventures, the upshot of which were that I was reminded that bulls are fucking huge, but are nowhere near as psychotic as they are reputed to be (thank god).

During the walk, we passed out of the part that was marked for thinning and skirted a fairly new area that was growing freely.  I say, "skirted", because there was no way we could enter the newer growth even had we wanted to.  The entire field was crowded with pine saplings ten or fifteen feet high and nearly as wide with their trunks only about five feet apart.  Just standing next to it gave me a feeling of claustrophobia.  I turned around to the older forest that was marked for a harvest thinning, and realized that it had once been a crowded grove like this one.  If I looked closely, I could even discern the remains of the neat lines in which the older trees had been planted.  Surely the new field was as due for thinning as the older one; I pictured the uses to which these small trees might be put--possibly Christams trees (although it was August), but mostly like they'd be crushed up for paper or boiled down for creosote.  Either way, I knew that sometime soon, someone would decide that a fair number of them had to go, so the others would have a chance to grow straight and tall.

Spring salad, suckling pig, and veal all began as by-products of the farmer's need to thin his crops.  Thinning is a natural part of life, a necessary part of life.  Ultimately, things become too crowded, and you have to open them up and let the light and the air back in.  A few weeks ago, I had the Arizona ash in my front yard removed.  The average life span of the Arizona ash is twenty-five years.  Ours was over forty, and was starting to show its age.  After Ike, and some fallen-branch incidents that weren't even related to high winds, my wife and I decided it had to go.  We kept the stump to serve as a sort of memorial to the old tree, because nothing that lives so long should be forgotten.

My yard looks different.  Not necessarily better, but definitely more open.  More lighted, too.  The twisted saplings and seedlings that had been languishing in the old ash's shadow are already showing signs of improved growth, and the grass, always pale and thin in that part of the yard (when it grew at all) is now thick and verdant.  The yard had, in essence, been thinned, and in so doing, I had given it a new chance to grow.

I know it's not a fully transparent metaphor, but that was the reason I had to end the comic.  As I explained previously, the story the comic told was more or less over, and the weekly obligation of updating had stopped being a contributing part of the forest of my mind.  Far to the opposite, the oppressive weight of repeatedly forcing myself to return to a story that was over (whether I knew it or not) was quietly choking out the garden of my creativity, leaving stunted and unhealthy phantoms in its shadow.

People say it's good to plant a tree.  Sometimes, it's even better to cut one down.