Maybe it’s because of the book I’m reading at the moment – The Overstory by Richard Powers – as well as the current transgressions against life in general and nature in particular but when I saw a bunch of mature trees slayed to make way for new, bigger power lines near our home in Columbia County it hit me hard.
My understanding is that the trees had to go so that my neighbors and I could receive access to more reliable electricity. I can certainly get behind that. It often seems that it requires little more than someone sneezing in bed at night for several hundred homes to lose power.
The new electrical substation being constructed in our area should alleviate that problem. And the power company’s website states that once the project is completed “ground cover and vegetation are encouraged to grow back.”
I applaud that. But once a hundred fifty-year-old tree is gone no amount of encouragement is going to resurrect it.
By the way, The Overstory is a stirring anthem to nature by an author who knows his trees. As we’re learning more about our forests we’re discovering that trees aren’t dumb vegetation. Sort of like broccoli stalks or asparagus spears writ large. Rather they’re members of elaborate communities connected by underground neural networks that can do things like sense threats and muster chemical defenses to assist their survival.
I’d compare the plot of the book – for the sake of full disclosure I’m a slow reader and little more than halfway through it – to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For those who haven’t seen the movie lately it involves a bunch of random characters who have visions, becoming obsessed with Devil’s Tower, a uniquely shaped mountain where extraterrestrials will be making contact with humanity. They do everything in their power to get there in time.
Substitute a passion for trees for space aliens and you get a sense of what motivates the book’s characters, in several interlocking stories, as they awake to the majesty of nature and discover their mission to save and protect it from forces such as logging companies, complicit government, and humanity’s intrinsic selfishness and short-sightedness.
I’m not prepared to go as far as some of them – at the moment in the book they’ve traveled to the Pacific Northwest to take up residence in ancient redwoods to thwart their destruction – but I like to think I’m part of a process of planetary consciousness-raising, made all the more urgent by the incontrovertible evidence that global warming is changing the Earth – what was I thinking when I invested in a new pair of cross-country skies this winter, sitting unused in my garage? -- and the window for restoring the Earth and insuring our survival on its surface grows smaller by the day.
This is a good thing. Not the floods and droughts and Califormia and Australian wildfires. But the dawning recognition that we’re not independent actors who control nature but merely bit players who may, in our hubris, be destroying the only home we have.
I got an email from a listener expressing regret than a recent commentary didn’t stick to the funny stuff. “I thought your column,” he wrote, “was an oasis from political banter. But sadly and obviously not.”
I can commiserate. I consider humor the most effective form of therapy we’ve devised. But it’s also a luxury, and a joke won’t stop a tree from being felled or a wildfire or a flash flood.
Fortunately, there’s something we can do about it. And we’re blessed in the Hudson Valley with a landscape not altogether different from the one Henry Hudson sailed up in 1609 on the Half Moon.
Nothing substitutes for an enlightened government in Washington, as enamored of our remaining wilderness as they are of mining and oil interests – there I go again. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless.
There’s no substitute for coordinated activism, obviously. But one person is stronger than none. And I like to think that my sadness over those downed trees near my home was more profound than it would have been even a few years ago.
Come spring I’ve vowed to plant a few more trees of my own. Bushes, too. Such as milkweed to help monarch butterflies, whose numbers have been dropping conservationists believe because of the loss of milkweed on their annual migration from Mexico north and back again.
There are also local organizations you can contact to assist in turning your home into a welcoming oasis for wildlife. I recently attended a woodland management workshop sponsored by the Columbia Land Conservancy, a non-profit that protects open spaces.
Among those who attended was Zack Boerman, who works for Audubon New York. Mr. Boerman will visit your property and show you how to create welcoming bird habitat since we’re losing birds, Zack said, at “an alarming rate.”
If you tend to believe in God, I’d say that reversing bird decline – trees, too – passes for God’s work these days.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
