Trees

“It’s just a tree,” some people are saying, and yes it is, this 300 year old sycamore senselessly felled in the Scottish borders. This is true. It is only 300 years old, and whoever cut it down did it simply because they are cabbage.

In the Northern Americas you can’t call a tree “old growth” until it’s over 150 years old. Loggers are taking down trees in Canada close to the age of the gap tree all the time, as they push it up to 250. Recently there were a few at 500 or more gone. Then look in the rainforests. God alone knows the age of some trees logged to make space for meat and palm oil, or burnt in arson designed to clear the land there for the same purposes. It is said that some trees lost recently in Brazil were over 5000, but … hard to get to and not as photogenic. They were cut down because societally we blind ourselves to the consequences of our short termism.

Idiots are mimics, so we are likely to see a few more well loved trees going down in the next few weeks, especially if the papers give some twit a platform out of the sycamore. Comfortingly idiots are also idiots so we are likely to see them lose an arm or drop the tree on themselves.

Why should we care about these trees more than the idiots who cut them? They bring more joy to more people. They are more pleasant to look at. They help make things nicer for humans. I don’t want to know the reason, or to pillory the idiot. Let’s use it to try to deepen the conversation.

This is not mine. It is referring to a much older protest rhyme, older than writing but written down and thus preserved in the 17th Century as

“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.”

Forever it has been thus. I was upset about that tree but I guarantee the pitchforks will be handed out by the Daily Mail. They’ll be the ones to run with a bad picture of someone and incitements to cut him down.

If we were upset by this tree, particularly those like me who have never seen it and never knew of it existing until it was felled, perhaps our focus needs to be on why we were so upset and what habits we are clinging on to that make the same thing happen to millions of older less photogenic trees. The higher up the chain we are the more we can do. Check your stuff for Palm Oil. Watch that meat…

I ate roast lamb for lunch. It was great and I didn’t feel guilty. These shifts are hard and societal and slow to effect. My lamb was well sourced – The Sussex Ox is very good for that – but it was still meat. Beef is the biggest bastard. But we all have to change things completely and we need to do it much faster than we have. It has started to catch up to Rishi now, but big shifts are hard to manage and can be enough to make people angry enough to do fucking dumb things with chainsaws.

After lunch I went to see my favourite tree in the area. It’s a 1600 year old yew that people have propped up with wooden supports. It has a face. It is covered in berries – don’t eat the stone or you’ll die. It is gorgeous and there is comforting evidence of generations of people trying to stop it collapsing under its own weight. Sometimes we can be such dicks. Sometimes we can be heroes. I guess it is about trying to weight it away from the negative as best we can.