Greetings from a tree being to a human being

It has been a strange week on the climate change front. Ten years is a long time to complete a book and sometimes I used to fret that it would never be completed. The irony is that if I had been able to finish Urban Meltdown more quickly, it would not be getting the attention it is receiving now. There’s never been so much public interest in climate change and Urban Meltdown is already receiving exceptional attention both in the local and national media – and it’s just arriving in the stores.

At the launch of the book last Friday evening, at Southminister, a church in my ward, over 80 people showed up for the presentation and we ran out of books for sale, which surprised and pleased everyone. But on the climate change ground, it continues to be a rough ride. Trees are the front line soldiers in the battle against climate change. They clean the air by producing oxygen, reducing the carbon dioxide content, recycle and clean storm water and stabilize the soil. Yet, my city has no by-law to control the cutting of trees on private property. An absentee landlord can buy a property for rent, roll it over in 12 months and chop down all the trees which have cooled and cleaned the neighbourhood air for generations.

Pamela White and I managed to save one 150 year old oak on Sunnyside through rather exceptional circumstances. (I was able to buy the fallers time using some money from my office budget to pay them not to cut the tree down. And Pamela who lives next door to the white oak agreed to purchase the side lot on which the oak tree stands.) It was exceptional in the sense that every day magnificent trees come down and there is little I or anyone else can do to save them. Last week, Hydro Ottawa has severed the street trees along Hopewell Avenue just a block away from Sunnyside, the tree where the white oak was saved to make it a little easier to repair the street hydro poles and wires. This shouldn’t have happened. Trimming a tree should not mean butchering the main stem of canopy. 

We need to recognize that trees are necessary to our lives because they are essential to the air we breathe. Air cannot be privatized. There’s no Ottawa air or Calgary air or Shanghai air, there’s just air. It’s a collective necessity and should enjoy collective rights as should the trees which are essential to its support.

Here is a poem that I wrote after the happy experience of saving the white oak and read on CBC’s  Sounds like Canada [listen to the radio interview] today with Pamela White.

Greetings from a Tree Being to a Human Being

Welcome person
to my domain of wild flowers at my feet,
the sun and sky around my head.

I am alone now
in the side yard of a small clapboard house,
but my branches are still great arms
sufficient to hold the sky;
my trunk a powerful bellow
to all those who pass by.

Welcome small powerful person,
you are an amazing creature
that cannot be denied
you have taken all my brothers and sisters,
all my aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents
who used to stretch in an ocean
of great tree voices as far as the eye could see.

Who would have thought when I was nothing
but a poke above the forest floor,
dreaming of the day to come
when I might tower above all
green cousin to the blue sky,
servant of the yellow sun,
brother of the brown earth
that one day I would be all those things,
but alone, the last of my kind;
the last to have a memory
of the time when we trees
ruled the earth
and the sunrise greeted only the voices
of the oak and the walnut,
hemlock and maple,
pine and spruce.
When the human beings
were no more important than
the wildflowers at my feet before
passing into winter memory
or come and gone like the wolf after the deer,
that you would one day cut us down
one after another, until it was we,
the oak and the walnut,
the hemlock and the maple,
the pine and the spruce
that had passed into memory.
but who’s memory?
that is what I don’t understand;
who will there be to remember us?

The memory of the white oak
is held by the white oaks.
The memory of the walnut
is held by the walnuts, and so it goes.
It is we trees that remember who we are;
who embrace the sun each day
and breathe life into the air.
It is we who create the forest roof and floor,
and scrub the air
from which life comes.

What is it you humans do?
Besides separate our hands from our arms,
our arms from our trunks,
our trunks from our roots,
our roots from the earth?

What do you humans do?
To make the earth, the earth?
To greet the morning sun?
To sigh away the dusk?
To perfume the sky?
To give life life?

What do you do?

(Composed on the occasion of a tree crew arriving to take down the oldest white oak in Old Ottawa South, by City Councillor Clive  Doucet who asked the tree what she wished to say in her defence, April 5, 2007.)