To the thousands of trees — the ashes, pines, maples, firs, sycamores, cottonwoods, elms, aspens, et al. — killed and deformed in the recent “inland hurricane”:
Thank you, for your years and decades of selfless benevolence, for your shade and relief, purification of air, enrichment of soil, provision of oxygen and sequestration of carbon; for refuge and habitat for the birds, bats, insects and other lives that lived from, on and with you; for bestowing beauty in blossoms, foliage and form, quietly nourishing us physically and emotionally alike, even as we too often callously ignored you, sprayed poisons at your feet, blasted your confused leaves with electric lights throughout the nights, disfigured you to accommodate the unyielding march of the grid, and exhausted fumes onto you from our mad multitude of machines.
The storm, and your ultimate destruction — to say nothing of the unimaginable incineration of whole forests across the West — has its final cause in the climate-scrambling consequences of this manic technological growth economy, against which you crucially mitigated. In your absence, urban heat will increase, provoking more air conditioners, more energy consumption, more emissions. Instead of your abatement of pollution, hundreds (perhaps more) of exhaust-spewing chainsaws and chipper-shredders are roaring away to dismember and dispose of your wrecked corpses — a double insult, contributing to further climate breakdown in turn, dooming your future replacements to similar fates or worse.
We are poorer without you, though we cherished and revered you too little while you lived. Can we learn, finally, to create a tree-honoring society, economy and ethic? Our lives, among others, depend on it.
Jon Jensen
Salt Lake City