A Tree at the End of History
 
 

I must admit that when I heard about the fatal cutting of the redwood tree, which Julia Hill occupied for two years and bought with money she raised, I was a little sad.  Not that I get all teary-eyed every time a tree is felled, and not that I'm an adherent to the tree-speaking spirituality which she suggests in some respects motivated her here.  But as anyone who's ever visited the coastal northwest will immediately attest, an ancient redwood is certainly something to admire, something which is moving in its own right.  And Hill, who was obviously thus inspired about one tree in particular, made some rather large sacrifices for a kid her age, and bought the damn thing outright - only to have it instantly wrested away.  So you'll excuse me if I don't feel like dancing in the streets over this one.

But I've heard the swell of whispering and gnashing of teeth rising from the conservatives.  She did it to herself.  She marked the tree.  There are deeper issues involved here, and she just waltzed in and took what she wanted, like none of that mattered.  And to this the timber industry workers and families add: like none of us mattered.  And I guess I'd have to admit that she did mark the tree, if by this one means she was the intended victim for the offense.  And lord knows, there are deeper issues involved, much deeper issues.

In the last decade alone I've heard mainstream media reports about car bombs, spikedriving, mass arrests, violent protests with looting, what can only be described as torture applied to protesters by the local police, and last year, if not outright murder, at least violent recklessness by a tree crew  which felled a tree on an environmentalist.  All of this in a 'take what you can get now and let the courts decide the penalty later' atmosphere, which is the only game either side knows how to play anymore.  The timber wars have been around for a while, and the extreme bitterness and rage has hardened into an inflexible and deadly serious fight.  Neither side has the capacity for good faith agreements anymore, since the believers know that the opposition is the enemy and the epitome of all that built-up hatred, even if the opposition is a rather frail-looking young suburban woman on a spiritual journey.

But in the milieu we lost sight of the ultimate goal of this fight.  Nobody wanted to preserve the earth for historical reasons; we needed to preserve the earth to live.  This is no joke.  Humans have already covered the globe, and our effect has thus covered the globe as well.  The historians make much of this strange sense of claustrophobia we developed when the globe was mapped and settled, but it makes perfect sense when you remember that humans have always settled, grown, polluted, overused, and moved on since the beginning of recorded history.  We know how it goes.  And on our clear days, we remember that population growth is exponential, not linear.  Some of us read the population numbers in the local newspaper, for instance, do the math in our heads, then try to forget the answer.

The reason is that the answer scares us a great deal.  It means that we are not talking about thousands of years, or hundreds of years, or future generations, or even the next generation.  We are talking about our generation.  Our lifetime.  I am not a doomsayer kind of guy, generally, but I must say that logic offers a dim picture here.  Given the rate of decay and the fact that we still don't know and aren't really trying to figure out what can be done to stop or reverse the process, I must predict that in the next decade, likely not much more than five years from now, it will become apparent that the holes in the ozone layer threaten mass extinction, and that our lives will change dramatically.  There have been many warnings, ultimately ignored by that greedy and narcissistic generation that some have dared to call 'the greatest generation'.  Our predecessors have, in no uncertain terms, laid waste to our birthright, and the birthright of our children, who will never know a healthy homeland.

And maybe that is what mitigates my arguments here.  Julia Hill is not a hero of the environmental movement, because the environmental movement is no movement at all.  It failed many years ago, leaving remnants of those who find whatever connections they can to what has yet to be destroyed, as it is destroyed.  This is not politics.  There is no leader.  Those beer-guzzling redneck lumberjacks who cut her tree are not the enemy, since they will die of cancer, radiation exposure and environmental catastrophe like the rest of us.  They simply demonstrated to Hill that her god is dead, which is a lesson many of us already knew.

We have arrived at the end of history.  Our demise was foretold in the 50's, when the answer to the overpopulation/overpollution problem became space colonization rather than earth's preservation, and our fate was sealed when the next generation, dubbed as the 'me' generation, failed to change this decidedly unattractive and, really, unrealistic course.  Since 1970, the earth has degraded more than it had degraded in the entire course of our history to date.  Of course, this doesn't matter to 'the greatest generation', which find their way out with their own spiritualism - that is, that Armageddon is coming and that is just fine, since all the spiritualists will escape the earth before its ultimate destruction, to spend time with god in heaven.  As much as I hate this generation for burying its head in its idealism at the crucial turn of history, allowing greed and short-sighted narcissism to finish the deal, I will find no joy in watching them discover that their god, too, is dead.

Is anything reversible?  Experience tells us that it is not.  Is there anything left to fight for?  I'm not sure.  My common sense tells me no, but my sense of preservation compels me to try.  Considering that the environmental imperative of the '70's, backed by a large population of Americans, netted nothing more than a symbolic attempt at recycling, I find very little hope here.  Perhaps we ought not to give up the fight, but I have news for the environmental groups engaged in this struggle, as well as for those whose money bought the laws that are killing us:

The worst is yet to come.
 

December 17, 2000