Gas prices aren’t the only thing falling in my neighborhood: we’ve lost more trees and more big branches off trees in the past week or two than in the four and a half years I’ve lived here. I’m talking big, old grandfather trees, the kind that -- even if the city comes and plants new ones, which it probably will -- cannot really be replaced.
Some of it is the result of stupid pruning:
So many beautiful old trees have been cut into a bizarre Y shape to accommodate above-ground wires (phone, electricity, cable) that invariably weakens the tree -- lots of arboreal Y arms fell this summer, and some trees that lost their Y arms eventually die altogether, and end up like this:
(I was just about standing on this fresh stump when I took the pic at the top, and there was another stump just beyond this one.)
Some of it is just huge old trees falling for no apparent reason:
What happens? The weather is changing -- it’s more rainy and snowy than it used to be; it’s hotter than it used to be; and then last week we had the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto blow through. The wind wasn’t hurricane speed -- it wasn’t even tropical storm speed. It was just powerful gusts over an extended period, a day or more. But the trees, in their weakened conditions, topple much more easily.
Piles of cleaned-up foliage litter the streets, waiting for garbage day:
All of these pix were taken within a two-block radius of my house, and these images do not represent, not by a long shot, all the recent tree loss just in that area alone.
It’s been making me think of an eerie passage in the apocalyptic SF novel Nature’s End, which I reread almost exactly a year ago, in the wake of Katrina, and have been rehaunted by ever since:
Rockfeller University is a strip oasis on Manhattan’s far east side. Its tall iron fence is festooned with banners proclaiming the wares of sidewalk merchants, but beyond the gate all is quiet. There is one old tree still living, its limbs wired with a net of electrodes, whether to maintain it or monitor its decline I could not be sure. There is grass here, though. The sight of green was nice.
The image of the last tree in New York City covered in electrodes makes me want to cry.
But hey, we’re killing the oceans and what we’ve done to the rivers is causing weird and scary mutations and anyway ginormous swarms of deadly insects are gonna get us. So what’s the point of mourning a few stupid trees?
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
--Ogden Nash, “Song of the Open Road,” 1933
(Technorati tags: trees, tree loss, climate change)
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