Progress
How does a tree cope when its plans fall apart?
It was the end of history, or so our parents believed, and who were us kids to argue? I grew up in the 90s and early 00s, and in my corner of prosperous liberal America, all the adults were in agreement. The big problems had been sorted and we had plans for the sticky remainders. The future is our oyster, the adults said, once all the retrograde Republicans die out. Then we can be free.
They taught us about Roe v Wade in middle school. I remember thinking it was fishy, and with the benefit of time I can now articulate why, that something as apparently essential and divisive as the right to an abortion had to be codified through a lawsuit, and the logic of the court’s decision relied on an implied right to privacy that was never stated outright, in a constitutional amendment originally written in the context of ensuring rights for formerly enslaved people.
But the adults didn’t seem worried. It’s all part of the roadmap! Of course people have a right to privacy and should be free to have abortions, and if Interpretive Constitution Bingo is the game by which those rights can be protected, then so be it. After Strom Thurmond kicks it we’ll sweep congress and enshrine Roe into law. I adjusted to the smell of fish.
By the time I reached high school, emerging science seemed clear that a human fetus is no more conscious than a pickled heart connected to a car battery. Which should have deflated the opposition overnight, right? In the past, we couldn’t agree on when a cluster of cells coalesces into a human mind that can feel and suffer. Now we have a nascent sense of when that is, and it’s well past the time when anyone would get an abortion for any reason other than a medical emergency. If the forced-birth perverts just looked at the data, they couldn’t defend themselves in good faith, could they? The adults told us that once we voted Bush out of office we could put all this culture war nonsense to bed and resume our march of progress. Next year in Jerusalem.
Even with two months of warning and an avalanche of darkness in between, the news last week knocked the wind out of me. “I have so much rage and so little energy,” I texted a friend. Everyone I talk to is coping with the same gloom. This was never part of the plan. The show Jeopardy! outlived Roe.
Trees have spent 200 million years learning to react to changes in their environment. That’s a thousand times longer than humans have, so they may have useful advice. How does a tree cope? I have no idea, though I’d like to learn.
What I can say is that trees are excellent problem solvers. When a branch breaks, trees produce a fast-growing woody tissue that quarantines the wound. If a concrete sidewalk obstructs a tree’s roots, the tree will plow through and around it, even if it takes years. Trees know how to respond in the moment without losing track of the long term. That said they also don’t know about Fox News or Ben Shapiro, so bully for them.
I’m enjoying my trees’ summer growth spurts. My dawn redwood pictured above is widening its fluffy canopy, and the ponderosa pine to its right is perking up as well. This new location sees far more sunlight than I ever get on my fire escape.
Remember this boxwood from a few weeks ago? A little patchy. Here’s what it looks like now.
It’s filling in nicely, and I’ll let it grow wild for the rest of the year. When the new growth stiffens enough to wire, I’ll use it to form the tree’s secondary branch structure.
I got a new tree on eBay: a ficus religiosa. Here’s a photo from the eBay listing, which is true to how the tree looked when it arrived in the beginning of June.
I put it under my lights on June 4th. Here’s how it looks this week.
Just look at those leaves! Sacred figs are famous for them. A heart crossed with a raindrop.
I wrapped the trunk in wire to emphasize the tree’s natural movement. In doing so I killed two growth tips that will be hard to replace, but the tree has soldiered on. I just pinched off the two prominent tips on the uppermost branches to see how the tree responds. I’ll use that information to decide how hard I can push this particular tree.
I’m also considering a chop or two.
I could chop right where the copper wire loops back on itself, and try rooting the top of the tree as a tiny cutting.
That would make this branch the new leader. Good movement.
OR I could chop all the way back to this low branch for a smaller tree with one or two curvy cuttings.
If I make any of those decisions, they’re months away. First I need to learn more about my tree. Pay attention to how it reacts.
This week a friend told me one way he’s coping. “They make it sound like it’s 50% of the country at war with the other 50%, but there are a lot more of us, and we have power in that.”
My time with my trees has helped me for a similar reason. While us humans make a mess of things, all this other life trucks on. Homo sapiens is a blip in the history of trees, even if that blip comes at the very end.
With respect to Francis Fukuyama, he got it so wrong he’s eligible for an award for getting your life’s work colossally wrong. History content to catalogue the human experience into a series of color-coded eras that lead to a definite endpoint is a monkey’s attempt at feeding data into the determinism machine. Every little thing touches every little thing. Any path forward is cleared with collisions and prone to turn back on itself.
The trees know this. Maybe we’ll come around in 10 million years.
Reproductive reading
I’ve shared this before, but good material is worth sharing again. My friend Nicole has made a wonderful guide to abortion resources, reading, and organizations that need your support. I encourage you to join me in making monthly donations to Kentucky Health Justice Network, an abortion fund and trans health advocacy group serving 4.5 million people in Kentucky, and who have all of two abortion clinics between them. As of today at 1 am, abortion is still legal in Kentucky due to a judge’s temporary order blocking enforcement of the state’s trigger ban.
Tree reading
Bristlecone pines can live for thousands of years. Historic droughts have made favorable conditions for deadly bark beetles, and now the weather and the beetles are killing the trees in record numbers. [Los Angeles Times]
This week, the supreme court denied the EPA the power to set and enforce carbon emission mandates on corporations, further defanging an already meek regulatory agency. [NPR]
Thank you, just thank you. Reading this helped me cope as well. I loved how you related real-life events with trees. Excellent point of view.