Happy Arbor Day: Please Quit Cutting Down Fucking Trees

This red-tail hawk lives in my backyard in this tree. I’ll never cut it down.

Last fall, a neighbor in back of my house cut down a 100 ft tall tree in their yard.  This took a full week, a 10-person crew with chainsaws, bucket trucks, and two flatbed trucks used to haul away the trunk.  It was a big job.  I don’t know the reason that my neighbor decided to cut the tree, but I do know that they have been systematically removing large trees from their property for the past few years so it’s hard to think that they are all dying and in need of removal.

By now we’ve all heard about deforestation but did you know that 12-15 hectares of forest are lost each year, the equivalent of 36 football fields per minute?  Forests cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.  The effects of deforestation are commonly documented: It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for the animals, it drives climate change, just to name a few.

Many people hear about deforestation and immediately think of the Amazon rainforests, with good reason.

• The Amazon Rainforest covers over a billion acres, encompassing areas in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and the Eastern Andean region of Ecuador and Peru. If Amazonia were a country, it would be the ninth largest in the world.
• The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the “Lungs of our Planet” because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.
• Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year.

When I think of deforestation, I think of my neighbors.  I remember back to when I first bought my house.  The backyard was lush with trees so dense you never saw the back neighbors.  The canopy of trees provided my yard with delicious shade for those hot summer days and homes for more animal species than I can name on two hands.  I remember the feeling I had the first time in the backyard looking up into the trees as I stood directly underneath them, it was glorious.  I watched squirrels run from tree to tree, woodpeckers hopping along the bark picking out ants, with nuthatches following directly behind them.  I saw red-tail hawks sitting majestically in the trees, comfortable in their position of power.  I saw life happening and it was beautiful.

These days there are only a few trees left.  The neighbors’ back porches are now completely visible and the privacy I once enjoyed is gone.  The shade garden I planted to encourage more bird visitors now burns in the afternoon sun, slowly dying without the protection the leaves provided.  Dust from neighbors’ overly used lawn mowers and weed trimmers now floats into my backyard.  Noise, car fumes, and scents from heavily perfumed commercial laundry soap now permeate the yard.  And the protection that the trees once provided me is nothing compared to the protection it gave to the animals who lived among them.  That is gone as well.

With each tree removal comes a disturbance in this small backyard ecosystem.  The squirrels who use the same trails to run from tree to tree are now vulnerable to the ever watchful eyes and talons of the hawks.  The birds who once nested in the trees must now move to a new unfamiliar tree making them too, vulnerable to attacks.  And that’s if they find a tree suitable in the same area.  Some don’t.  Some can’t.  Spotted owls for instance, need old-growth forests to survive.  Not to mention what losing trees has done to the animals who feasted on the insects in, on, and under the them.  And although I can’t really tell, I know that there’s less oxygen out there too.  It breaks my heart.

Today is Arbor Day, a holiday devoted to encouraging people to plant and care for trees.  Arbor Day originated in Nebraska on April 10, 1872, but many countries now observe a similar holiday.  To me, Arbor Day is a lot like Earth Day– a holiday to celebrate something we should be doing anyway.

Every day, every single one, should be Earth Day.  Every day, every single one, we should be protecting the trees in our neighborhoods, our forests, and on our planet.  We need them, the planet needs them, and the animals who depend on them for their very existence, need them.  Happy Arbor Day, please plant a fucking tree.