Thursday~Tears
By: John Allen
Tags: Trees, Forests, Capitalism, Ecology, Culture

“If normal people within this culture are raping and beating those they purport to love, what chance is there that they will not destroy the salmon, the forests, the oceans, the earth?” Derrick Jensen~Endgame: Volume 1

Forests, a Requiem

“I read the news today, oh boy~About a lucky man who made the grade~And though the news was rather sad~I just had to laugh~I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car…”~John Lennon, Paul McCartney~The Beatles~A Day in the Life

“I saw the photographs and cried.”~J Allen

Earth’s beautiful forests are being murdered. The Amazon rain forests, the SE Asian rain forests, the USA’s old growth forests, and Canada’s old growth forests. Many others too, I suppose. Today’s piece concerns Canada’s old growth forests because I saw the photograph in the Canadian publication, “The Narwhal”. And I cried. One old growth tree some 20 feet in diameter is about a 1,000 years old. One tree supports an unfathomable number of interrelated species, from the single bacteria, the fungi, the insects, the birds the deer, elk, moose, the foxes, wolves, bobcats, cougars, others I can’t think of. One tree felled is the death of countless other species. And it’s not just one tree that’s being murdered, it’s thousands, or millions. Forests are part Earth’s breathing apparatus. They take in CO2 and oxygen in the light and dark cycles of photosynthesis. They are what we need to survive.

Old growth forests are the backbone of forests the world over. In the US only 7% of the old growth forests remain. In Canada all I could find was an industry propaganda bit on how Canada is a world leader on ‘sustainable’ forestry. Clear cutting forests is the opposite of sustainable. It’s murder. The Narwhal essay explains the difficulty of saving our beautiful old growth forests. A link will be included at the end of today’s article. Look at the pictures if nothing else. The photos should licit an affective response, if not this culture has taken its toll on your being, your soul.

Our Culture

So we live in a culture of murder. Whether it’s murder by wars of Empire, state sponsored extrajudicial killing by cops or presidents, by fellow citizens, spouses or lovers, we are a culture of murderers. We arrive in our family of origin either by a planned choice, or accident, we are the result of what I term, the genetic lottery. But our little bouncing, bubbly selves are conditioned by our societies culture. And a vast majority of us are raised in a system where love is very conditional. Getting fed is paramount in our developing years. Food is often used as a form of control on the little tyke. So is love. We are told we are loved but repeatedly get hit if we stray from our family’s or society’s rules.

So how can anyone be raised where they are coerced either by hitting or by withholding love as a condition of strict compliance of familial rules, many of which are never spoken out loud. They are implicit. Our culture also has implicit rules. They begin in school. Capitalism is a given. There is no ‘alternative’ so we don’t ever see in school another way to live and do things. It’s an indoctrination to culture as it has to be. And this includes implicitly murder. National patriotism is the implicit murder as we’re taught the freedom comes at the price of blood. Fuck that. It’s implied for imperialist states to coerce citizen’s compliance, to not think about state sponsored murder. Like the millions murdered by the US govt as they bombed the living shit out of SE Asia during the ‘Nam. All we see are the flag draped boxes coming back with dead youth an heroin inside. Not the millions of dead indigenous people from the millions of bombs. Sometime I think about what if…no war.

A Bit on Myself

When I was very young my folks got a TV set. I wondered why the cowboys were killing the Indians. “Well that’s what they did”, was the general answer from adults. No reasons were given. The landlord neighbor told me to look out for Indians when we were moving to New Mexico when I was five. Asked why, he replied, “they’ll scalp you”. I was terrified the first time time I saw an Indian in Native American dress. I truly thought my young life was in danger. That’s what culture does. It molds you in ways you are unaware of.

Like my paternal side was prejudiced against blacks. I had to work hard to rid myself of that illness when I was in the later years of my schooling. Why? Because I liked Jimi Hendrix and my father didn’t understand how I could like his music. I bought “Band of Gypsys” in 10th grade. I hid it at the bottom of my small stack of LP records. I didn’t want him to throw a fit if he saw it. MC5 was bad enough and they were white rockers form Detroit. Drugs were the issue with them.

Culture itself is ill. Weitko is rampant in our sick culture. Greed. Hubris. Murder. Sick because our culture is sick and most folks don’t know it. Step outside of it for a moment and never look back. Escape the trappings of this afflicted culture and face some real truths. One can indeed get mentally healthier. After, of course, when the grieving is done as the last trappings of old culture gets scrubbed away. And like peeling an onion there are many layers and many tears. Most people never get to where we need to go to quit murdering Earth and ourselves. It does take work. Culture is always resisting change, fight back, get real.

Trees Again

How do we lowly in status, ecologically aware people stop this culture’s commodification of everything, in general, or trees specifically? Old pictures of loggers standing on stumps of huge old growth trees bring me to tears. It’s similar when I see families that are devastated by all the fires that are burning in the western US states.

Global warming has progressed enough to affect the climate change phenomena such that it’s now ravaging Earth. Forests are drying out because they aren’t getting the rainfall they need to stay healthy. I corresponded to someone the other day about the fires. I corrected some of his faulty info. He didn’t reply back. Healthy forests do burn sometimes but they do recover. The death from the fires today won’t recover because the climate will stay too dry for forests to recover.

This culture has implicit rules that includes believing industrial propaganda, which includes “forest management”, buy the latest iPhone, get a “new car”, get a boat to ski on lakes made by murdering the rivers with the dams. Murder is built into this culture. Trees are in the gun sights of industrialists wanting to make toilet paper, housing, even my precious books. We live in this culture and we have to take stock of our own consumption before critiquing the systematically macro-scale murdering of trees. Yes, I use toilet paper. And I like paper as opposed to eBooks. I have both and the vast majority are paper. I buy used one when I can.

Living in the desert climate of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I’m well aware that water is a resource that must be conserved. So I’m careful with my water use. The increasing ferocity of the forest fires are driven by the drying out of the western parts of the US because of climate disruption over the last few decades. Warming the atmosphere by pumping out vast quantities of CO2 and methane are now affecting the climate in many ways we don’t quite understand. Or, for an analogy, the climate is a big scary monster and we’re poking it with multiple sticks with our industrialization. It’s starting to roar back, big time.

I want to give my sincere apology to the trees of the world. My existence has consumed many trees. My book collection is my indulgence. So are my personal habits for sanitary purposes, these are built in in many ways so they may not be actual indulgences. If there were only 2.5 billion people in the world, approximately what is was when I was born the trees wouldn’t be in such trouble. Many huge trees in America were already gone by that time in mid 20th century.(1954) Now that there’s almost 8 billion people and trees are being stressed to the point of implosion. Not to count the millions of other lifeforms lost when forests are felled or dry out and burn because our industrial activity has run amok.

Population increase stresses everything. It’s like Pope Francis says, “stop breeding like rabbits”. My apologies to the rabbits when they are teaching their young bunnies to, “stop breeding like humans”, in rabbiteze. In three generations, educated world awareness of population reduction could possibly save the world for human existence. I doubt it. Because in a culture of murder we need to replace humans in ever expanding numbers. Capitalism calls for it. Stop! Think of Earth as our home and we don’t want to lose it. It’s like when a home is consumed by fire. We can rebuild a home and still have our good memories of living there. A very sad situation indeed. But if you and your family and family pets or livestock survive, you can thank your lucky stars and start over. If we burn Earth to the ground, if we murder our forests, we can’t rebuild because we’ll all be dead too.

So my apologies to the trees stands. I don’t want to be buried in a wooden box. My remains should go back to the trees that enriched my life. An eternal recurring of the cycle of carbon, of life itself. I will still read paper books. I will still use paper towels, tissues, and toilet paper. I’ll recycle when can. I’ll buy used books when I can. We’d all be better off if collectively we think about what we use and leave behind. Trees are the foundation of terrestrial life. Let’s give them every break we can. Stay safe. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy. \/: link below