On Trees and Democracy: An Arborist's Open Letter to Herschel Walker
The $1.5 billion in the IRA for urban forestry will improve the lives of many, many people. It will also be a step toward environmental justice.
Dear deniers of the importance of trees (I’m looking at you, Herschel Walker),
As an arborist with 37 years’ experience taking care of trees, I take issue with one of your attacks on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Your casual claim that "we have too many trees'' could not be further from the truth. As someone who has pruned, planted, and doctored trees in the urban forest for over three decades, I want to testify that trees are not the enemy; in fact, they are our allies. Especially in poor neighborhoods, we don’t have nearly enough of them.
We need politicians who understand that one way we can address climate change and fight environmental racism is to plant and nurture trees.
Enemies do exist, but who are they really? In the 1930s and 40s, America’s enemies included the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the global spread of supremacist fascism. Back then, trees helped us defeat those evil monsters. America is fighting similarly evil enemies now—entrenched poverty, the Climate Catastrophe, and yet another round of supremacist fascism. Some monsters change shape, reappear, and must be defeated by every generation. To see how trees helped us win those battles in the past—even the battle against fascism, I lost family in that war—let’s look at one inspiring chapter of America’s arboreal history.
But first, a little history lesson about history. There’s lots of blah blah blah these days about not wanting to acknowledge embarrassing parts of our all-too-human past, as if anything but a Disneyesque fairy-princess-history is too scary for some folks. The denial of uncomfortable history is dishonest but understandable (who really likes looking at past mistakes?), but there is also a willful ignorance about amazingly positive parts of our history, about the times in which people really did come together against great odds, about stories in which Americans overcame differences and worked for the common good. This denial of the angels in our history is more than a little strange. We need to get over denying our successes, especially now that climate change is supercharging ever bigger killer wildfires, killer hurricanes, and killer heat waves. You may remember that old saw, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Time for an update: those who don’t know history are unable to repeat its successes. We need to remember with great pride when Americans worked together to heal a badly wounded land, to lift millions out of poverty, and to soundly defeat the genocidal ideology of supremacism.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/09/07/trees-and-democracy-arborists-open-letter-herschel-walker
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