Is there a paid position to weep for the world?
The destruction of the Sycamore Gap tree and our planet.
Yesterday I was really suffering from a devastating loss of a beautiful, healthy hedgerow in the park near where I am staying. It was on the edge of the park from the street, there were no sidewalks between it and the curb. It was a thriving mix of shrubs and small trees supporting the larger canopy of trees. It was full of berries and flowers and birds and butterflies and all the other creatures that it protects and sustains that we don’t know or see. It housed mice and hares and kept playing children and wayward balls from the traffic. And it is gone in some sort of civic grooming death ritual.
Watching the chainsaws systematically obliterate years of habitat anchoring in minutes I was so upset and reminded of the senseless felling on the estate I lived on in Scotland so that pheasants could be shot more easily. I can’t understand why these deliberate, selfish acts of destruction are normal and there is no where for my rage and grief to go.
It made me dream up a character for our story. One whose job it is to hold the grief of the more than human things amidst the human tribe. A translator and voice for the rest of the environment amongst the people. I felt some comfort in the idea that I could bring this to life.
And then I woke up this morning to the news that the famous Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland was felled overnight, on purpose, by a 16 year old boy with a chainsaw. This famous sycamore tree along Hadrian’s Wall blessed walkers and photographers alike for almost 200 years. Gone. The grief for this tree will be global as news spreads today. We will struggle with the senselessness of it.
I dearly hope this child gets the support they obviously need. I don’t know why this was their answer to life yesterday. But I know that collectively that destruction is a common answer and we are doing this EVERYWHERE. There are not just a few special trees. In Canada this year we have lost at least 27 million acres of trees in the wildfire season. Ten million acres in excess of any previous record. Twenty-seven million acres of cleaned air for this planet. Decades to grow their replacement if that’s even possible. We can’t be cutting down trees for any reason besides literal safety right now. We definitely can’t do it for aesthetics.
I’ve been thinking about this all morning and I just sat in the park next to the piles of dead trees and cried at our stupidity. Is there a paid position to weep for the world?
We need to care more about Nature and how it works to protect our world. I'm with you, what harm would it have done to remain there?