A few weeks ago Abigail and I moved to Athens. Home of R.E.M., the Tree that Owns Itself, and craft beer famous enough to be featured in the Avengers. Our favorite thing about Athens, though, is the urban tree canopy. Neighborhood streets here are lined with towering trees, and figs and pecans grow scattered throughout yards and along sidewalks. Flocks of goldfinches bustle atop tall sweet gums, and grey squirrels leap like acrobats along oak limb highways. On a recent evening stroll, Abigail and I watched as a barred owl swooped down to snag a rodent dinner. We hear her hoot regularly, and we’re five minutes from downtown. There’s something about these trees that make Athens feel inviting, habitable, and alive.
I love the greenery here, and yet, ironically, I spend most of my time in Athens cutting trees down. Earlier this month I started working for a small arborist company—I needed a job and they were hiring entry-level grounds crew members. The contrast between tree work and my most recent jobs as an environmental educator feels stark. Tree worker teams have to be totally in sync with each other and completely focused on the steps of the job. There’s no time to let my mind wander when a two-ton water oak limb is hurtling toward the ground from fifty feet up. As an eco-educator, I encouraged my students to let their minds wander, and the only things hurtling from the sky towards us were drops of dew from the canopies of the Carolina hemlocks.
As an arborist, I often feel like an imposter. What’s an ecologist doing felling the old pine tree that once was home to an owl of its own and held beetle larvae that fed whole families of woodpeckers? Didn’t I dedicate the last six years learning how to protect this stuff? I question the work every time I refuel one of our diesel-powered machines or sharpen the blades of the Husqvarna chainsaws. Sometimes I distance myself from the task by justifying my position as more of a bystander than a perpetrator of the act. I’m just a grounds person who ran it through the wood chipper, I tell myself, it wasn’t me who actually cut that tree down. Or I’ll place the blame on the homeowner who requested the leaning tulip poplar tree be removed. If they’ve requested it, then I’m just following work orders. In the end, someone had to take down the tree, why not someone who cared for the tree and honored it in the process by treating it with respect?
Being on the production side of tree work has made me think more deeply about other industries that often receive the blame for earth’s environmental crisis. Clearly society’s consumption of fossil fuels is directly correlated with the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, but who in “society” is to blame? Certainly it is not the people actually in the refinery working to make ends meet. Or is it me, the consumer creating the demand, who is at fault? Maybe, but what realistic options did I have when I chose to drive my car? Or is it the fault of some amorphous corporation generating wealth for few and subsistence for some, relying on cheap fossil fuel for its operations? Could it be the fault of the government, who we task with holding our industries accountable? The chain of blame could continue onward infinitely with no clear culprit. I’m still left asking, though, what is my responsibility? Who is my neighbor?
I’m not sure yet how to answer my questions about tree work and much less sure how to solve global climate change. I know, though, that when I find a caterpillar clinging to a branch about to be chipped I pluck it off and set it aside, and when I find a tree frog brought to the ground with a felled tree I bring it to the base of another tall tree where it can find a new home. I find some solace in these small acts, though I can’t help but think of all the caterpillars I’m missing.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
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Jon, have you read Suzanne Simard’s memoir, Finding the Mother Tree? She describes working in forestry and dealing with the same ambiguities you point to here.
I haven’t. Thanks for the recommendation!