Try telling someone you don’t like trees. Better yet, try telling someone that not only do you not like trees, but you actually find the sight and smell of trees personally repugnant, that if you had your way we wouldn’t exactly be cutting down trees, but we wouldn’t be planting a trillion new ones across the planet either, and do they not know, by the way – here you may wish to adopt a thoughtful or scholarly pose – that for most of human history trees and forests were as much symbols of horror and misfortune as anything else, that the modern idea of the tree as a benign source of calm and wisdom is actually weird, and that maybe we should think about how, in an era of climate breakdown, the humble tree has become such an object of over-wrought feeling that when two men accused of illegally felling the famous “sycamore gap” tree in England arrived to court they had to wear balaclavas for fear of mob justice?
I’m now old enough to admit that, over the years, I’ve made a habit of taking on awkward or contrarian ideas – sometimes genuinely, though sometimes, too, in a misguided attempt to appear edgy or interesting. I’ve long claimed, for example, that physical exercise is a right-wing conspiracy and in fact that sporting pursuits in general exhibit a dubious interest in bodily perfection. I’ve argued, with conviction, that Paris is the ugliest city in Europe and that Italian cuisine, when you get down to it, is just flavourless carbohydrate with basil on top. I’ve variously taken against the GAA and the Irish language, as well as espoused more niche objections to sea swimming (bourgeois) and country walks (fascist).
Where anyone notices or cares at all, this kind of posturing is usually met with tolerance, or at worst indifference. Except for the thing with the trees. Because it turns out the one view I have that’s truly unpardonable, or at least unignorable, is that I really, really don’t like trees. It’s even become a kind of unwitting personal brand. “Ah yes,” people will say cautiously when I introduce myself at academic conferences, “the guy who hates trees”. Whenever there’s an art exhibition – there’s always an art exhibition – about the frail majesty of trees in the Anthropocene, I’m guaranteed a host of mocking invitations. Last year, when the same “sycamore gap” was mysteriously chopped down, having stood for two centuries in a picturesque hollow near Hadrian’s wall, several people contacted me to inquire if I’d seen the news and if I had an alibi for the night in question.
We’ve never been good at trees in my family. Once, when he would have about 16 or 17 and our parents were out, my older brother got very drunk on Dutch Gold and attempted to climb a tree in a walled-off park not far from our house – from which he quickly fell out again, more or less directly on to his face. He got up and wandered around the park in an alarmingly confused daze, as I – characteristically sober and uninvolved – tried to persuade him to come home and seek help. Eventually, I did get him back, and we called an ambulance, and then our parents and he was fine, obviously, at least in the immediate sense. But the tone of this memory, the sense of the tree as a source of likely mishap or tragedy, is one that runs through my childhood. At the back of our house in those days, right at the end of the garden, stood another tall tree – maybe an oak or lime, I have no idea – which, over the years, became an object of considerable anxiety for my parents. They worried, first, that the roots might damage the foundations of the house. And then, later, it occurred to them that a storm, arriving at just the right velocity and angle, could uproot the tree, sending it crashing into the roof of the house. As an act of mitigation, this tree was gradually pollarded, first through my father’s own, rather neurotic efforts, and eventually, when these proved insufficiently severe, by a professional arborist, who quickly pared this once-impressive specimen back to more appropriately suburban dimensions. My relationship to trees, beyond these family lessons in caution, has been mediated by a more immediate biological concern, ie by an allergy to tree pollen, which is the kind of thing that sounds minor or even comical if you don’t suffer from it, but isn’t. Since early childhood, I’ve understood the creeping efflorescence of spring, taken by so many to be symbolic of joy, rebirth, childhood innocence, and so on, as a harbinger of chemical attack, and have thus spent many hours in the solace of cinemas and shopping centres, safely away from the noxious atmosphere of early summer.
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[ When the extreme heat hits Ireland, we’ll be grateful to the treesOpens in new window ]
Beyond these personal and familial grievances, however, maybe it would be more accurate to say my real problem is how we think about trees. Or if I was feeling especially sociological, I’d say I’m suspicious about our cultural and political imagination of trees. Why is it that, having been regarded for centuries as an object of general cultural suspicion, on the one hand, and as an inert economic resource on the other, trees and forests have suddenly become repositories of all kinds of odd and weepy sentiments about what’s wrong with the world and how we can fix it? Indeed, it is striking how often trees are cited as the uncontroversial and usefully unideological solution to any number of political issues – from climate change to mental health; from street violence to unstable food systems; from wildlife habitats to children’s development; from economic development to, people don’t always talk about this one so loudly, increased property values.
The relationship between trees and property values is real and important. For example, one study in London some years ago estimated that each 1 per cent increase in green cover in an electoral ward added an average 0.5 per cent to house prices. This reminds us that trees are not simple, innocent plants, untouched by our systems of thought and representation, rather they play an important political and economic role in human affairs too. A leafy neighbourhood isn’t shorthand for wealth and status because of some mysterious cash-generating qualities of leaves, after all, but because trees (and leaves) are symbols of abundance, stability, and hierarchy.
The cultivation of urban trees, in particular, demands a luxurious relationship to time and space. As industrial cities became more and more crowded through the 19th and early 20th centuries century, much of the middle and upper classes – including whoever built my childhood home before my father got his hands on it – moved out to pseudo-pastoral sanctuaries on the suburban fringe.
This is fine if that’s what you’re after in life, but my problem with trees is that we act like they’re an uncomplicated good for everyone, whereas the reality is that trees, especially city trees, are often planted as social and moral barriers, as a way of organising and classifying space, even as a system for signifying who does and doesn’t belong. This can be an uncomfortable realisation. I’m lucky enough to work on a beautiful city-centre university campus, but the fact that our institutional home in Cork City is also an arboretum of 2,500 trees tells us something about how the founders of the university understood its relationship to the city, and the atmosphere of moral improvement it intended to cultivate in its relationship to it.
Trees and cities are, as anthropologists like to say, binary oppositions of one another. The industrial cities and their inhabitants have long been a source of elite anxiety. When you crowd people close together, you create the conditions to spread everything from venereal disease to subversive ideas. Since the 19th century, separating people from the soil, distancing them from the imagined physical and moral discipline of agricultural labour, has been understood as a source of collective breakdown – even, at its worse edges, as a form of racial degeneration.
This is how we should understand the tree, as a vehicle for returning nature to the city and helping to discipline its unruly inhabitants. The reason we have trees in cities, in the end, isn’t because of climate breakdown or the effect they have on psychological wellbeing. The reason we have trees in cities is because they act as a kind of time machine – pulling us, however briefly, back to an imagined past of hard work, moral certainty and unquestioning obedience to hierarchy.
So maybe my family’s awkward relationship with trees and natural things isn’t so bad after all. It’s a dream-like sentiment – but I like to imagine that in my brother’s drunk falling, in my father’s dogged and cautious lopping, even in my seasonal wheezing and scratching, something faintly modern is happening.
That our suburban mishaps are not mere incompetence, but that they recognise nature as a source of symbolic danger; that this history is legible now as an attempt, however unconscious, to leave the trees behind and tip face-first out of the branches of tradition into a bright, open, air-conditioned future.
Des Fitzgerald is professor of medical humanities and social sciences at UCC. The City of Today is a Dying Thing is published by Faber & Faber
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