When my annual missive from John McLoughlin arrived a day or two ago, I was reminded immediately of Paint Your Wagon. John is president of the Tree Council of Ireland, and every year he writes to me around this time to tell me about National Tree Week, an annual celebration intended to promote the planting of trees and to highlight their valuable contribution to our national well-being.
National Tree Week 2000 starts tomorrow. Its theme, "Trees - the spirit of a new age", is beautifully illustrated in a poster by Fergus Gannon of DIT showing a benign, ghostly figure peering from what appears to be an oak, inviting, it seems, some kind of spiritual communication with the living plant - hence Lerner and Loewe and the musical Paint Your Wagon. Remember the song in question?
I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me;
I talk to the stars, but they never hear me;
The breeze hasn't time, to stop and hear what I say;
I talk to them all - in vain.
Perhaps the trees are too busy to listen. Each one is a little chemical factory, which through the process of photosynthesis helps to maintain the chemical equilibrium of our planet's atmosphere. Under the influence of sunlight, trees take up carbon dioxide from the air and combine it with water to form the living tissue that they need for growth. But there is a double benefit to this activity: as a byproduct of photosynthesis, oxygen is released into the atmosphere, so that the world's trees also constitute a massive oxygen factory which renews the air we breathe and makes it capable of sustaining animal and human life.
As we know, there is concern nowadays about the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The major factor is the annual 5,000 million tonnes of CO 2 being pumped into the atmosphere by the industrialised nations of the world, but the problem is exacerbated by the rate at which trees, which might otherwise help to redress the imbalance, are being cut down.
The theme of Tree Week 2000, according to the organisers, celebrates the spiritual relationship that mankind has enjoyed with trees throughout the ages, although they do not say precisely how this relationship is consummated. In any event, during National Tree Week over 15,000 trees will be distributed to schools and community groups free of charge by every local authority in the country, and numerous other events are planned. And those who wish to do so, of course, are at liberty to commune in private with their favourite sycamore.