Everyone wants to save the Earth, but no one wants to help Mom do the dishes. – P.J. O’Rourke
Not all who wander are lost. – J. R. R. Tolkien
The reasons for the Trudeau government’s poor political standing are many. You don’t usually fall behind your chief opponent by 20 points for a single reason. But a key reason is that the prime minister and his team promise big but underdeliver. A towering symbol of this is their promise to plant two billion trees by 2031 to reduce GHGs. The program is off to a bad start.
By itself, not a big deal. Trees aren’t usually a ballot issue, but the tree program represents a pattern that is hard to ignore.
Last year in an audit, Canada’s environment commissioner, called out the tree planting program for failing to get timely agreements with the provinces, failing to get commitments through to 2031, not giving nurseries the certainty and time they need to start growing 350 million trees a year, and generally poor planning. The program didn’t even have annual tree planting targets. Where’s a deliverologist when you need one?
The report also noted, and this is infuriating, that in 78 sites where 10,000 or more trees were planted, they planted all the same species of tree, a monoculture. The commissioner noted in the bloodless language of the public service, that monocultures “do not support biodiversity and other benefits related to environmental and human well-being.” No kidding. Enhancing biodiversity is one of the key goals of the entire program. How could they get this so wrong?
There is more and it’s depressing reading.
The commissioner estimated at the time that the program was on track to only reach 3.8 percent of the two billion tree target, pathetic even by Ottawa standards.
The grand tree plan is clearly failing as originally conceived, partly because it wasn’t conceived with the public doing anything more than praising the government. It needs a much bigger role for the people of Canada, millions of whom already have a personal connection to the trees in their local park and, especially, on their property.
A tree is the giant in the yard, a wonder-inducer for many of us, an imagination-sparker for children. and a stand-alone natural community stretching from root to sky. A native tree is humanity’s provisioner, mood setter, and shadow caster. For millennia it was our gallows. Some trees in some cultures are home to the gods. On windy nights a tree can be the towering, swaying skeleton of myth and nightmares, with roots penetrating to the underworld. Trees are frequently cast as the setting or the subject of literature, poetry, music, art, and movies. Some trees are celebrated as mute witnesses to the history that unfolded beneath their spreading branches years before.
When we plant and nurture a tree, we also mix our life into it. We climb it and play in it. We picnic beneath it. We might propose there. It is where we were married. It is where we ponder the miracle of life. If we are fortunate, it’s where we will be buried.
A two-year-old Grand Fir sapling stands about 20 centimetres tall among Douglas-Fir and Western Redcedar trees at Francis/King Regional Park in Saanich, B.C., May 26, 2016. Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press.
Planting a tree is a bet on the future. Planting a native tree can set in motion a chain of life extending thousands of years as tree begets more trees that shelter and shade our great, great-great-grandchildren, provide a home to generations of plants and animals, clean the air and water, and store carbon in trunk, branch, root, soil. Planting trees always bears fruit. All trees are the tree of life. They produce the very air that makes life possible. We owe the plant world our lives. We can repay our leafy friends by planting more of them. Don’t fret, it will be a labour of love.
Working the soil with our hands is the sacrament that connects us to our own primeval roots. We share DNA with our amiable green cousins, so being among trees and in nature is a family reunion and a homecoming. I doubt we are ever more at home, more content, and more at peace than when we are in brown earth and green nature, puttering in the garden, walking a field, or scouting the woods. We wander without ever being lost.
Those who designed the tree program probably didn’t think about any of this, meaning it was always going to fall short of what it could be. It could still be rescued from the sterile Ottawa technocracy, passed completely to the provinces, and then to communities to empower local organizations, families, and those rebels who plant trees just because they love trees, those who know that a tree is more than just a store of carbon and a cog in an ecosystem. It can and should be a personal connection to nature and the agreeable gateway to caring and learning about the natural world and what threatens it, from reckless land use and habitat loss to invasive species, pollution, and climate change.
Performative outrage won’t save the Earth, but we can all make a real difference to the world, our families, and our own lives by planting a native tree or two in the yard. It will give us something to look up to that is far more impressive and useful than preening celebrities and grasping politicians.
