Tree illness as metaphor

Thousands of The Hague’s oldest poplar trees were culled in 2020 by the municipal government, to protect pedestrians from the danger of falling branches. In my neighborhood, the first trees to be felled lived in a small, unnamed park lining a section of the Haagse Beek, a thin creek flowing from coastal dunes into city center. This was my Covid park, the place where my wife and I inhaled our fresh air during lockdown, where we played around photographing crocuses using the « nice » cameras, and where we spent countless hours observing herons and coots and moorhens — all of whom were indifferent to our artistic experiments and epidemiological worries.

The poplars, once their deconstruction started, did not disappear overnight. For days they lay in heaps of damp sawdust, their decaying branches beckoning armies of beetles, ants, and isopods who no doubt relished their good fortune. As a keepsake, my wife and I dragged a sizeable branch back to our second-story apartment and for the next three years it languished on our balcony — a musty, arboreal relic. The park, meanwhile, shorn of its grandest trees, looked bald and insipid, like it had weathered a course of chemotherapy.

We were not alone in our urge to commemorate local nature. Sometime during those chilly, unsettling weeks straddling March and April 2020, I stumbled across a homemade monument in a back corner of another local park, not far from a clearing where Nazi soldiers had once launched V-2 rockets. It was fashioned from a moldering tree stump that had been cut at a sharp angle at about hip height. Someone had taken a fat marker, the kind used for graffiti tags, and written on its surface, in large, fluorescent, cursive letters: N-A-T-U-R-E! Exclamation point! With a wreath of exuberant curlicues, glowing like a neon sign against dark mossy undergrowth. Thank you for this, it seemed to say. For this I am grateful. But also: What if something were to take this away from me?

Gratitude and anxiety were common companions. On the return leg of a long-awaited cycling holiday to Germany, I grew obsessed with how dry the landscape had become. Hillsides of brittle conifers turned ashy in the sun. Pastures bleached to straw. And the Rhine dribbled where it should have flowed. When my wife and I returned to The Hague, we found that the city trees were as dry as their country cousins, as though a house sitter had forgotten to water them in our absence. The palmate leaves of the chestnut trees, browned at the edges, dropped to the ground like it was November instead of August. Was it the heat? The drought? An infestation? The poplars’ expiration had been orderly, at least. And they had grown old. The chestnuts, by contrast, seemed destined to expire before their time, their darkening leaves an omen of general devastation to come.

One part of eco-anxiety is the disorienting realization that the tools we use to make sense of the world — calendars, maps, narratives, numbers — no longer make any sense themselves. And how could they? Unprecedented times, we’re told. Or: deep, deep precedent. The last time the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was as high as our current 425 parts per million was sometime during the Pliocene Epoch, roughly three million years ago. But there is a loneliness to comparisons on such a vast scale. How can they be anything other than an abstraction? How can they help us think about how to live? If climate change is a « hyperobject » — to use the philosopher Timothy Morton’s term for entities so vast, spatially and temporally, that they defy human understanding — perhaps it is natural to seek an antidote in the local, the finite, and the commonplace. And what could be more local, finite, and commonplace than an ordinary street tree?