Musings: The Hard Lives of Trees
By Zahra Asghari
On my way to catch the bus to work, I walked past two construction workers putting up a fence around a sidewalk tree. If you live in Vancouver, this is a familiar sight. These city trees are precious and must be protected at all costs from nearby construction. They are loved, adored, worshipped by nearby residents. They have fan clubs and die-hard protectors - at least until the nearby project is completed and their 15 minutes of fame are up. But in those precious minutes, we build fences around them to make sure no harm is done to them.
And how do we build that fence? With the carcasses of another tree.
These poor trees that have been cut down and turned into dimensional lumber often come from tree farms, the country, if you will. They are deemed unimportant enough or grown specifically to be cut down for the protection of a city tree.
What makes the life of a city tree so valuable? Is it their scarcity or their juxtaposition to the built environment that makes them more precious? Maybe we feel too removed from the country trees to expend daily energy on their conservation, but the city trees — well, they are right there, and we can at least try to save them, whatever the cost.
We deploy a similar logic in our promotion of mass timber, perhaps forgetting that alive trees are much better at sequestering carbon than dead ones (I highly recommend Laila Seewang's article if you want to get into it and further your despair at the climate crisis).
I’m not saying city trees must fend for themselves—they deserve a good life as much as any other tree. I just find this particular method a little cannibalistic for my liking.
