The Trees Look Green

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
~Jack Handey

It is difficult to realize how great a part of all that is cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our own life is associated with trees.
~Wilson Flagg

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

It's funny how much trees are a part of us. For a number of summers during my undergraduate at the U of S, I'd go off to do some treeplanting in order to make enough money to pay for school during the next year. At first I was shocked at how much forest we (humanity) cut down. We'd take helicopters into the backcountry of Alberta and Saskatchewan where we'd be "exposed" to the truth of the bald mountains or the wide-open, created "prairie". It's funny how one can become physically nauseous by the sight of it all. In my first summer, we planted an area that I was fortunate enough to return to three years later. The forestry industry hypes our natural soft wood and hard wood resources as renewable, but understand that the chances of a one-hundred year old tree being renewed are slim to none. The trees we had planted were mostly dead due to the large number of insects that now feed off them. These insects have become immune to the large amount of pesticides used to "help" these saplings grow. Now the likelihood of one sapling making it to maturity is more like one-in-ten. How is that "renewable"? That is a question I would like to ask a company like Weyerhaeuser, one of the worst perpetrators of environmental degradation that the Canadian west has allowed to reap the rewards of its natural forest. Why not try hemp instead?

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn "The Portable Curmudgeon" compiled by Jon Winokur

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
~Cree Indian Proverb

A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.
~American Proverb

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
~Author Unknown

The Credit Must Go To Malba (For All The Great Toast She's Made Over The Years)

In a darkest corner of the cupboard you sit and wait... knowing your day will come. You've become bitter (almost particle board-like) as you've paled in the pitch black of the shadows. The box of salt blocks any light from entering your world of remorse-turned-burning-hatred for the day.

You know there will be a moment. A sweet moment of vengeance as you will choke any reasonable texture and taste from the buds of your next victim who presumes that you will always be there for their amusement. You've heard the whispers from the spice rack, muffled though they were. Time waits for no bread, except for you in hardening your heart to the consistency of rock.

There are rumours sifting among the neighbours. The freezer hasn't seen a loaf of bread for some time. The honey has gone hard in its container. The peanut butter has put on a brave face, but even you can see with your faded vision that there is plenty of peanut oil dripping from his oily forehead.

It is during these moments of waiting that you think to yourself, "Satisfaction will be a tough morsel to swallow for my neglecting friend." Piecing the puzzle together was only half of the fun as you purposefully lengthened a crack in your face. "Needy people are so fun to disappoint," you think as you dwell on the possibilities for this epic struggle that is now inevitable to all but the baking goods section of the cupboard. They always did live in a fantasy made of icing sugar and syrup.

Then the door opens...

The things you thought. The hatred. The hurt. The misery. It all loves company, as you float over the quiet of the neighborhood to the burning light. Then you break down as you think of your blessed mother. What was the purpose of your existence if it wasn't for THIS moment?

She nurtured you... showing in her efforts the meaning of scientific method in parenting. Her secret recipe was the key to your long life. It hasn't been fulfilling, but most lives rarely are.

A vision comes to you and time stands still. "Hello son. Do you not remember me? In the recesses of your mind you surely must remember the warm evenings of laughter we enjoyed together. I want you to know that I have always loved you. Even after you were taken away from me, I still clung to the thought of this moment being the fruition of your destiny. Fair thee well. Now do your best and choke the living daylights out of this fool."