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buy generic Ivermectin A friend recently lent me a book and I repaid him by reading it. The book, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant, is about an unusual Sitka spruce, several hundred years old, which had golden needles in place of the usual green ones. Golden foliage is an odd but regularly occurring plant mutation, highly prized by horticulturalists and hence to be found in every nursery and garden center in the United States in at least a few dozen plants. But I have neither seen nor even heard of a tree thus mutated flourishing in the wild; and John Vaillant, who wrote the book, does not mention any other naturally occurring golden trees, and it is possible that this was the only one on earth that was to be found thriving, and over a hundred feet tall, in the wild.

buy Lyrical dance costumes online I wish we would hear more in our culture about great trees, and would make them places of pilgrimage and adoration; I have made special trips to see the Angel Oak and the Lone Oak and the sequoias, but I’m sure there are many more great trees I have never heard of. It is said that man is made in the image of God, but this does not rule out that trees (and mountains and stars and lakes and nature in general) are made in God’s image as well. Those who can feel reverence – not a majority, for sure, but the quality is not entirely absent in humans – will surely feel it for great trees. And not surprisingly, the golden spruce was regarded as sacred by the indigenous people where it grew: the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, along the Inside Passage between Seattle and Alaska.

The tree no longer exists; it was cut down in 1997 by a somewhat mad logger from Vancouver named Grant Hadwin. He was an outdoorsman and loved the woods; and he found that the world would pay, and pay handsomely, for him to destroy them. It turns out that cutting down forests is one of the few jobs available for people who love to spend time in them. (Vaillant records a conversation between two loggers, one of whom picks a rare orchid in the woods; the other tells him he shouldn’t do that, but then yields when he is told that they are about to cut down the entire forest anyway, and orchids will not grow there for another hundred years or more). And so that was how Hadwin made his living, scouting out routes into remote areas of the woods of British Columbia and overseeing road-building and timber removal.

The tension between his love of life in the woods and his living destroying them eventually undid him: after quitting his job, he bounced around for several years, penning an environmental manifesto and in general getting nothing done whatsoever, until he decided to swim a river in the middle of a January night and work until dawn cutting down the Golden Spruce. In a psychic twist familiar to anyone who observes human behavior long enough, he cut the tree down to protest environmental destruction in the area. He called it the logging company’s “pet tree.” Vaillant imagines Hadwin’s feelings about the tree to be like a man who had seen the prairie full of buffalo being told how wonderful the lone pet buffalo grazing on the mini-golf course was. Hadwin had been felling ten- and fifteen-foot diameter trees which would be used to make skids – a much greater waste because it is so routine. Only some kind of symbolic destruction could move human beings, who did not care about the actual destruction of the woods. They would care less for the forest than for one tree.

There is human reason to this approach. If an American drone operator grew to hate America’s drone program, he could probably do more to stop it by using it against some symbolic target than by resigning, or going to the press, or writing a tell-all book. If a drone destroyed the Kaaba (for instance) more Muslims would be upset than if drones merely continued killing Muslims; and the outrage might stop the use of drones. A drone attack on the Statue of Liberty might work fairly well also. In Hadwin’s case the approach apparently worked, stirring up environmentalist feeling in the local press – for about two weeks. Then everybody resumed their normal lives. Hadwin decided to kayak across almost a hundred miles of open sea to get to the Queen Charlotte Islands for trial, and he was lost at sea and his wrecked kayak recovered. Some said he had merely vanished into the woods, but he has not turned up in the fifteen years since, and since the internet has not lured this manifesto-writer out of hiding I presume he is indeed dead.

The book itself is a long-form magazine article puffed up to 300 pages by the usual clunky machinery of nonfiction: when the indigenous people come up there is a long irrelevant digression on Haida culture; when logging comes up there are a lot of irrelevant gruesome logging stories; when discussions of restoring the spruce arise there is a digression on asexual reproduction in plants. Some people like this (“local color”) but to me it is just digression from the story, which is that people with consciences cannot bear to live in close proximity to the extraction industries on which our modern civilization depends, and yet modern civilization continues, not only unchanged but more wasteful by the year. I know of no solution but the one suggested by Voltaire, which is to participate less in the grand charades that cause great harm, and to cultivate the life that is in one’s own garden. It is probably not enough.

I will let Hadwin speak a bit for himself. He certainly had an unusual love of the comma, and his hatred of “university-trained professionals” probably stems from his apparently continually offering suggestions to spare certain trees and places in his logging work, places he felt were really worth keeping, and being continually overruled by his superiors. It certainly is true that our forests, which are now almost all managed to some extent by “university-trained professionals,” are as a rule managed very badly. Cornell recently did a study which indicated that 72% of New York’s state forests – this is about half the ground in the entire state – are not regenerating. They are terminal forests. Besides the fact that these are the cradles of almost all the indigenous life in the entire region, forests are also chemically speaking a layer of carbon extracted from the atmosphere. When they are gone, that carbon will all be in the air, which is not where we want it. The problem is not better in other areas of Eastern North America. The cause is mostly deer, which could be solved overnight if government stopped protecting these animals. If deer meat was allowed to be commercialized, the deer population would be decimated by capitalists in a year or so. It’s that simple.

Now for some Hadwin:

I didn’t enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university-trained professional, should be able to understand. … I mean this action to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters, whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc. appear to be responsible, for most of the abominations, towards “amateur” life on this planet.

And elsewhere:

If you had the power, to create all matter, including life, and you could synchronize, those creations perfectly, what would you do, if one life form, was apparently abusing, all other life, including themselves?

If the original “intent” of your creation had apprently been twisted, from respect, to hatred, from compassion, to oppression, form generosity, to greed, and from dignity, to defilement, what would you do?

How would you convince, people, that material temptations, social status, and education institutions, are used, to preserve and perpetuate, the status quo, with very little real consideration, for the future, of life, on earth?