The Brockovich Report

This is purely a philosophical question and it is not one that I can really answer for myself, much less anyone else. I was just thinking about Christmas trees.

There's something about having a real tree that is just Christmasy. There's just no other way to put it. The way the scent of pine fills the house, the colors, even sweeping up the needles that are left behind, particularly those elusive ones that you find long after the fact--all part of the ambiance of the season.

But.

We kill the tree to have that bit of festivity in the house just like you have to kill a bloom to have flowers in a vase. Because the big difference is, of course, that the bloom is only losing a matter of days of it's life anyway. When I was little, I always wondered if there could be some kind of giant glass of water to stick the Christmas tree in on December 26th, where it could root and we could stick it back in the ground to finish off it's life. Or perhaps some rooting powder where the tree could somehow be grafted back onto its roots. Unlike that short-lived rosebud, a tree--well, it can live for hundreds of years. How many years of life are we taking from that tree; or to be less sentimental and more scientific, how many years of CO2 consumption and oxygen production are we depriving the world of?

Okay, then, we can entirely avoid that issue with having a live tree--one that's in a pot, and after you decorate it, you can always plant it. Plant it in the back yard, plant it in someone else's tree deprived yard, plant it in a forest somewhere...

But what about the plastic tree? What about those aluminum trees that you have to screw together, and then you can take them apart and put them in a box until next year. There are thousands, maybe millions of these permanent trees that are already in existence; nevermind the "carbon footprint" of all the new ones being churned out of factories. Surely the green thing to do is to keep using them. After all, over the span of its usable existence, each of these fake trees saves how many tree-lives? What is the environmental cost of making that plastic or aluminum tree? Especially when, no matter how well made it is, it falls a far second behind the festive ambiance of a live green tree,

Which brings me back to the question of how green Christmas trees really are.

Evergreens are grown specifically to grace your house for the Christmas season. Evergreens--seasonal tree farms--are a sustainable industry, whether the trees are cut before you buy them, or sitting in a dirt ball ready to plant at the end of the day. Even if you have a cut tree, it will eventually end up as mulch somewhere, sustaining the next plant generation.

Is this a blog demanding that everyone use live trees? Not really. Maybe it's just because somewhere in the back of my mind, the Christmas tree reminds me of the Giving Tree.

IF you don't know The Giving Tree, it is a book worthy of exploration; it is a deceptively simple Shel Silverstein tale that many of us read to our children or in our own childhoods. It's a story about unconditional love, about the gifts of nature. It is a story about the relationship between a boy and his tree; and if you think it is a silly and sappy concept, then read it yourself–(don't be surprised when it makes you cry)–and look at the broader view. Here is a tree who gives and gives until she has no more to give; and the boy who takes and takes until there is no more to take. In the end, the boy is an old man, sitting on the stump of what remains of the tree who gave her life to him, and even then she is happy in her giving.

Is this what we are going to do to the earth? Is this earth our Giving Tree? Is it our destiny to dominate the earth to its destruction or to tend the garden to its fruition?

Could we not each choose to give a little back? Take a little less? Could we not honor our own Giving Trees and instead of using them up entirely, learn to cohabitate, to share our lives without using each other up?

Ultimately, the choice is not between a live green, or dead aluminum tree. It's all about the little choices we make every day.

But whatever choices you make, I'm wishing for you and yours, the Merriest, Greenest Christmas, ever.