Life in the Green Zone

It was during the last half of the eighteenth century when Ben Franklin first posited about the false economy in removing all the trees around one's property.  He mused about the as yet unknown oxygen cycle whereby trees replenish the bad air expelled by animals, with more refreshed air for us to breathe.  He came up with this idea because of an experiment conducted by Joesph Priestly which involved a candle, a mint sprig, a bell jar and a mouse. His postulate preceded ecosystem science by 200 years. True story.

The Priestly Experiment

So it is with the blessings of one of our greatest founding forefathers that Tammy and I always felt it necessary to live amongst the trees.  We never even considered living in a subdivision built on an old farm where one Bradford Pear per quarter acre is considered woodland living.  True, Kentucky Bluegrass conducts photosynthesis on a regular basis but due to our active lifestyle and the abundance of hot air I produce we need enough oxygen that only a forest of 200 year old oaks can generate.  And I always felt a few back breaking days of raking leaves every year is a small price to pay for all that recycled air. 

But a series of recent events have led me to rethink my position.    Actually a series of events over the course of the last 25 years.  No, a tree did not fall on our house, though the daily barrage of acorns raining down on our roof has led me to believe Chicken Little may have been on to something.  I did not think acorns hitting a roof could make such a racket.  It's as if the squirrels are the German Luftwaffe and our home the British House of Commons.  Nor is the stick (pardon the pun) that broke the camel's back the drudgery of bending over and picking up the 50 gallon trash can's worth of branches every week.  A large limb did fall and dent the hood of Tammy's car a few years back but that is when I still valued the friendship of the foliage.

Over the course of the years I have tried to take a preemptive approach to removing the dangerous trees before they can inflict damage on our property.  Much like Bush's War on Terror.  I don't hate all the Ents.  Just the arborofascists that want to destroy our way of life by suicide bombing my house by crashing down on the roof.  And also like the war on terror, my preemptive pruning just seems to make them angrier and more prolific.  Every time I remove one, three more seem to grow in its place.  But in any case, the twig that finally convinced me to want to move to a gated, over 55 community with no trees, was a thirty inch diameter Beech that fell into the lake behind our house.  No property damage, fortunately, but my sources tell me we may need to bring in a crane to remove it.  True story.  I will post the pics when the crane rolls in.

In the mean time I will continue to advocate for better understanding between the  autotrophs and heterotrophs because we all have to share the same Earth.