1000 Dead Trees

On the road where I grew up there were two trees. Well, there were millions of trees. It was rural Alaska and I grew up in a neighborhood in the woods. But there were these two particular trees. About a quarter mile down the dirt road. They became, over our growing up, THE TWO TREES. A place. These two trees. Known. “I’m going to the two trees.” “I saw a moose and its calves, just past the two trees.” A utility truck ran into one. My mom gathered the sawdust after they cut it down, put it into a jar. One tree we still called THE TWO TREES. Then none. Not even the millions. They’ve all been cut, well not all, but most. Every tree I knew. The spruce bark beetle, an effect of climate change in the arctic, moved in, killed the trees. My mom, for years, tried to protect one tree, the one we called the climbing tree. My mom researched and created a homemade concoction with grapefruit rind and other things that mimics the pheromones of beetles after they’ve infected a tree. My mom applied this to the tree, taught me and my little relative how to do the same. My mom, with this continued attention to the tree, confused the would-be-boring-into-the-climbing-tree beetles for a few years until this one came down, too.

Right now the city of New York is killing 1000 trees at East River Park in the environmental justice neighborhood of the Lower East Side. It’s a land grab on stolen land called the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, a real estate driven “resiliency plan” that is anything but. While 700 trees and 25 biodiverse acres have been destroyed since December 2021, 504 trees and 25 acres remain to protect.

Land defenders have gathered at East River Park for years in defense of this land, Lenapehoking. @1000people1000trees recently released a petition addressed to Council Members who serve on the Environment, Resiliency and Waterfronts Committee asking they uphold environmental justice standards, demand proper mitigation and procedural policies regarding resiliency projects and align with the Right to Clean Air and Water and a Healthful Environment for all New Yorkers. The petition calls for two oversight hearings, one to investigate the ESCR project, the second to investigate the TREE WORK PERMIT process in New York City and call for a newly enacted TREE REVIEW and permitting system, independent of City Council and Mayoral influence. You can read and send the full petition here. 

In The Trees by Agnes Borinsky, characters turn tree and, in so turning, are threatened because the ground they turned to tree upon turns out is threatened, too – by real estate. In relation to The Trees, I’ll highlight the second oversight hearing called for by the 1000people1000trees petition – a tree work permit process that is peer and community reviewed, removed from politicians beholden to real estate who can, with impunity, issue the killing of thousands or of any single tree. But first, my mom again. This one person! In the midst of a decades-long assault on trees in southcentral Alaska (no fault to the beetles, they are doing what they do). All fault to settler colonial capitalism feeding the need for climate destructive extraction and production causing irreversible climate change and death. This one person, my mom, in THIS assault tried to defend a tree. ONE tree. To keep it living. To protect it from harm.

*
I stood with a Saguaro once. A single Saguaro. For a very long time. Their community of relatives with us – thousands, through the hills.

After quite a while of standing, I felt like this Saguaro asked me what it is like to have arms.

I can’t tell you this whole story, but I can tell you that I described my arms as coming from my back, that I feel as though my shoulder blades are wing joints – that I imagine the joint where the scapular feathers of the wing of a hawk meet the glenoid fossa and trioseal canal is where my scapula is. And I feel as though my arms move forward, from my back, that they hold. And I said that I feel tenderness through my arms. And power through my arms. That it is amazing to hold someone who is dear to you, close to you, in your arms. That holding small, tiny beings and things feels quite similar somehow, to holding larger, weightier, more complicated beings and things. That action comes from these tiny fingertips and that, from them – fingertips, you can begin moving things, like dirt.

I asked,

What is it like to stand in one place for seventy-five years? For seven hundred and fifty? For four-thousand eight hundred and fifty five? For seventy thousand, six hundred and forty years?

*

The trees at East River Park were over eighty years old. Healthy trees rooted to this land. It may be worthy to note how many Elder trees exist on Mannahatta now. How probable it is, given our rate of destruction, that Elder trees in a few more years, will exist here at all.

*

The Oversight Hearing to investigate the TREE WORK PERMIT process in New York City is necessary because New York City repeatedly fails. We all know the importance of trees on health, well-being and climate, especially in a lower-income, BIPOC neighborhood like the Lower East Side. But in New York City, “If you want to map inequality in New York, you can just count trees.”

Where are the ethical standards governing the professional practice of arboriculture in New York City?

There is supposed to be robust protocol for the protection and removal of trees in New York City – my understanding is each tree to be cut must be visited by a forester. A measurable equation for what the tree outputs – oxygen, shade cover, etc. is noted along with the health of the roots, trunk, branches. I surmise the point of this process is to ensure that trees that do not need to be taken down, aren’t. Each tree in NYC has a number. You can find it on this Tree Map. Though you’ll notice if you search “East River Park,”  the Tree Map still maps all the trees as if they were still living. Each tree in NYC has a “value” the city places on them. This is why all the scaffolding has cut outs where trunks and branches are supposed to be allowed to continue to grow. But these protective measures are circumvented. Do those branches straining through scaffolding look healthy to you? I spoke with Joe Kocal, the Director of Manhattan Forestry at NYC Parks to ask why Manhattan Forestry wrote and NYC Parks Commissioner issued a single one-page permit to kill the initial 630 trees at East River Park.

Manhattan Forestry is part of NYC Parks and the Parks Commissioner is appointed by the mayor. This creates a conflict of interest when, for example, a real estate company who donates to a Council Member or the Mayor’s campaign wants to push through a development and trees are in the way.

The petition above asks for an independent outside review in relation to international guidelines set by ISA (the International Society of Arboriculture). It calls for A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS moving forward intending to advocate and implement the necessary, ethical tree protection protocols within NYC Parks, required to mitigate and address the effects and root causes of climate change, ensuring the protection of biodiversity and halting the ecocide currently carried out at East River Park and any other current or future sites.

Current or future sites.

Let’s try this. Gather at the banks of Newtown Creek. The East River. The Mississippi and Kuskokwim deltas. Gather at all the Great Lakes, all the smaller ones too. The public water system of East Palestine, Ohio. The Nile, the Timor and Caspian Seas. The River Daugava, the human-made lagoons of Dubai, the Bonneville Salt Flats. That trickle of LA River…the Three Gorges Dam. We are gathered at each ocean and stream and harbor and basin, on all of the lands that make up all of the shores. We face the water. We are incredibly still. The water sort of regards us. Then backs away. We step forward onto the newly exposed shore. The water backs away again. We move forward, the water backs. It’s going to go on like this for days.

*

I wrote a poem with a very long title:

That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking, is a way of transforming this place we are caught up in, this place of knowing only one way of knowing, of forced worldview, of bunkers on mountains, of concrete levee, of rising heat, of 1000 dead trees, of nothing in promise, no sound of bee or bird or place to fish or carry on, for career, for nothing real, for what you have been sold, for a future you. This is land. This is water. This is air. This is Lenapehoking. This is for you Carlina Rivera, Council Member District 2, Mannahatta, Destroyer of East River Park.

This is that poem:

The whole world waits.


Do you remember that time I told you the story about the tree?

It was a very heavy tree. It was cut down or it fell down and I found it, I brought it here, to you, for you. I thought you would like to remember how a tree smells.

Do you? Remember?

Do you remember when you came to build this (monument) this (concrete levee) and found our bones in the ground?


It wasn't always like this; these bones used to be mine and we were always running around (all over these hills). It's sort of hard to imagine right now because there were so many of us! Feasting and dancing, talking and making things. There was this one time, we caught so many salmon we had a huge party and there was so much laughing. We were all gathered, right over there.

Do you remember that story?

The one I told you about the tree? I'll tell it again. It was a very heavy tree. I found it, in the basement of this building, a pile of dirt that used to be a tree. And I brought it up – for you, remember? But it was so heavy, we just had to pretend?

Slow and steady breathing from the corners of my eyes.

My legs felt strong. My chest felt heavy and like it wanted to go down. I stood, my chest tipped and curved forward. I kept having to pull my neck back into a more comfortable alignment. Then nothing, then the jostling. The ground felt very humus-y and moist, which is maybe not what it actually is.

The longing and the pulling. There was an actual pull toward west and also down, like the floor was tipping even, even though, well, maybe it does slope. And there was something in the distance and a knowledge of that distance – a measurement which came in the form of an imagined shot. Bullet traveling. The ground was forest.

A tipping slope.

A conversation with the enemy.

How do you know we didn't want it this way? Stuck and dying? How do you know if we even ever loved anything you took away? I didn't want these kids – they were loud, laughing all the time, and running around, playing like deer – and swimming – all the time swimming in that clear, beautiful, shining river. What a mess – their dirty, little feet! How do you know I ever loved my sister, my brother? And my fire, my home? Always full of relatives and relatives of relatives, eating and joking. See these chairs? This is where they sat. All the time, their butts on these chairs, resting their elbows on my table, slapping it every time a joke made them laugh, leaning their chairs back just a bit and rocking back in for a snack. How do you know I'm not glad they're gone? And the fish, so gorgeously red and plentiful. I used to watch them jump up their falls, their entire bodies surging with their might. How do you know I miss them or not? This bit of cake I made from this box is suiting me just fine. Would you like some? There's plenty, and maybe it makes me happy, sharing cake with my enemy, watching you stuff your mouth full standing in the rubble of my own home, still smoldering logs outside where there used to be trees, a brown, stinking river, and silence because everything is dead. Except the sound of your drills digging through death, through genocide, through extinction, through oblivion. Sweet oblivion. Maybe I like that coarse, crumbling, etching sound: hot, empty, loud, and not a drop of rain.

Do you remember rain?

In The Trees the characters become rooted into the ground.
I honestly wish this for all of us.

In The Trees a family community grows and life continues with life things: a burned house, a sick grandmother, love. The misunderstandings and communications prosper alongside shared meals, time outdoors. The outdoors itself a growing monolith. Real? The outdoors?

When I am dancing on a stage that is indoors I am thinking of pulling the ground UP from underneath and I am thinking of tearing the walls DOWN and all the while I am dancing and so it becomes for me like they – the walls, the floor, the impositions – don’t exist.

Unbeknownst to everyone in The Trees save one, a mall is planned at the site the characters became trees. We can’t live in a mall! Some people (and trees) align with this thought.

I want to scream knowing all the plans made. To dump radioactive waste into the Hudson at Indian Point. To mine for copper in salmon estuaries. To drill for oil where caribou and Iñupiat live. To tear down a forest for a COP CITY. For malls. For malls on Governor’s Island. For malls along every interstate. For interstates. For New York City’s trash to be trucked up an interstate, a new dump at Grand Gorge! For luxury towers and a mega-jail coming to the Lower East Side and Chinatown in concert with fake resiliency plans.

There are raised voices. A betrayal in The Trees. 
But no guttural scream against the impending mall.

The feet of the rooted characters did not move.
I loved witnessing the endurance of that act.

Endurance.

My partner, artist and self-described water protector in training, IV Castellanos wrote a story about living amongst the tops of trees. Thriving there along with all possibility. Moving without impediment.

In Mari Kurisato’s Seed Children, in the compilation Love After the End, edited by Joshua Whitehead, the children are in need of protection and the place of protection it becomes known, is tree.

A forest defender, Tortuguita, was murdered in Weelaunee Forest. They were murdered sitting cross-legged, their hands in the air on January 18th, 2023 by Georgia State Patrol in Atlanta, Georgia.

*
For a few years I have walked the circumference of the outer branch spread of trees. My colleagues, Karyn Recollet, Camille Usher, Dylan Robinson notice how the tree is organizing me. I am trying to pay attention, with all of my senses and cells. It becomes curious to think we are the activators, we are the designers, that we even know when something begins and ends. Is the tree moving me? Gathering me? Dylan asked me this.

Walking the circumstance of the circumference we notice we are walking the circumference of the roots too. We find here an energy cypher that roots itself as a tickling in our bellies, a flowed sensation that is around the entirety of our belly, back, root of self – perhaps similar to the full, roundness of a tree trunk. The teaching from the tree is that this is a way to comprehend the entire STRUCTURE, if not the full BEINGNESS of the tree. Structure is not, in this moment, next to or touching trunk, tree, bark. The closeness actually exists in this otherwise space that aligns tips of top-reaching branches space to tips of underground-reaching spreading root space. Root as branch and branch as root. Moving along the energy space of the cypher that simultaneously reaches up and reaches down – along the path of the root/branch spread – is vital. A learned process of decolonizing outside space – walking over or across the buildings makes sense and lessens the “matter” of the buildings – they become and are less important, less material, less permanent than this cypher space of and with the tree.

*
So that tree in the basement. I’ll hold my arms out, like this. You can imagine the tree laying here, across my arms, my hands wrapped up to hold the bark. I’ll take heavy steps up the stairs, the weight of tree moving into my bones. I’ll bring it up for you. What you do then is up to you.

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is of the Yup'ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily has lived on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta in Lenapehoking for the last seven years.