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vaster than empires, and more slow
Friday, 18 November 2011 08:15 amThe auto-repair business of Ray, magical mechanic, has a bunch of youngish and very beautiful plane trees in its parking lot. They probably have about a quarter of the girth of the one in our garden, but they're lovely trees - well-shaped, healthy, full of green and those fascinating hedgehog bobbles which plane trees produce. Absolutely all of them, though, have weird protrusions from their trunks - bits of plastic string, barbed wire, that sort of thing, embedded in the bark and with bits sticking out rather incongruously. Obviously the young trees were staked when they were planted, and over time have gradually grown to absorb the material which tied them up.
It's a very strange image, encapuslating human obliviousness to nature at the same time as a sort of half-arsed, unthinking care - back when they were planted, someone clearly cared enough about the young trees to prop them up, but didn't care enough, or stick around long enough, to remove the supports when they were no longer necessary. And, in that slow, imponderable, organic way nature has, she simply engulfed the problem, incorporated it, and allowed growth and strength to happen regardless.
There was a moment, while I was waiting for my lift and pondering the odd bit of blue plastic string sticking out of the bark, when I found myself wishing that the world on a more macro level was capable of absorbing our damage in that way. Coal-based power stations, for example, folded gently into the earth. Giant forests slowly reducing to rubble our uglier cities. Four-by-fours engulfed by elephant herds which patiently, inexorably flatten them into a thin, quickly-rusting metallic film. The problem is that in the destructive stakes the human race as a whole is really a lot more far-reaching than a few bits of blue plastic string.
It's a very strange image, encapuslating human obliviousness to nature at the same time as a sort of half-arsed, unthinking care - back when they were planted, someone clearly cared enough about the young trees to prop them up, but didn't care enough, or stick around long enough, to remove the supports when they were no longer necessary. And, in that slow, imponderable, organic way nature has, she simply engulfed the problem, incorporated it, and allowed growth and strength to happen regardless.
There was a moment, while I was waiting for my lift and pondering the odd bit of blue plastic string sticking out of the bark, when I found myself wishing that the world on a more macro level was capable of absorbing our damage in that way. Coal-based power stations, for example, folded gently into the earth. Giant forests slowly reducing to rubble our uglier cities. Four-by-fours engulfed by elephant herds which patiently, inexorably flatten them into a thin, quickly-rusting metallic film. The problem is that in the destructive stakes the human race as a whole is really a lot more far-reaching than a few bits of blue plastic string.
