What’s It Like to Be an Earthling?

Amoeba 6.2.24 | How to grieve a tree

Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to the Amoeba: the gooey, ever-changing blob of thoughts wriggling beneath the surface of Unnatural Heritage. The Amoeba is my way of sharing updates and ideas before they’re fully baked—to blurt out what’s on my mind and hopefully hear what’s on yours. It’s meant to be looser and more conversational. It’s also a place, I hope, where I can get a little personal from time to time.

As some of you know, I’ve spent the last three years building out a native plant garden in my backyard in Bed Stuy. It’s been a singular joy and obsession of mine, cultivating this little ecosystem out of nothing. I live on a shady north-facing lot, so I’ve planted lots of ferns and other woodland flowers.

If you’ve been unlucky enough to find yourself in a corner with me at a party, you’ll know that perennial landscapes develop on a three-year cycle: sleep, creep, leap. In the first year—sleep—plants are focused on putting down roots. The second year—creep—is about establishing the vegetative growth to support those roots. Some plants flower, but it’s mostly leaves. The third year, though—this year, MY year—is the leap. I’m so excited. I’ve watched countless bees and moths and cicadas take refuge in this garden, and on my most defeated days, it serves as a testament to what I might have to offer the world. Because sometimes I forget. In April, I planted my 100th native species.

But yesterday morning, the tree that grows above my garden was pruned beyond its capacity to survive.

Its limbs fell slowly, like big heavy sighs, crashing into my neighbor’s yard. A good arborist knows that removing more than 25% of a tree’s canopy in a single year can kill it. By the time I got there, about 50% was gone. I yelled at the pruning crew for nearly 10 minutes and was informed they were there on orders from my landlord. Furious, I left.

The crew hopped the fence into my yard to get a better angle for their ropes, crushing my irises and foamflower. They dragged the fallen limbs out to a wood chipper on the street, and by noon they were gone, leaving behind a thick layer of sawdust on the parked cars nearby. When I got back, the western part of the garden was completely trampled, and the reliable shade that once protected the yard from the afternoon sun was noticeably late. By 2pm, it was still not there.

I stood in the sun and cried. Soft, weepy tears, then a couple big ugly sobs.

I cried for the tree, who has lived on this block longer than anyone else, who simply could not scream loud enough, who will likely be dead within five years. We’ll have to see. I cried for the plants that had been trampled, and how they’d been mistaken for weeds: disposable. I cried for the plants that could likely die later, in the summer, without the canopy to protect them. And I cried for me, and my crescendo of blooms. Three years in the making, muffled by boots and chainsaws.

What’s It Like to Be an Earthling?

Over the years, I’ve gotten really good at embracing the deep, private joy that plants elicit in me. I love letting it wash over me, kneading away the knots in my mind. My lungs are fuller in the garden, my vision clear and hawk-like. It’s a muscular joy, full of breath and vitality. But the grief I can feel for plants is something I’m still at odds with. What does it mean to cry for a tree?

If I’m being honest, I find it a little too ~bleeding heart tenderqueer~ for my taste. Yes, I love plants, but I like to think I’m pragmatic about it. The term “treehugger” has a connotation of naïveté—a kind of myopic, misguided environmentalism that fails to see the larger arc of progress. Sometimes, a tree must fall. I’m a diplomat—I know that. And in a world so full of human suffering, where children are beheaded and hospitals are bombed, how does one justify focusing their grief anywhere else? Maybe this supposes that empathy is a limited resource.

I start every Unnatural Heritage post with the same salutation: Good morning, earthlings. My hope is by saying it enough, the word earthling will start to sound less like science fiction and more like a communal exultation. You, and every single one of your ancestors, and me, and every single one of my ancestors—we have only ever lived on Earth. Each one of us is a fleeting amalgamation of four and a half billion years of volcanoes and tectonic drift and molecular transformations and laughter. Every ember of life on this planet is, statistically, a cosmic miracle. We live on a planet so dense with miracles that we regularly take them for granted.

Look at your hand for a moment. Somewhere in the ridge of your tendons is a nitrogen molecule that once lived inside a salmon. For years, it traveled along the Pacific coast, before returning to the mouth of the Columbia River, then eventually making its way into your stomach, before swimming through your bloodstream.

Now touch your cheek. Can you feel it there, just below your eye? A carbon molecule from a raspberry. And just below that—one from a sunflower.

Every single molecule in your body came from somewhere else on Earth, bringing with it the stories and knowledge from its journey. Someday, years from now, they will disperse, carrying the story of you with them as well. You are an earthling. What a massive fucking privilege.

Act Like One

Did you know that 98% of people can’t identify more than five species of trees? It’s a chronic condition known as plant blindness, and it’s the reason that the tree removal crew, in an effort to “protect my property”, stacked my outdoor furniture on top of a baby witch hazel. A little group of earthlings, unable to see the earth.

The last one thousand years of Judeo-Christian values and settler colonialism have resulted in a devastation within our psyches. Not only have we lost sight of our shared humanity, we’ve lost sight of our earthly heritage, too, and the myriad of intelligent beings with which we share planetary ties. You are here, four and a half billion years of volcanoes and earthquakes later, because humans have evolved the intelligence for survival. The tree outside your apartment is there because it too has spent billions of years gathering intelligence for survival. Only it does it without ever having to move, or go to the grocery store.

Plants are not here on accident. They are not just decoration, or background scenery. They are here because each one of them is brilliant, and tough, and the result of four and half billion years of struggle and survival. They are fucking miracles. Just like you.

Having had the privilege to learn about plants—to study their behavior and ingenuity—I find plant blindness to be an immense societal tragedy. Human culture is vibrant and dazzling, full of enough stories to fill a lifetime. But there are millions of cultures on earth, all with unique things to teach us about what it means to be alive. To only ever know one is to live your entire life in muffled shades of gray. Millions of humans have lived and died this way, without ever experiencing the depth of their entanglement on this planet. To live an entire life on Earth, and never even see it?!  I cried for them, too.

I have more thoughts on this than I can muster. Plus, I need to get back in the garden.

The reality is that most of my plants will come back. Native plants are resilient like that. They know how to set roots. Over time, I’ll move the shade-loving ones, and add new species that adore basking in the afternoon sun. By August, the garden will be something different. Something I hadn’t planned on. Something beautiful.

Until then, here’s how you identify a pin oak tree.