Smith 1

The War on Trees

11 November 2050, 7 a.m., My House

I remember the day all the other trees died in town. I am a tree, my hippie parents just

had to name me Sequoia. Maybe its because of my very human parts, but now Im the only tree

left in this town. I saw my parents crying, unable to look away from news anchor on the t.v.

screen. They hugged me. They looked desperate and tired from breathing in all of this dead air.

All hope died with the other trees.

I escaped outside, I don't know if I wanted to see the damage or just be anywhere else. I

guess I just felt like walking to school. The sky looked like smoke, it was churning and brown

and my lungs screamed for fresh air. It felt like I had been punched in the chest. All the birds

either left or died and took the last bits of peacefulness with them. The whole world seemed dead

and all I could do was keep walking. No one could really pinpoint the one horrible moment when

it all started to get so bad. I guess all of this began long before any of us could remember, when

farms and industry and greed skyrocketed our country. We were warned. No one did anything.

The big businessmen and politicians convinced the generations before me that coffee, corn, and

oil were far more important than the withering environment. Anyone that tried to stop them, I

suppose, got taken out like the trees. Those heroes tried to right the wrongs, but they were

crushed by industrialization and their thoughts burned into ash. There was nothing innovative

about farms and factories; theyre killing machines. Nothing could be undone.

11 November 2050, School

In my passing periods I would hear jokes and whispers about how Disney was a prophet

and Wall-E was a gross parallel into our lives. All the kids laughed because they didn't know any
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better. I guess thats the thing, we never had anything else to compare it to, but somehow we all

knew nothing could ever be the same. I cant really remember a time when things werent this

way.

I couldn't really focus on much else during the day, no one could. Besides the few jokes

people made to try lighten the mood, everyone just seemed vacant. It was probably from lack of

oxygen. I sat in the back of all of my classes attempting to be anonymous. I was distracted. I

don't want to say I was only marginally listening, but I didn't really feel like faking it, not today

at least. One by one students were called up to the office, the counselors set aside their day for

anyone wanting to come in and talk about it or whatever. As if talking about it would make it

okay. I lied and nodded and did all the rights to be allowed to leave.

I made it to my favorite class of the day: English. I only think I like this class because my

teacher is old and crazy. He makes us read really really old shit from really really dead guys. We

read Kurt Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions and talked about Armistice day and how it

mustve been nice to feel the beautiful sweet silence of leaving the death and dust and slaughter

behind. We talked about being able to cherish something sacred and to rebuild, but it was too late

for us. All of the trees were lined up just waiting to be slaughtered and there is nothing heroic

about killing. I thought about how funny it was, my crazy teacher talking about sacred things,

there was nothing sacred or beautiful or graceful about the way we left the world. We made the

world sick, now all of the trees in this town are gone. I took a moment of silence for all the times

we couldve fixed it but looked the other way.

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Analysis

In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut discusses Armistice day and the importance of

remembering those that have fallen in an effort to prevent future bloodshed: It was during that

minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped

butchering one another (6). What if we, as a society, adopted the message behind Armistice Day

and applied it to our treatment of the environment, because in many ways there is a war on trees.

Just as we shouldn't think of war as celebratory, we shouldn't think of industry driven by mass

deforestation as innovative. Deforestation plays a key role in global climate change and

eventually the effects will be irreversible. This led me to translate the article Deforestation

Induced Climate Change: Effects of Spatial Scale into a young adult vignette about the

possibility of all of the trees dying in one town. The comparison of war to deforestation

translated into a vignette encourages readers to think about the implications of global climate

change.

In Deforestation Induced Climate Change: Effects of Spatial Scale, Longobardi et al.

study the effects of deforestation on varying latitudinal levels of the world. According to the

article, Deforestation is also associated with CO2 emissions, as crops and marginal lands that

usually replace trees after land clearing tend to hold less carbon per unit area than

forests (Intro). Essentially, they observe that higher latitude areas will experience cooling and

lower latitude areas will experience warming. I thought the harmful carbon dioxide emissions

explained in the article would best be represented in the story by describing, The sky looked

like smoke, it was churning and brown and my lungs screamed for fresh air. Without trees

filtering our air, we will cease to be able to enjoy the great outdoors and I urge readers to prevent
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this bleak future from occurring by changing their ways. Throughout the piece, deforestation is

compared to death or death related omens such as, We read Kurt Vonneguts Breakfast of

Champions and talked about Armistice day and how it mustve been nice to feel the beautiful

sweet silence of leaving the death and dust and slaughter behind. Deforestation is a war on trees

and will inevitably harm us and future generations. Eventually, we will not be able to go back or

press the reset button.

In conclusion, deforestation is something that should not be ignored. We cannot turn our

backs on this world to promote our love of coffee. As population increases, our agricultural needs

will only grow. In Deforestation Induced Climate Change: Effects of Spatial Scale, Longobardi

et al. claim that deforestation will dramatically affect the world we are accustomed to and

eventually the affects will be permanent. I hope this fictional, apocalyptic translation will inspire

young people to prevent extreme deforestation from ever happening and while I am by no means

claiming my translation is successful, life changing, or will ever reach its intended audience, I

hope it at least makes my readers think. We should not foster greed and political agendas at the

cost of our health and the worlds health. Similar to Kurt Vonneguts explanation of Armistice

Day, for one moment we should stop the greedy slaughter of trees and respect all of the nature

we have abused and usurped over time.

Works Cited

Longobardi, Patrick, Alvaro Montenegro, Hugo Beltrami, and Michael Eby. "Deforestation
Induced Climate Change: Effects of Spatial Scale." PLOS ONE. Public Library of
Science, 21 Apr. 2016. Web. 22 Mar. 2017. <http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0153357>.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell, 1973. Print.