While you, the diligent SLU student with your Mac and Juul, have been lost in thought writing lab reports and blogs for classes, I, the good citizen of the world, have been thinking of trees. Alright… that’s some pretentious bullshit. I too have been sucking nic and hate the supposed comedy of zoom “reactions”. But while we sit in our rooms, spacing off during our lectures, let us for a moment appreciate the trees.

I’ve had the privilege of taking Prof. Mark “Marky Mark” Sturges’ class on environmental literature and, my love for kissing ass aside, have been moved by his passion for nature. He lives it. He breaths it. He sends us emails outside of class about it. Just today, he sent this email:

For the curious among you, here is the most recent list of campus trees, with total number of specimens. These days, SLU is definitely a campus of maples. But if we really want to plan for the changing climate, we better start planting some more oaks. Who among you will spearhead this effort? And how is it that we only have one sycamore? That’s just criminal negligence.

Below was the list and it initially meant nothing to me. I asked myself: why would I care if there are 21 Balsam Firs on campus? Then I looked outside.

A wave of orange, red, and variants of green in the distance, all of which I cannot describe without waxing poetic, peered at me from above the Kirk Douglas dorms. The chapel bells rang, the frisbee team played: everything was in motion except for those distant trees. The nearer firs and maples soaked in the wind, the cracks in their bark having withstood… a lot. 

A lot of change. A lot of sun. A lot of snow. A lot of flowers. A lot of leaves. A lot of stillness. A lot of storms. A lot of construction. A lot of destruction. A lot of change. A lot of elections. A lot of P. Fox’s. A lot of white males. A lot of caring maintenance employees. A lot of donors. A lot of happiness. A lot of sadness. A lot of seasons. A lot of change.

For a moment, I was distracted. I was distracted from the news notifications, the masks on the frisbee team members, the quarantine center in Kirk. I so desperately wanted to crawl in those cracks, feel as a tree, dance as a tree, be as a tree.

Then I thought about it for two more seconds… and took it all back.

The reason Marky Mark sent us that email was to remark on the decreasing biodiversity and increasing uniformity of our nature both here on campus and in the world around us.

If I were a tree, I’d be dead sooner than I should be. 

I sometimes pass the Avenue of Elms on my way to golf where, according to one of Marky Mark’s emails, 15-20 elms have been cut in the past two decades due to Dutch Elm Disease. The fungus, furthered by man, has killed a ridiculous number of elms worldwide and has reached our campus without campus wide attention.

Back home out West forest fires rage every summer. The northeast seemed largely blind to this until we were hit with a disease ourselves and could see the smoke in our homes which originated 3,000 miles away. The relatively few numbers of fires in the forests here, however, does not make our trees immune to flame, destruction, and degradation.

If I were a tree, I’d get no eulogy, no funeral service, no open casket. You would think even elms, a decorative tree, would interest our SLU donors and campus at large. Yet these trunks are met with the silence of the axe. 

So much is happening in the world, it is hard to imagine a maple-planting, sycamore-loving spearhead to appear anytime soon on our campus or in office. But, in order to get there, we need to appreciate the trees. They’ve been through a lot… let’s keep it that way.