What “Speaking for the Trees” Means to Me

It’s a Plant Planet; We Just Live Here

I’ve had a welcomed spike in subscribers lately, so here’s a bit about where I’m coming from. My declared focus here at “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From” is “plant advocacy” which is a purposefully vague/broad term. More on that in a minute.

“Speaking for the trees” is an allusion to the Lorax, the Dr. Seuss character, who so famously declared:

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

If you haven’t read The Lorax, you’re missing out and I encourage you most strongly to seek out a copy of this classic 1971 book. Your local library probably has it, and it’s easy to find second-hand because it sold over 16 million copies worldwide. You can read the full text here without illustrations. This book (and the 1972 animated television special) made a huge impression on me as a child. So if you want to assign some credit for my worldview—or blame, if you’re a Once-ler—you can point directly to The Lorax as an influence.

Just to add a brief biographical note: I was raised a plant lover by parents who tended both bountiful veggie gardens and lovely flower beds, so I learned nurturing and aesthetic appreciation from a young age. They also took me and my sister on nature walks nearby and to wild wonders on vacations. I raised caterpillars in screened boxes and let the butterflies and moths go as soon as they emerged from their cocoons, which meant waiting all winter for their emergence. In my adult life, I took up organic farming in 2005, and ran a bicycle-based urban CSA in Portland for a few years. [See this article, or buy the book.] I also worked in the Cannabis industry a few seasons, and learned how not groovy it was. Over the last decade, I’ve devoted much of my attention to the uncultivated lands of the western US and to the practices of sustainable foraging and wildtending. This summer, I’ll be working on a friend’s farm in Paonia, Colorado.

For me, plant advocacy includes multiple efforts: defending plants and their habitats; pushing back on ideas and institutions that insist we must sacrifice nature for profit; opposing the use of pesticides and supporting sustainable agriculture; safeguarding animals and other creatures essential to plant communities; challenging the ideology of human supremacy; and in general railing against the needless killing of plant life.

As a species, our well-being is utterly dependent on the well-being of the planet we live on. Practically speaking, this means our well-being is utterly dependent on the well-being of plants because they make up over 82% of all biomass. This truly is a plant planet, and we just live here.

We literally cannot live without plants. The oxygen we breathe is provided by plants, with sea-dwelling phytoplankton providing 50-80% of the total. The food we eat is provided by plants either directly or via animals and fungus who consume plants. Until the advent of synthetic fabric, clothing was often made from plant fibers, and cotton still accounts for almost 40% of what’s manufactured today. Housing frequently utilizes wood. Medicine was primarily plant-based for most of human history and even today many pharmaceuticals are based on plant compounds.

All other creatures on this planet (except for lichen, a few fungi and some bacteria) are also dependent on plants for their survival. This is why plants are designated “primary producers” aka “autotrophs.”

Plant blindness

Despite these facts, most people in “developed” societies don’t give much thought at all to plants, and can’t even name many of them in their immediate environment. This syndrome has been called “plant blindness” and has many causes: The majority of people don’t directly interact with plants for their own food, clothing and shelter. The education system spends very little time on plants. The big religions discount plants as worthy of life in their own right. Our media is predominantly anthropocentric.

As a result, plants are regularly subjected to thoughtless or malicious destruction as if they’re not even alive, with no regard for the benefits they confer to humans and more-than-humans alike. They are treated as “resources” to harvest or “weeds” to eradicate, far in excess of necessity, driven by economic motivations. They’re routinely killed for aesthetics or dollars or just out of spite.

That plants are deserving of life on their own terms is almost never considered.

That plants have their own kind of consciousness and intelligence is considered fringe (though there’s a nascent movement).

That plants are our elders and thus merit our respect is an even rarer sentiment.

So my primary purpose here is to encourage plant-sightedness; to increase people’s awareness and appreciation of plants in their neighborhoods and in the world. Ultimately, I would like my readers to understand that plants are living creatures who, though different from us, are not inferior, and are worthy of consideration. The “great chain of being,” which ranks everything on earth in a hierarchy with humans near the top and plants near the bottom, is an outmoded way of viewing the world which has led to widespread environmental destruction that now threatens our own survival.

To make matters worse, we live in a Nineteen Eighty-Four world where some acts of environmental destruction are trumpeted as salvation. So, two of my core themes here are 1) critiquing the “invasive” plant narrative and 2) calling out the environmental problems with “green” energy development. Each is a war being called peace.

• Pesticides are sprayed and ecosystems bulldozed under the banner of eradicating “invasive” plants despite collateral damage and seriously shaky science. Furthermore, by adopting what’s really just a set of cultural biases we end up worsening our own unhealthy relationship to nature. Nikki Hill and I are finishing up a book on these subjects tentatively entitled, “Don’t Blame the Messenger: A critique of the ‘invasive plant’ narrative.” (Paying subscribers get access to draft chapters.)

• Plants and the habitat they share with wildlife are sacrificed to “green” energy development, including solar and wind farms, electric vehicles, transmission lines, and mining. The “other leg” of climate change, land use, is ignored because addressing it would upset the status quo. It’s profit over planet, again.

Conflicts of interest

Taking these stances sometimes puts me at odds with people I otherwise agree with or whose work I respect. For example, I really appreciate my friends who are socialists or Communists, and I learn a lot from them, but they too often omit the environment in their analyses, let alone plants. Hence the necessity of the term “eco-socialism”; because the prefix “eco-” needs to be appended. I find myself rolling my eyes at admiring commentary about “development” in Communist nations; industrialism wreaks environmental havoc no matter who is doing it. I, too, would like to see the means of production seized, but only so they can be pared down or dismantled.

I also sometimes find myself at odds with climate activists who primarily concentrate on “green” energy infrastructure as a way to lower carbon emissions. First because I believe carbon is overemphasized (see my “Too Much Focus on Carbon”) and secondly because I think we need to priortize shrinking our overall consumption and energy use. When it comes to fossil fuels, I absolutely agree we need to “leave it in the ground” but I don’t want to see other forms of extraction increase as a result. (See my “Copper Mining: Totally Not Green, But Totally Needed for “Green” Energy.”)

Finally, though my favorite thing about travel and visiting new places is probably checking out the plants unique to a given region, I am not a native plant purist, and I am saddened by the anti-”invasive” rhetoric that has reared its ugly head in native plant circles. It’s misguided and myopic, and distracts from what is far and away the biggest cause of ecological disrpution and species extinction: habitat destruction. People will complain bitterly about a few introduced plants in a ditch, while ignoring the road they drove there on, and the acres of monocrop agriculture stretching away to the horizon on either side. Hence the book project. Thankfully, most native plant lovers are not like this, but those who are have really poisoned online native plant forums. Native plant enthusiasts can be allies in opposing “green” energy projects that bulldoze native habitat though.

But what about…?

Every issue has many angles, and in “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From,” I take the plant-centered, environmental angle. Hence, in my recent piece on AI, I honed in on the adverse ecological impacts of AI infrastructure. I’m aware that AI might provide some benefits to some people in some ways, but my goal here is not to cover all the angles of AI or any other subject. I am not trying to provide my readers with everything here: just a slice that’s close to my heart that I believe doesn’t get enough attention.

I’m definitely aware of the other angles. Over my years of activist journalism going back to the year 2000, I have written about social justice, LGBTQ+ issues, electoral politics, labor, war, media, and many other topics, because it’s all important. (See here for 107 examples.) But these days, I don’t feel like I have much to add to those subjects, and there’s no shortage of people covering them.

A truly environmentalist approach is about engaging with plants and nature in a healthy, respectful way, and it feels to me that this perspective is in danger of falling by the wayside. That’s why I’m “speaking for the trees.”

Thanks for reading! If you appreciate what I do here, please share the publication with others. I’m not on social media anymore, so it’s great when people post my stuff there. It really does help get it to a larger audience.