I didn’t know how exceptional it was. I’d passed the lot hundreds of times, on foot, in car, by bicycle. It’s in Camden, on the corner of Chestnut and Greenfield Drive, amidst 100-old houses with turrets as well as more recent abodes with predictable lines and modern vinyl siding. 

The first day, earlier this month, there were a couple of pickup trucks, a few trees down. As the days went by a small earth-moving vehicle appeared. The pile of downed trees—near the road, debranched, stacked like Lincoln Logs—grew. One day last week big wafting swathes of smoke grew from brush piles in the middle of the lot. Two men stood by watching the rising gray plume. After taking drinks from their bottled waters they simultaneously lifted their chainsaws from stump tops, pulled the starter cords, and in tandem set to sawing the logs at their feet.

By the next day the men were gone. So were the trucks, and the yellow-clawed earth mover. The large lot, fronted on Chestnut Street by a stone wall where one row of trees was left standing, stood empty of the towering trees I had taken for granted. Irregularly topped stumps littered the area, holding firm, like the one at the end of  Shel Silverstein’s iconic book, The Giving Tree.

As I looked at the light-filled lot, ragged, muddy, and stumpy, a great, palpable sadness overcame me. There I stood, erect, strong, breathing, while next to me a pile of dozens of downed trees lay like fallen soldiers. A kind of shock overtook me. How quickly the breathing, growing landscape changed. How quickly these venerable trees—mostly pines, although a few were deciduous—had been struck down. 

Was there a warning? Had anyone been there before the first downfall to celebrate the lives of these trees? Many of them were at least two feet in diameter. I counted the rings to gauge their ages. The first one numbered over 97—and I suspect it was actually 100 years old. At least six other numbered over 90. This had been a forest of wise old ones. 

As I stood on the side of the lot I wondered if the trees—who are purported to communicate through their root systems—sent out word underground as the assault started. Did the trees of the same age across the street hear the messages? They certainly heard the chainsaws. Did they shed sap tears as their mates were felled one by one? What of the birds, animals, and insects who once lived there? Not to mention the lichen and moss and other fungi. 

These pines spent their lives using the sun, water, and soil to grow. They took in carbon dioxide and gave us oxygen in return—providing us, and many other species on the planet, an important component of the vital air we need to breath. A 100-foot tree, 18 inches in diameter, is said to produce over 6,000 pounds of oxygen (an average of 260 pounds per year). Suppose there were 40 trees cut (5 of them 100-year old)—that meant we were losing 1,300 pounds of oxygen a year from the 5 big trees, and another 4,550 a year from the 35 smaller ones (using 130 pounds/year/tree)—5,850 pounds of oxygen per year. I’m 63 years old—in my lifetime this lot, if undisturbed by cutting, yielded over 380,000 pounds of oxygen. You can research how much pure oxygen a human needs in a year—these neighborhood trees provided oxygen for several of us over their lifetimes.

And now, I realize, the land is most likely to become a house lot, the felled wood headed to a lumberyard. I am not naive, nor am I against wood products. I sail on a wooden boat (“Cut down my trunk and make a boat,” says The Giving Tree). I write at a wooden desk. I burn logs in my wood stove. 

And yet, and yet. I do wish we had been warned. I wish we had honored the trees that stood on that lot for over 100 years. I would have liked to have thanked them while they were still alive. I would have liked to discuss ways to allow more trees to stay, removing carbon dioxide from our warming planet. “Half of the countries on Earth have contributed more to global warming through land use, land use change and forestry than by burning fossil fuels.”* 

I’ll say it now: Thank you, trees. 

*Axios, “1 Big Thing: A New Greenhouse Gas Balance Sheet,” Ben Geman, Andrew Freedman, March 29, 2023

Milly Mulhern lives in Camden