Sycamore-like

The Norway maple (Acer platanoides) was brought here by Europeans to decorate their yards. One can understand the impulse. These trees grow rapidly and produce a dense folliage, delicate green leaves and an utterly delectable tangerine hued yellow fall color. They are also incredibly tolerant of all the atmopheric maladies accompanying modern life - smoke, pollution, automobile impact. The have a strong wood, narrow rings. It is rumored that Antonio Stradivarius made his famous violins out of this material, the little ice age of the 17th century contributing to even denser rings than ever in this popular European tree. Here in the United States, they escape from yards and streets and populate entire forests where they have been given a chance to thrive. I have seen them grow up the inside of apple trees and small bushes, twist against white oaks and scarlets. The trees in this photograph hug the boundary of two properties perpendicular to mine. These leaves conceal an entire house until fall and fall's rains remove them to the ground again. Here in New England, Norway maples, whose Latin name means 'like the sycamore' because its leaves are very similar, have not only escaped cultivation, they have established themselves, "naturalized," (and more) as they say. But the Norway maple is to native New England forests what the European was to Native American lifeways in the 17th century. The tree is classified as "invasive" because it does not share the space it comes to occupy, but, instead, uses its beautiful dense folliage to out-compete other native species, removing nutrients from the ground and shading out sunlight from above. Simplifying.

And so, riots and tornadoes and the threat of a flu pandemic and who wouldn't think these days are those last days of which it is written? Why not? You do not want to be one of those left behind, after the storm, do you? The trouble, of course, is that nothing more than ever happens is continuing to happen today, no more hurricanes or earthquakes or tornadoes or volcanoes. All of these are in statistical proportion to last year and the year before and even the year before that one. These are not the products of sudden change, these things did not just appear. Laws of averages apply. Gradual erosive politics, for example, lead to gradually erosive societies. CO2 builds in the atmosphere and gradually heat build-up takes place in our atmosphere. The trouble is neither the suddenness of it (for it is not sudden) nor its chronic presence (it has been here for some time), the trouble is that we have become, somehow, powerless in this system. It is not that we are being out-competed. It is that we are not even part of the competition at all. You will fill up with gasoline this week, turn on an electrical switch, open the refrigerator, flush a toilet. You have no choice. You have no alternatives, nor alternative skills. We need genuine alternatives, a new vision. Something countering the trend of Norway maples that sacrifice complexity for beauty.