This morning I woke up and realized I hadn’t heard the sound of sirens in almost 24 hours.
Instead, I heard chirping and singing birds, the rustling of leaves in the wind, the occasional sweep of cars going by on the road, the constant babbling of the brook nearby. As soon as I got here my nervous system breathed a sigh of relief.
Sirens are my reality when I wake up in the city. I live near two hospitals. It’s not every minute, but it’s enough to be constant. Here at my friend’s place up in Vermont in the woods, it’s quiet, peaceful; I am so much more relaxed here. I can feel my nervous system resetting even after being here for only an hour.
Of course, people need help when they’re ill, and the EMTs and firefighters onboard those vehicles with sirens are heroes; but what’s making people ill in the first place?
When everything’s an emergency in the city, doesn’t the stress self-perpetuate? Doesn’t the grime and the hustle make people sick?
How would we radically re-orient ourselves in a city to be more like trees?
First, we might free their roots from their concrete prisons. We might begin to build around nature, and plan to build with nature, instead of building over nature. We might plant whole rows of trees in sidewalks, instead of placing them in concrete solitary confinement. We’d give them back their communities. And we’d acknowledge that trees grow and change as they do so; why don’t our buildings (especially when at least part of those buildings have always included the remains of trees themselves)?
Second, we might realize that bringing nature back into the city has manifold positive consequences: crime goes down as people are more relaxed; health costs plummet as asthma rates slide and people spend more time in green spaces; inequity decreases because we start this greenification in the places that need it the most (what if “Brownsville, NY” became “Greensville, NY”?)
Third, we might find that the more that we plant trees, the more nature rebounds around us. We might find that people have more to eat because the pollinators are back. And when we get rid of the gas-powered cars in the city, the air quality will improve too. When we start paving roads and sidewalks with permeable pavement, the water will drain into the water table more cleanly. When we start daylighting the streams and brooks we buried, public life will start relaxing. New York City, in particular, would cease to be among the grungiest cities in the world, but would become one of the greenest beacons of hope and light in the era of climate crisis.
And what would politics look like if we took our cues from trees? Trees communicate, hold each other up, share nutrients and warn each other with chemicals; you might even say they practice socialism, or at least non-zero-sum politics. But of course it’s not “socialism” to a tree. It’s just the way they have lived for millions of years.
It’s the trees’ world. We’re just living in it. We would be wise to adapt to this reality.