Unchopping a Tree

I'm told it can't be done, but I will try anyway.


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Maya Lin - Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.


Credits for the video:
©What is Missing? Foundation
Produced by @radical.media
Music donated by Brian Eno and Brian Loucks
Support provided by The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, Louis Bacon, Moore Charitable Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Stuck with What We've Got

     For a few billion years there's been an incredible mega-cycle which is defined by the inclusiveness of all things on Earth, from the life and death of every cell or organism to their wastes being fuel for another.  Systems stack and subsume and shift and die.  But in reflection and observation, which is one of the many fabulous passions and skills of the human mind, it seems impossible to find anything that is definable as 'out-of-system waste' in the cycle of this whole mega-system of the earth; there doesn't seem to be anything produced (or existing, for that matter) that is not, at worst, merely a necessary aspect of a system or, at best, immediately recognizable as a resource for an organism or system.  Almost everything that any industry calls a 'resource' is involved in these billion-year-old natural systems and processes.  It's not an unsafe assumption to include everything that we have observed about what's happened in the entire existence of the Universe as working on the same cycle and system principles that we find on this planet, as well.

     You and I are composed of stuff forged in stars billions and billions of years ago, of the debris of ancient mountain ranges and the extinct species of epochs long past, of particles that could have come into contact with some of the wisest people humanity has ever offered up.  Of course, we're not special in this; everything else here is along the same lines, from your computer to your pets.

     The difference between your pets, or any other naturally productive members of the mega-system, and this computer you're using is that the computer only participates in one direction.  That's the 'nature' of our industrial process: linear and detached participation in the mega-system upon which it relies.  Most of the stuff industry produces cannot compose other living things and does not positively feed back into greater system and cycle.  One hundred generations from now human beings and forests are not going to be made up of polystyrene or any of the other non-biodegradable elements we produce.

     We are taking things, 'resources,' that can only be created and recreated in a healthy system in order to produce our fiberglass boats and running shoes and laptops and hiking gear.  These resources are products of a system that has been cycling for billions of years.  What we're putting back into that system is stuff for which it has no use, things with which it can't do anything.  We're taking stuff that we need from the only place we can get it while completely restricting its ability to produce more of it.

     Those of us who have a car probably made that really expensive investment for a reason, to drive.  There's also a reason we try to take care of our cars, so that we can keep that complex system called a car in operable condition so that it CAN drive.  The reason we change the oil in our cars is because a useless and harmful sludge is produced in the process that we rely on to help make our cars do what they're supposed to do, and if we don't drain the sludge and put in fresh and clean oil then we'll soon find our expensive investment and useful tool of a car become a useless pile of junk.  We're treating the much more complex system of the earth in a fashion similar to our treatment of cars, as a tool for getting something we want or need.  The difference is that we can't 'change the oil' of the planet; the sludge build-up has to stay in the system.  This is a very, very dangerous situation, much like in a car.  What's worse is that, of course, even if we had the money to buy a new car after we drove it into the ground, no amount of money or anything else can buy us a new mega-system on which to live or from which to get resources.

     We don't have home recycling plants or spaceships with faster-than-light travel that Baby Boomers and Generation X'ers thought that we might by now, and in real terms we're virtually no closer to them.  With this disappointing rate of development of technologies that help us solve some of our most important problems, whether it's curing the great plague of cancer or finding another habitable planet while we have the opportunity, we're kind of stuck where we are with what we've got.