Last week I attended a lecture on campus, in which guest professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Wood spoke about “trees as profit, trees as pets.” It’s easy enough for us, living in a logging region, to understand how trees translate into money, but a concept of trees as pets is really quite easily dismissed.
That is, until you start to look around and see individual trees that have symbolic value attached to them. A pet tree isn’t just the one outside the window that gives you shade and something pleasing to look at and would not really consider using as timber or fuel. It is the tree that you planted to commemorate the birth of a child, the memorial tree dedicated to veterans, or the oldest tree in the area that is a living artifact, older than the first European settlements in the region.
We take these pets for granted and rarely consider the significance of how they function in our social environment. These days we are starting to think of trees in terms of carbon sequestration and as a way to offset greenhouse gas emissions, but the trees that we plant and keep around our homes, schools and places of work characterize who we think we are and what history we think we have. In a way we use trees to create social and mnemonic value and form a decidedly human environment with one of the most basic symbols of what we think defines nature.
The University of Oregon has long recognized the social and symbolic value of trees. From the University’s beginnings in 1876, trees on campus have formed an integral part of selling the aesthetics here. In 2001 the University integrated an official Campus Tree Plan into its planning processes, and all decisions that may impact campus trees now have to pass through a flow chart to ensure that the aesthetic, environmental and historical aspects of trees are considered.
According to the Campus Tree Plan, students initiated the first tree planting program in 1883, starting the tradition of trees at the University and laying the foundation for its current reputation. Though most of those trees did not survive through the next year, in 1884 the University janitor was commissioned to plant and care for more trees, and as of 2001, the plan claims that the “big-leaf maple near the southeast corner of Deady Hall is the sole survivor of this planting effort.”
This is an example of the official “significant trees” on the UO campus. It is an interesting symbiotic relationship that this tree takes on a new significance just by having social meaning attached to it, and once that story is attached to it, we look at it differently. Many of you will walk over to Deady Hall in the coming weeks to see if that 1884 maple is flushing green with its 124th Oregon spring. You’ll stand under it and wonder about the janitor who cared for it all those years ago, finding it interesting that he was paid only for the trees that survived. You’ll imagine the world back then, before electricity, before autos, before Oregon’s eastern neighbors were afforded statehood, back in a world as changed as that barren pasture that is now a 4000-tree arboretum. You may even reach out and touch its bark to see if an essence of that history and time between may be hanging there like moss.
This maple is an example of our pet tress because it is possible for us to identify this individual tree and create a social space and social significance for it. To value it in dollars or board feet or BTUs it could produce if used for firewood would be considered by many as blasphemy, tantamount to chopping and burning that unnamed janitor, the University’s history, or even our entire sense of identity as an institution with a past. But it is not the only pet tree on campus.
Others include the Douglas Fir “Moon tree” south of the EMU, germinated from a seed that orbited our moon 53 times on the Apollo 14 mission; the English Oaks on the Memorial Quad; the Pin Oaks from 13th and University to Lawrence Hall; and the Douglas Fir, which line the walkway from Deady Hall to Kincaid Street.
If any of these were cut down, it would have significance far beyond just nondescript wood fiber destined for a lumber or pulp mill – it would be a death of social significance. But it is not so much what would be lost if we cut these trees. The whole point of examining our pet trees is to then ask why and how it is so easy to disregard any intrinsic significance of non-pet trees that make up our national forests, our building materials, and our economy.
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Campus’ pet trees have deep roots at University
Daily Emerald
March 4, 2008
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