November | 2012 | inthenameofhumanrights

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Deforestation without ludicrous logging. Amputated humanity.

Filed under: animal abuses, anti-environmentalist, entirely from other sources., thief of patrimony, too serious abuses, in fact bona fide act (or way of life) of tortures., unpunished crimes, vegan — 2 Comments

November 17, 2012

Deforestation without ludicrous logging. Amputated humanity.

Ash tree disease: Britain will never look the same again

100,000 ash trees have been cut down so far to combat the fungal disease

Kipling was on to something when he made the ash part of a forgotten mythology Photo: Alamy

By Christopher Howse

8:24PM GMT 01 Nov 2012

180 Comments

And now the ashes are dying. “Don’t it always seem to go,” sang Joni Mitchell in her fey, sexy, Canadian way, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” She was right.

Ordinarily – don’t you find? – it is interesting and even exhilarating to see a tree cut down. Its insides, so clean and beautifully structured, are as appetising as any tray of dressed honeycomb tripe or scrubbed pigs’ feet piled on the butcher’s counter in the market. But a diseased tree, turned to dead timber, is as repellent as a side of beef with BSE.

Some people take tree-felling harder. “The ash tree growing in the corner of the garden was felled,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins one April Tuesday in Lancashire, when he was still in his twenties. “I heard the sound and, looking out and seeing it maimed, there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.”

By inscape, a word he had invented about five years earlier, the poet meant “individually-distinctive beauty”. I’m not sure whether his intuition of “thisness” (on which inscape relies) is intellectually coherent. Never mind. What he did do was see and feel, and since there have already been 100,000 ash trees cut down to counter this new-found fungal disease, Chalara fraxinea, their loss should cause many a pang.

It’s not just Hopkins, but before leaving him, it’s worth borrowing his eyes for a moment. “On a December day and furled fast,” he wrote in a poem on ash boughs, “they in clammyish lashtender combs creep / Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high. / They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep / The smouldering enormous winter welkin.”

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That is simply true. By lashtender I suppose he means “soft as eyelashes”, and their boughs’ ends do sweep and beat upon the sky as on a tabour. It’s the “clammyish” aspect, though, that has weighed against the ash in my experience: their clusters of seeds or keys hang soggily and their fallen leaves lie slimily on the dewy grass. That is very different from the crisp, copper leaf litter of the beech. But then we are used to seeing ashes in damp hedgerows.

They have thriven in hedges where once the elms were dominant. The loss of 25 million elms in Britain from Dutch elm disease since the Sixties has utterly transformed the landscape. It is not merely the number of trees now missing, but the lost character that they gave the places where they grew – a cricket field, say, where rooks cawed from a row of elms beyond the boundary.

It was just such a rookery of elms to which David Copperfield (Dickens in not much disguise) first opened his eyes. Their wind-tossed boughs prophesied bad times ahead. “As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind, some weatherbeaten ragged old rooks’ nests, burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea.”

For today’s readers this picture of elms means nothing, or next to nothing, since we no longer know elms and their characteristic shape. Is it soon to be the same with ashes?

Kipling tried to give the ash tree a place in an invented mythology for England in Puck of Pook’s Hill. His triad of English trees discounted the yew, or beech, or elm, and he swore instead by oak, ash and thorn. “Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town / (From which was London born) / Witness hereby the ancientry/ Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.” He meant that the ash stood guard when Brutus, the descendant of Aeneas, settled in Britain at about the time that the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites. A likely story.

Still, Kipling was on to something when he made the ash part of a forgotten mythology. He was really writing about England, rather than Britain, and the English cannot help sharing in the myths of their Germanic forebears that seem so unconvincing on stage in Wagner.

Yet, as the Eddas tell us, the ash tree Yggdrasil is the noblest of trees (though the Norsemen at last learnt of a nobler). It embraces the world. On this tree Odin himself was hanged and sacrificed himself. Only when the tree is set on fire will the world end. “Smoke wreathes up around the ash Yggdrasil, the high flames play against the heavens, the graves of the gods, of the giants and of men are swallowed up by the sea. This is Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods.”

In England now, instead of the pyres that burnt cattle during the foot-and-mouth plague (their legs dark against the sky), we see the smoke of the ash trees. It’s not the end of the world, of course. Or is it…?