Trees (cost, space and time)

First, a bit of personal history.

I love camping. I love the quiet calm an uninhabited lake has during a morning paddle. I love the weight of a canoe pressing down on my neck. I love the sleep I can only get in tents, exhausted from a day's worth of physical duress from the miles through rivers, lakes, and muck. A portion of my years of camping experience has been this: The elusive and challenging one match campfire. I've heard legends of such a feat, and frankly, I disbelieve its existence on some levels. A no-match fire (aka, use a damn lighter already) sounds less stressful. But the trick we'd often use: a length of birch bark applied as kindling. I can almost smell the sickly sweet stink of the tree jacket rising from the bowels of my fire pit. That being said, it was common place to scour the entire campsite and its surrounding conifers just for downed birch (we are not in the habit of skinning the living, thank you!) because, for as often as we see the birch lining riverbank and lake shore, we never seem to camp near their graves.

Thus, when I asked myself, if I were planting 1000 trees in a day instead of writing 1000 words, my next question was, what kind of trees would I plant?

There's something eerie about the birch, the whiteness of that bark. You'd know it from miles away (depending on the size of the tree and the amount of obstacles blocking your line of sight.) There are a few things I know about it, whether its empirical knowledge or information found on the internet is the purview of a different writer. The bark always falls off in horizontal strips and no one knows why. The wood itself is the worst kind of firewood, something about the amount of moisture it retains, but the bark is highly valuable to starting a fire, as it burns even when wet and usually at high temperatures.

I did some clicking on various nurseries and the best price I was able to find for a birch sapling (or seedling, or baby tree for the uninitiated) was about £32.50 per, which translates into about $47 (USD) after adjusting conversion rates and applicable state, local and federal taxes. (One could ask, "why not find a state side horticulturist and cut out the overseas shipping costs? They're JUST TREES you dunderhead!!" I would respond to that person, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." And while he [or she] is pondering that, I would follow up with the observation, "Who even says dunderhead anymore?")

$47,000 is a lot of money, so we'll pretend the nursery has offered a 25% discount applied prior to the conversion of pounds to dollars. So that reduces the initial price by £8,125. The total due the nursery for the purchase of 1000 birch is £24,375, which, adjusting for inflation and conversion rates and carrying the two (always carry the two) we're looking at a cost of roughly $35,319.48 (USD). What a bargain! I mean, really, in the scheme of things. That's 1000 trees you're buying (from Britain.) You're doing good work for the environment and you're being very worldly by injecting much needed capitol into another culture's economy, not to mention the fact that the British nursery industry has been in trouble since that fire back in '97.

The adult birch has a trunk diameter of about 80 centimeters, and for the sake of argument, let's say we space them out at 2 meter intervals. If we were to plant these trees in a straight line, one imagines it would be a very long line. How long, you ask? About 1 and 3/4 miles, or 9,186.35 feet. Notice, if you can, that I've switched midparagraph from the metric system to the antiquated English units of measurement. I have a few good reasons for doing this. First of all, here we are, all the way in the future, and not only are there no flying cars and no robots doing my laundry or sawing on a fiddle and playing hawt, but I'm still buying galleons of milk and liters of water. My frustrations always come out in the prose. Also, who even knows was 2.8 kilometers looks like? Don't we hear kilometers and immediately think, "those are those things that are like miles but shorter. Pfff. Wacky Brits." They came up with the mile! Come on!

Now here's an interesting turn: There are only 1440 minutes in a day, so if I were planting all these trees by myself, I would need to be planting them at a rate of 1 tree every minute and a half, that would pretty much be the only thing I'd do that day, every day, forever. No sleep. No eating. No texting or drinking beer or playing video games or anything else I usually fill my days with. It would be better if I had the manpower to assist me in my endeavor. Now let's say as far as volunteers go, let's say of the friends I have (that would be four) let's say 50% of them have enough free time in their daily schedules that they can donate some of it to a good cause. Of that 50% percent, let's say another 50% wants to spend that time on something that actually matters, like volunteering at a food shelter or helping someone run a nation campaign for the highest position in our government. That leaves (get it?) me and one friend planting all the trees. We would still be fighting against the clock. Each of us planting 500 trees, that's one tree on average every 3 minutes. No break. No rest. It's just tree after tree. And trees never say thank you.

This thin white line would be a thing to look at, but I'm thinking laws of physics, time and space, are working against us.

Or we could hire people.