While I’m justified in yelling this at you if you refuse to get vaccinated when you have no valid reason not to do it (your freedom or religious beliefs don’t count), I’m not writing about protecting innocent human beings here. I’m writing about other innocent victims, the giant Sequoia trees!
I nearly wept when I read that the giant Sequoias are now threatened by those California fires. These trees are old friends, and, if you’re a climate-change denier, I’ll blame you for their murder! Or even for their torture if they manage to survive.
My father loved these trees so much that one summer he became a night watchman between the parks (that’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks for those who don’t know California, the greatest and most populous state in the union). He did that so he could study and paint the portraits of his redwood friends—I’m looking at one of those paintings now as I write this. Their subtle colors change throughout the day, so he might have more than one painting going for a tree or trees for different daylight hours. He minimized his sleep time (daylight hours, of course) so he could commune with these gentle giants. He spent that entire summer doing this, up there between the parks with the trees.
My father taught me to love these gentle giants, and I’ve continued to love them even after he died and even when now that I live far away from them. Once, long ago, when I revisited a famous Sequoia with the name General Sherman (a better bearer of that name than the Civil War general, to be sure), some ignorant Japanese tourists passed its protective fencing and sidled up to the tree for photos. I gave them a tongue-lashing (no expletives, which they deserved but likely wouldn’t have understood—at the time I could swear in four languages, but none were Japanese—but, nonetheless, they were strong words). Like tourists everywhere, they were too addicted to their snapshots, chattering away about the right poses, instead of enjoying the awe-inspiring sight of a tree that was only a seedling before Christ. I suppose that’s even worse now with smart phones. Tourists usually don’t commune with Nature; instead they look for the best selfie to put on Facebook and ignore Mother Nature who’s saying, “Why don’t you treat me with some respect?”
Standing in front of one of my Sequoia friends is a religious experience, akin to but much more profound than the one inside any European cathedral. The builders of those cathedrals tried to reach to heaven to touch God; the Sequoia does that naturally. And it’s a transcendental experience to see its natural embrace of the heavens. Not transcendental in the sense of Thoreau (who almost burned down Walden Woods!), but in the sense of communion with Nature, embracing a whole of which each of us is only a small part.
Climate change isn’t just an existential threat to humans! It’s one for all of Nature, to Gaia herself. If you can’t understand that, or think that’s all some liberal hoax, you have no right to be alive on this planet. You should have never been born!