IF A TREE FALLS.....

   From the chopping down of an old standing dead tree for firewood, to clearing a lot for a house, to the loss of another piece of Mohawk territory in Canada or the opening up of an Alaskan National forest to the lumber industry, logging is a part of living in the country. It can take hundreds of a years to grow a tree. It only takes a couple of minutes to chainsaw one down. So far nobody has figured out a way to put one back up.

   Recently two pieces of forest are in the news; one is the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, “North America’s Amazon,” and the other, a little stand of pines in Mohawk territory outside of Montreal. A member of the Mohawk Nation, Ellen Gabriel put it this way, “The pines are their own micro-climate, you can be standing in the forest and feel a chill and then you walk outside of it and feel a gust of warm air. It is part of the biodiversity that keeps us cool and when you cut that down, you contribute to the global warming that’s killing our planet.” And yesterday the Trump administration proposed opening up over half of the 16.7 million acre Tongass National Forest on Alaska’s panhandle, “the largest intact temperate rainforest in North America,” to logging and the lumber industry. The “roadless rule,” put in place by President Clinton, would be waved, green lighting the skidders, bulldozers and picker trucks. The tiny Mohawk patch of pines is a microcosm of what could happen to the old growth arboreal forests of Alaska. Who will stop it?

   Alaska is a blood red Republican state. They love Trump. Mining, logging, fisheries and indigenous murder have been a part of the Alaskan landscape since the Russian’s started trapping beaver in the 1500’s. In Canada it was the French, then England’s Hudson Bay Company and the international whaling industry making the millions. White people have been making fortunes in the wilderness since they “discovered” it. The Mohawk diaspora populated Quebec post Revolutionary War. They were forced to move from guarding the far eastern door of the metaphorical longhouse of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in New York State to north of Niagara in the 1780’s. British land was part of the deal. As far as Alaska goes, cousin Henry Seward brokered the deal with Russians, closing on October 18, 1867. From that day forward the U.S. government has been responsible (and to blame) for what happens in Alaska.

    This is the great danger of the Trump administration, and to a lesser degree the Trudeau administration in Canada. Issues like climate change and indigenous rights are either outright ignored or prioritized so far down the news feed as to be invisible. These deals are happening in the shadows. The courts will have their say, but once the roads are cut and the chainsaws start up it will be impossible to “regrow” an ancient forest or even a cool stand of pines. A lone Mohawk man has embarked on a hunger strike in protest in a tent west of Montreal. His non-violent protest may or may not stop this most recent incursion into Indian territory. We may not hear those trees falling, but future generations will be the lesser for it when they are milled into 2x4s.