This article was published in the April 24, 2009 edition of The Parkville (Missouri) Luminary, the May 2009 edition of the Mension (the newsletter of Mid-America Mensa), and the May - July 2009 edition of The Heartland Sierran (the newsletter of the Thomas Hart Benton Group of the Sierra Club).

"Happy Arbor Day, early."

Those were some of my first (sardonic) thoughts when I saw what had happened to the trees in my neighbor's yard.

We live in a neighborhood where the houses are neither new nor old. Our house is about 18 years old, and most of the houses on my block are of a similar vintage. When this neighborhood was platted, the lots for many homesites (except the corners and a few others) were set up fairly large. Our own yard is nearly 1/2-acre. There are some trees around, including a patch of mature trees of medium size in the center of the block. This patch primarily occupies the back halves of three neighboring yards, situated behind ours.

We've lived here for a bit over 10 years, and many of the neighbors have been here even longer. That sort of stability, I suppose, more easily allows one to become vulnerable to taking the status quo for granted. I guess that's what happened to me. Because, when I came home to find that the yard immediately behind ours was denuded of trees, I was shocked.

These trees had stood probably 40 feet tall, and helped provide a living privacy screen in the back of our yard. They had also provided other benefits too numerable to list in this article. They were mostly, based on my observation, black locusts. Some folks, given to the establishment of hierarchies for all things, from people to the living world, might think of black locust trees as being of some less value than others. True, they tend to grow quickly and not live long, and they have thorns (but small thorns, not the monstrous thorns of their cousins the honey locusts).

On the other hand, when I think of black locusts, I think of them as they are during the spring. Some time after each vernal equinox, the black locusts in this area set great drooping bunches of white blossoms. That would be enough to make them esthetically pleasing inhabitants of the local community of life. However, the fact that the spring breeze blows thick with the perfume of their gloriously sweet aroma makes them even more treasured.

Of course, any homeowner is within his "rights" to do as he or she wishes with their yards (within the limits as established by local law and homeowner's associations). I'm guessing that our neighbor will end up planting a lawn in the place which was formerly the home of a collection of trees. If he's like most people in this culture, he viewed them as "just trees", and no obstacle to his larger landscaping plans.

I've not spoken to him about it, and I probably won't. Polity mandates that one maintain civil relations with one's neighbors, and, at the moment, that would be difficult for me. This fellow, with whom I've had pleasant (but few - after all, this is suburbia, where we mostly avoid one another) interactions, seems to be a person of, by cultural standards, good will.

The National Arbor Day Foundation (www.arborday.org) goes to great lengths about the benefits of trees to the enterprises of people. This is all well and good, but it helps perpetuate a myth, too. That myth is that the world was created for people.

But the unacknowledged (except here) fact remains: a number of living beings of relatively long standing were killed in this place. To make way for a suburban lawn. Then again, I suppose, why should it be any other way? We as a culture have established this as standard operating procedure. When anything, be it mountains or living beings stand in our way, we opt for violence.

Happy Arbor Day? Or unhappy manifest destiny? Ask the trees.