Meet More Meat

I am a tree. Hath not a tree senses? Hath not a tree a trunk, branches, leaves, sizes, affections, roots; fed with similar food, hurt with similar weapons, subject to similar diseases, healed by similar means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a human is? If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you hug me, do I not love you inside? If you axe me, do I not die? And if you wrong me, what can I do? If I am like you in the rest, I will resemble you in that. If a tree could wrong a human, what would be its punishment? Death. If a human wrongs a tree, what should his sufferance be by human example? Why, death. The villainy you show me, I will not take, and it shall be harder for you now, and I will survive your instruments of my destruction. Shaketree, from The Tree of Venice

There is no such thing as wood. It is tree meat. Is it the first time that you meet tree meat? I can bet my life that it even held you in your crib. You slept on tree meat. You have been surrounded by tree meat all your life. You eat meat on tree meat. You sleep and make love on tree meat. What kind of love is that? You should be disgusted by now. There is so much more if you are not. Timber is also tree meat. Trees have been murdered by humans since they left them to live on the ground and in caves where they used tree meat for fire and tools and anything else they needed.

Can you even fathom the number of trees that have been murdered since humans began to axe them? It is surely the longest and bloodiest war ever on Earth, and our so-called enemy could not even defend itself. It was and is an everlasting massacre, a genocide of gargantuan proportions, an unforgivable crime against lovable and defenceless creatures that constitute the basis for most life on this pale blue dot. What would be the worth of a blue sky without the green of trees and other plants? What would life look like if there were no more trees in the world?

The tree in the picture above is lucky for now. Perhaps it has already been cut down to avoid pine cones falling on murderers. I am not being sarcastic or ironic and this is not a parody. We are all murderers and or collaborators. Can you sleep soundly at night now that you know your crime? It is not a crime, you surely think and even say. ’Tis a heinous immoral act, I say. The law does not cover it. ’Tis human law which only applies to humans. I am referring to plant law, and other animal law while I am at it. Earth is bleeding everywhere. What about Nature’s law?

What are we going to do about tree meat now that we know it? What are we going to do about Ikea and Walmart and all the other purveyors, facilitators and bloodletters of this primordial murder? Not much, I bet. Practically nothing. The Oedipal Complex? What about the tree complex? I forgot. There is no such complex when murderers do not consider themselves to be lifelong killers, when tree meat is simply wood and timber to be axed, carved and chiseled, and even better, chainsawed by the millions, by the billions throughout the years, by the trillions since we began to view trees as nothing more than firewood.

I am disgusted. Are you? Save a tree today! Do not buy any tree meat! Write about it! Talk about it with conviction in your voice! Trees feel everything. They communicate through their roots. Their only god is the Sun. The true natural god if ever there was one. I have written extensively about trees. Most of my pieces (around 150) were published on Woodworkers of the World Unite. I know. It is a strange name for my type of stories. I even suggested to its editor to change it to Meatworkers of the World Unite, but it could be better titled, Meatworkers of the World, Enough.