Channeling Bill Douglas

 

Channeling Bill Douglas

            A tiny sprig of a thing - an orphan alone in our garden - the sprout might have died. Grubbing weeds between azalea shrubs one spring day, I nearly yanked the small shoot out of the dark soil - a seedling no more than two inches high, with soft green needles, as defenseless as any small lifeform left to the elements.

            Usually cavalier and careless about ridding my garden of any vegetation that doesn't belong there, I join most gardeners in the belief that weeds are the Devil's spawn, ghoulish reminders that from primordial green ooze we came and to the loamy land we shall return. The Sisyphean labor of removing prolific rooted varmints does not generally incline me to mercy. Whoever invents a commercial use for crabgrass, pigweed, buttercups, dandelions, groundsel, chickweed, and their ilk will reap millions. (The same goes for dryer lint or dust bunnies.)

            This day, however, something stayed my ruthless hand. What I was about to pull out of the ground was undoubtedly a tree, and a non-deciduous one at that, its "trunk" not much thicker than a toothpick. Frail, but a tree regardless, I decided to spare it, if only out of curiosity. It flinched when I pulled a tiny clover stem away from its base, and it seemed to stand more securely when I firmed the soil around it with my fingers. My wife cut out the bottom of a clear plastic cup and settled it around the youngster to protect it from the elements and marauding cats.

            We adopted it.

            After a few months, the little volunteer looked like it could stand on its own so we removed the plastic cup. It weathered our usual rainy winter and grew enough the next spring and summer to reveal itself as an infant Douglas fir. After a few years, it had branched well, and it asserted itself in its patch of earth like a confident young boy with his arms crossed. More years passed and it grew. And grew. But here the anthropomorphizing must stop. It was only a tree - we thought.

            In the Pacific Northwest where we live, Douglas firs grow speedily and so prolifically that they're considered as weeds themselves in some quarters. Still, we marveled as it grew straight and tall and green over the years.

            Then, one fine morning, reality intruded. Our adoptee was immense and in the wrong place, alongside our front stoop and buttoned in by a driveway and a retaining wall, both of ancient vintage. As the tree had grown, the wall had begun to bulge and finally to warp the siding of the house and the basement window and door. Safety required its removal. Not the tree's fault, obviously. Ours. What to do? 

            My mind went back some years to another durable survivor of the Northwest, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas of Yakima, Washington. Justice Douglas was 74 years old when he wrote his memorable dissent in the case of Sierra Club v. Morton. He'd served on the High Court for 36 years, longer than anyone else. Appointed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, Douglas died in 1980 at age 82, mourned by liberals and civil libertarians across the country, but never more so than by advocates in the increasingly vocal environmental movement.

            The Morton Case, decided in 1972, was a landmark case in the early days of what is now the recognized field of environmental law. The Sierra Club asserted that simply as an organization it had the right to challenge the Interior Department's grant of a permit to build a ski resort in Sequoia National Park. The case tested the concept of "standing," where traditionally only parties directly injured by the act of another have the right to sue for redress.

            In his famous dissent, Douglas asserted that persons and organizations should have the right to sue on behalf of the very "inanimate object[s] despoiled, defaced, or invaded where injury is the subject of public outrage."

            Justice Douglas wrote,

    "Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation [ships in maritime law, corporations] .. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even the air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains and nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."

            Critics scoffed. Developers were outraged. Rocks and trees have rights? You have to be kidding! Some said he'd stayed too long, ought to retire, in his dotage - which would have brought a smile to the face of his pretty wife Cathy, 44 years his junior. In fact, Bill (as old friends addressed him) was alert and bright and as hard-working as ever, continuing to enjoy his beloved Cascade Range and hanging out with fishing and hiking buddies back home.

            Opponents increased their call for Douglas' retirement, or worse, impeachment. But environmentalists, successors to Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and the like rejoiced. This was, to be sure, ground-breaking territory even though a dissenting opinion. 

            Now, looking out of our second-floor bedroom window, I steeled myself to saying goodbye to our beloved 45-foot tall Douglas fir. It was about to be cut down.

            Trees are marvels of botany and physics. A tree is a factory, a living factory, loading up on nutrients in the soil, transporting them skyward through a vast circulatory system and mixing them with carbon dioxide in the air and sunlight through the miracle of photosynthesis. Trees produce leaves and needles, bear flowers or cones or fruit and thereby sustain and recreate themselves. The hydrostatic pressure that keeps the smallest blade of grass erect is multiplied enormously in a tree - tons of pressure, from bark to branch to leaf or needle - to raise a massive, growing thing high into the air and hold it there.      

            Out our window, beautiful long-needled branches, ends tipped in emerald clusters and bearing bright chartreuse cones sticky with sap, had long since grown up above the gutters and beyond. Each spring, new growth on the nearest branch would beckon to come right into the room, Little Shop of Horrors-like, growing noticeably closer year after year.

            From far down the block, our tree was a visible landmark, welcoming us home after a trip or serving as a reference point for first-time guests. Its brittle, brown cones littered our lawn and walkway. Its lower branches had to be trimmed annually to allow passage to the front door. At Christmas, I'd string lights across its boughs and top them with a star. Our kids grew up and moved away; neighbors came and went. Our tree stayed.

            Now the fateful day had arrived. As I watched, oblivious branches danced merrily in the wind. Or were they waving goodbye! Or were those pleas to not do what the woodsman's axe had been summoned to do? Necessity governed our decision, like regrettably eradicating a wasp's perfect nest hanging in the wrong place. We'd weighed all alternatives and sadly reached the only conclusion.

            Neither my wife nor I wanted to be around while the dismemberment took place. She left, but I stayed to keep an eye on the loggers. When she came home several hours later, branches and logs were gone as we'd specified, leaving empty ground and a level clean stump, and stray remnants of sawdust here and there.

            Part of the personality of our home of thirty years was gone. The prospect of planting a more appropriate tree - say, a modest Japanese maple - was little consolation. My wife and I didn't survey the scene for long. We held hands and walked back in the house, quiet with our own thoughts. 

            What would Bill Douglas have done? As a son of the hard, dry land of Eastern Washington - not to mention many years on the bench - he was nothing if not a realist. He'd probably have given the tree last rites and bid the woodsman do his job. He'd help buck the logs and put them up for firewood to be used after a long winter's hike up a flank of Mount Adams. No tears, I bet.

            RIP, Bill Douglas. RIP, Douglas Fir.

 Postscript:

            The Interior Department won the case but lost the war. The majority opinion in the Morton Case held that, although the Sierra Club by itself did not have standing to sue, a named member of an organization - a hiker or fisherman, say - did have standing to allege injury to his or her environmental or aesthetic interests. This changed the way environmental lawsuits were brought thereafter.

            A personal note. In late 1968, Justice Douglas graciously agreed to swear me in as an attorney along with others I rounded up in Washington DC who'd just learned they'd passed the California Bar Exam.