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Urbanites divorced from seasons’ change and transplant large trees that wither
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AS the weekend approaches, temperatures steadily edge higher and we can smell spring in the air.
According to the Chinese lunar calendar, we observed jingzhe on March 6. Literally meaning “waking of insects,” this term suggests fundamental transformation taking place in the soil, insects, and plants, as a result of the steady altitude change of the sun.
This Friday is another landmark day, the Spring Equinox, when the yin and yang, day and night, heat and cold, are perfectly in balance. It’s the time for sowing and irrigation.
Not long ago, our whole civilization was still an elaboration of the seasonal changes. The year’s 24 jieqi (solar terms) are timely reminders of the changes. Emperors would make sacrifices to the god of the harvest, and ordinary people would examine these changes for signs of eternity. This sensitivity to seasonal changes underlies typical Chinese outlook and attitudes, in which doing it right and in season is much more important than doing it fast.
Today we have become insensitive to signs of perennial budding and leafing in the desolate urban landscape.
This lack of attunement is peculiar to modernized human beings. For them, these seasonal changes are no longer dependable facts of life. They are certainly not facts of life and death.
These numerous seasonal changes conflict with our sense of industrial precision and standardization.
Of course, you can visit parks and be surprised by the revolution of seasons in all their splendor, in the blooming of magnolias and plum trees. But you might have to drive there.
On February 25, while inspecting a Beijing neighborhood smothered in smog, President Xi Jinping cited an online suggestion about setting aside more “useless space” in cities. “Useless,” Xi explained, probably means open green spaces, for the people.
With urban land increasingly grabbed and turned into exclusive compounds and commercial complexes, open spaces afford urban residents the only chance for shared experience.
March 12 was national Tree Planting Day, and it should have provided our citizens a day to pay tribute to the changes in nature. Unfortunately, we no longer have space to plant trees in cities. Instead, we were called to “adopt” trees, by pledging money.
Born and bred urbanites have lost their faculty of sensing the advent of spring. Now they turn to meteorologists who work it out on computers.
In a globalized world, we urbanites need not fear punishment for failing to be responsive to these changes in nature, because we have mastered the consummate art of “purchase.”
Our forefathers used to say that “it takes 10 years to grow a tree, but a hundred to rear a man.” Today, you can buy both with money. Our top universities no longer take pride in the transformative power of education, though they become expert at attracting (or buying) the students with the most promise.
Meaningless metrics
Similarly, nearly all the trees recently introduced to urban settings have been transplanted from their native habitats, sometimes thousands of kilometers away and at no small a price.
These “outsourcing” of nature allows us to taste the fruits of labor without having to soil our hands with dirt.
In a press conference on February 25, Zhao Shucong, chief of the State Forestry Administration, said that effort should be made to end the practice of uprooting mature trees and transplanting them to cities, in our eagerness to conjure up forests overnight.
Transplanting grown trees from their native habitat, Zhao explained, hurts the local ecology and worsens soil erosion. What’s more, these trees, once transplanted to alien environments, can never achieve the growth and abundance possible in their native habitat.
In Chongqing, for instance, an ambitious forestation campaign aimed to drastically raise forest coverage to 45 percent by 2017. Since the project was kicked off in 2008, about 23 million gingko trees have been transplanted, at a cost of 17.8 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion). A huge number of those trees have died. In Tongnan Industrial Park, almost none of the transplanted gingkos survived.
It has recently been reported that forest coverage in Shanghai is edging up steadily, and projected to reach 15 percent by 2015. But relevant authorities should find out if these flattering figures have been attained at the expense of other regions. More important, we should find out how these figures translate into positive benefits for residents.
I used to enjoy the shade of plane trees after exiting the metro station near my office. But a couple of years ago, these trees were uprooted overnight to make way for a new metro station. Near my home, the old, leafy campus of Shanghai Maritime University, dominated by camphor trees decades old, is being pulverized. From its ashes will rise a state-of-the-art commercial complex and exclusive high-end residences.
Our ambitious urban management officials have acquired an uncanny knack for manipulating the metrics of green space to their advantage.
They should explain how these metrics relate to our everyday lives.
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