This month of September, Daniela Elza is sending a Tree Poem a Day to BC Premier, the Prime Minister, and select Ministers and MPs calling on them to work across party lines to protect Ancient Ecosystems and to protect the peaceful forest defenders at Fairy Creek, BC.
Dear Premier Horgan, Prime Minister Trudeau, Ministers, MPs, current and future MLAs,
It will take extraordinary vision and concerted effort on many fronts to stop our province and country from burning and to combat the climate crisis. But fighting the old-growth forest defenders and protectors is not one of them.
In a recent Globe and Mail article Grand Chief Phillip said, “You can’t simply parcel this off as an Indigenous cultural rights issue. You can’t parcel it off as an economic issue. You must remain focused on the fact that old growth forests in British Columbia are at the point of extinction. We all have a responsibility to do whatever we can to protect them.”
I am a writer and educator who spent the last pandemic year writing tree-poems with my students. They had many questions I could not answer. Our policies do not make sense for the bold action we need to take today to preserve our life support ecosystems. I have to ask: WHY?
Studies out of UBC say: “Trees are the most efficient air conditioner we’ve got”. [https://beyond.ubc.ca/fighting-climate-change-through-our-urban-forests/] In our urban environments this has become particularly urgent in the heat waves. In other words, stop cutting down our most efficient cooling systems on the planet. At Fairy Creek the machines are lining up to resume the ancient tree massacre. WHY?
I am sending you a tree-poem-a-day this month to inspire you to implement policies that will protect our Fairy Creeks, our home, our ancient forests on the verge of extinction, our children, and their future.
Just like the housing crisis (enabled by policy) is manufacturing homelessness at unprecedented rates, destroying our ecologies is rendering many species homeless and extinct.
This month the injunction at Fairy Creek will be reviewed and we are going back to the polls. Please commit to more than words. Stop the ancient forest logging, protect the people who are peacefully protecting the ancient ecosystems at Fairy Creek against police violence and violations. Stop policing our right to clean air, diverse ecology, and our chances for survival.
Instead, put these efforts and funds into a vision we can all gather around. Work across parties, across provinces, and across borders. The planet knows no boundaries, or political divides.
I hope these poems give you inspiration, and the courage to protect the natural wealth we are abusing and losing.
To destroy what is irreplaceable is to steal from the future.
DAY 9 – Today’s poem comes from poet activist and London’s inaugural Poet Laureate Penn Kemp, who has believed in the sentience of trees forever and especially in the ongoing, essential presence of old growth forest.
Kind Regards,
Daniela Elza Vancouver, BC————-
Poem for the Fairy Creek Elders
by Penn Kemp
When Buddhist monks ordain the great Cedar
no axe can approach, none can wield harm.
May we too wrap saffron ribbon round
the girth of beloved ancients. If only symbol
would suffice to protect the great ones.
We breathe trees, their life-giving air and atmosphere.
Until trees breathe us, how can we speak for them?
In protest, we appeal nonetheless, we demand, we assert.
In spirit, I join the seniors who arm in arm surround
the old ones who witness millennia along the watershed
unless their slow heartbeat in heartwood is stopped.
Cardboard cut-outs crafted into trees are planted on
the Legislature lawn, though simulacrum can never
present the magnificence of old-growth forest.
Who can halt this unacceptable harvest of living deities,
these trees who are the elders of the oldest among us?
And this pine from Southwestern Ontario:
Penn Kemp 