Ponytail Picks #1 - Trees
We’re going out on a bit of a limb here, but we think you’ll find this first edition of Ponytail Picks to be a real treet.
LISTEN
Bruce Cockburn, “If a Tree Falls”
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s a commonly quoted philosophical quip that gets one thinking about the nature of reality as it relates to one’s perception. In Bruce Cockburn’s 1988 song “If a Tree Falls,” he cleverly contorts the question into a scathing critique of ecological apathy by shifting the onus from the tree (“If a tree falls in the forest… does it make a sound?”) onto the observer: “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?” The trees are there, Cockburn confirms, all “mist and mystery, teeming green,” and they’re falling too, “in cortege rhythm,” but do we care?
Overtop a chugging, 80s-tinged folk-rock groove, Cockburn speaks words of wrath that lose nearly all of their patient poetics by the second verse (“Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day / Take out people who’ve lived with this for 100,000 years / Inject a billion burgers worth of beef”) as he makes it clear that we were the ones who caused this conundrum of trees falling in the first place.
See, the thing is—and this speaks again to the anthropocentric and colonialist ignorance that Cockburn is calling out—there’s always someone or something around to hear a tree fall in the forest, whether it be the aforementioned indigenous people who’ve lived here for millennia or the plants and animals of ecosystems which have been here for even longer. So, to quote the words of another hippie who said the Kingdom of God is like a tree filled with birds, “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”
- JB
WATCH
5 Things to Watch Where Trees Act as Portals
Stranger Things, Season 1, Episode 5 & 6 - Nature is mysterious and sticky. It does not have your back.
Alice in Wonderland - Fantasy proves to be just as absurd as reality.
Sleepy Hollow - Death breeds life. Life breeds death. Burton uses the same tree for both.
Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban - Once you enter the passage, know that hard truths will be revealed.
The Princess Bride - Death breeds life. Life breeds death. “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”
- AK
READ
The Golden Spruce, John Vaillant
An environmental activist in protest commits a heinous act against a local indigenous community and then disappears. Sounds like a new Netflix series, but it’s actually the plot of a true story written nearly 20 years ago.
John Vaillant offers more than a TV-ready tale, though. With his excitable prose, he turns his setting—Haida Gwaii—into the story’s central character, the actor readers empathize with the most. The emphasis on place helps him avoid any finger-pointing, turning his book into a masterpiece of long-form journalism.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
For a book about war, Ernest spends a lot of time pointing his terse camera at the forest surrounding his group of rebels.
Certain circles like to argue about Hemingway. Is he worth the hype? Should we forgive him his sins? Who are we not focusing on because we keep talking about him? I’d like to sidestep all that and just tell you to read this book. Read it, and pay attention to the pines.
The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
Read this again, as an adult. When we were kids, we thought this was a nice book about a nice tree being nice to a nice boy. Turns out, it was a simple tale that shows with surprising accuracy what an abusive relationship looks like. Read it, and ask yourself: are you the boy? Are you the tree? Don’t be that boy. And for God’s sake, don’t be that tree.
- AK
That’s all for this week, folks! Tune in next time as we explore our next theme: borders.