Why We Need To Stop Cutting Down Trees Yesterday

What Interstellar, Philadelphia's Parks & Rec, Elon Musk, and the German Empire Have in Common

I have a confession to make.

The gravity problem in Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 star-studded space odyssey, confounded me the first two times I watched the film. Once I figured out what was going on, my own sense of betrayal during the final scenes in that tubular space station mirrored the way Cooper, an ace pilot portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, experiences gut-wrenching betrayal when he realizes Dr. Brand never intended to solve the gravity problem before shooting him off into space.

It was only in that culminating, final moment that it dawned on me that for the whole film no one ever intended to save the Earth.

Never even tried to.

In fact, not saving the Earth was the whole point of the movie, and I had completely managed to miss it.

Twice.

Normally, I’d be too embarrassed to admit as much. In this case, the disconnect led me to a greater revelation, so what the heck. Originally, I had mistakenly assumed the gravity problem was part and parcel of the Earth’s failing ecosystem, or its ecocide, which is a phrase repeated as often in Interstellar as gravity, love, and black holes and will be repeated here as often as betrayal, Philadelphia, and heritage trees.

In my defense, that kind of billionaire tech mindset that views the Earth as a resource to be used up and cast aside like an aging first wife for the tantalizing fruits of a younger, newer planet is alien to my own conservationist mindset. However, the second time around, for personal reasons, I was more engrossed in the plot and even more invested in the idea of saving the Earth and finally pieced together that “solving the gravity problem” was not “solving ecocide” but rather a more elegant way for humans to love and leave Earth with all their stuff in tow.

(More spoilers) When Cooper (aka Matthew McConaughey) returns from his mission a century later, it’s supposed to be a happy ending. Humanity now inhabits an Elon Musk wetdream of a space hotel, and no one even cares whether the Earth is managing to rewild herself once humans departed; a phenomenon environmentalists have noted the environment is incredibly adept at managing to do once humans stop effing with it.

It’s more or less assumed the Earth is a dead husk. Oh well. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately, in our present era, we do have to care about ecocide. It’s a phenomenon we’re still very much living through and a word, unlike black holes and gravity, that’s cropped up too often in my own life recently. For the past two weeks, I’ve been witnessing and doing my best to help to protest against the clearcutting of old growth trees in Philly’s FDR Park. There’s also a lawsuit brought by nearby residents in South Philly I've been following that neither the Orphans’ Court nor Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler, who’s rumored to have ties to the opposition (as in her ex-husband worked for Fairmount Park Conservancy— aka the “conservancy” doing the clearcutting) deigned to even listen to in court.

That’s why, while grieving the loss of South Philly’s only canopy, I felt drawn to rewatching an old favorite movie that I thought was thematically on point and to ponder what it’s going to be like when, and, let’s face it, not if, at our current trajectory we lose the climate battle.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic; rather, for the sake of my own children, I’m trying to be a realist. This past April was the hottest month in recorded human history, and no one cares. It barely made the headlines. Mature trees, and especially forests full of them, are our greatest assets against man-made climate change and yet we’re chopping them down at unprecedented rates.

It’s honestly a conundrum as complicated as any of Dr. Brand’s fancy astrophysics equations, though, in this case, it all boils down to one very simple question:

How can we be so foolish?

I’m not asking rhetorically, either. It’s a question that’s been obsessing me recently, and if anyone has answers I’d love to hear them. Personally, I didn’t expect a fun adventure film to hand me part of the solution to my own gravity problem, but it did.

After reading and pondering and researching this subject and interviewing experts in the field from activists to lawyers to scientists, I believe if we’re to defeat climate change, first we have to defeat a mindset so prevalent it’s in our headlines, or lack of them, and so embedded in our Hollywood blockbusters that we fail to see its fallacy. Christopher Nolan is a master storyteller, but we need a better story than hoping tech will save us. We need to learn to value our ecosystem as a living entity, the way so many indigenous folks like the Lenape, a tribe indigenous to the Delco area and who have also voiced opposition to the clearcutting of FDR Park, view our environment as possessing an intelligence of its own and not as a resource to be controlled, manipulated, and ultimately used up, while crossing our fingers that love and black holes will one day save us.

So while I love the movie Interstellar— Christopher Nolan fanboys please don’t come at me— it might be one of my top five favorite movies of all time— I despise the mindset that views the Earth as nothing but a resource for humans to profit from and to manipulate. That mindset isn’t some faroff futuristic one fueled by life-or-death necessity, either.

Consider Elon Musk’s offer in 2021 of a million dollars to anyone who could create a technological fix to sequester carbon. As renowned author and sustainable forester Peter Wohlleben puts it in The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us If We Let Them, our trees might put up their leaves and branches in response to Elon “—and say to him, “We’ve already invented this, although it was more than 300 million years ago. Does that count?”

That kind of futuristic-seeming mechanistic mindset is actually pretty old-fashioned as I’ll show in a minute, and it was on full display here in Philadelphia where our own Fairmount Park Conservancy has been chopping down more heritage trees in order, in their words, “to bring nature, water, and human activity into balance in one unified system”. While there are some good things about their current project in South Philly—for example, it seems there’s a genuine desire to keep the park from being submerged as climate change causes the nearby Delaware River to inexorably rise. Nevertheless, any reasonable person would agree their response is as batshit as their intentions might be (arguably) noble. In the face of all we now know, calling the clear-cutting of hundreds of mature trees to replace them with 30 acres of plastic astroturf “conservation” is bonkers to put it mildly.

So on one hand, we have the Inquirer paying lip service to this plan with, “The city says this renovation will help maximize the park’s usage and render it more climate-resilient.” Oh, gee, well, if the city says so, it must be true. Is parroting officials now journalism? Not to mention cutting and pasting directly from FPC’s master plan for FDR Park, which is full of speculation dressed up with scientific-sounding numbers, “Some of the heritage trees are dying or will be dead within the next 10 to 15 years because of climate change. Under the plan, 7,000 new trees will be planted to replace the 48, along with 1,700 new shrubs in the 33-acre wetland.”

That all sounds peachy… on paper. Except the old trees weren’t dying and the new 7,000 trees are a bunch of sticks in the ground. In reality, what the conservancy is doing is all textbook forest (mis) management that traces back to practices first popularized in the German Empire (more on that in a moment) and really has nothing to do with sustainability or our current climate, which is nothing like the pre-industrial one from which these scientific forestry practices originated.

 As for the city’s claim that those trees were old or dying, I saw their fresh, green canopies for myself (go to savethemeadows.com for further evidence or watch my own video below). And if that’s not enough, consider that Peter Wohlleben has heard the same claim from cities so many times he could write in 2021 with what feels like astonishing prescience in this case, “…this narrative is simply a public-relations ploy that allows foresters to cut down large, valuable trees without having to worry about public protest.” See for yourself.

Pictured: a healthy Linden tree being razed to make way for plastic soccer fields at FDR Park on May 4, 2024.

At this point you might be wondering why a German forester’s opinion about Philadelphia’s trees counts for much? There’s a very good reason, actually! It’s because Germany invented so-called “scientific forestry.” Or as German forester, Peter Wohlleben puts it in his book, “It’s… because German forestry has influenced forest practices worldwide since the nineteenth century* and continues to do so” and because, much to Peter’s chagrin, “it is still considered to be an exemplary model to follow.”

Note: from my own research, I’ve learned that date is more like the freaking mid-eighteenth century.

To borrow a phrase from that same distant past since borrowing from centuries past is how we’re crafting modern policy these days: the proof is in the pudding. Indubitably, the city’s plan to replace healthy heritage trees with a bunch of tiny sticks mimics the 300-year-old German same-age plantation model of planting, which, as Germany is learning now and beginning to change, does not a healthy eco-system make. In fact, it proved so disastrous for colonized places like India that since decolonization in the 1940s they’ve long abandoned the practice and India is now one of the ten most forest-rich nations in the world. And we call them a developing country when we’re the ones destroying our own forests through a mishmash of city-wide corruption and past traditions?

(Cool fact: did you know the word tree-hugger originated from India?)

 If Cherelle Parker, our new mayor, who has promised a “greener Philadelphia” and who inherited a terrible master plan for FDR Park really does want a greener city that old 18TH CENTURY mindset should not be how new wetlands will be designed.

And a healthy canopy is a thing of wonder. I’m not speaking of its beauty alone, although that’s refreshing for the urban eye, I refer to its ability to cool a climate, to store carbon, to clean the air, and even to mitigate flooding. (Learn more about the benefits of urban trees at World Economic Forum.) A plan to mitigate flooding that does not incorporate existing mature tree canopy with all their benefits is an objectively bad plan.

So what is going to go in to replace those magical trees with their incredible, innate carbon-storing powers that defy even the imagination of a tech billionaire like Elon Musk?

Astroturf aka plastic playing fields that are supposedly for the children of our community. And here’s where the design process shows that something more sinister is afoot: why do our children need around THIRTY ACRES of plastic that will be accessibly by permit only, not to mention toxic underfoot with links to childhood cancer?

It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Unless.

Unless you maybe view it like a tech-minded Elon Musk or a Christopher Nolan would.

“We’ve cut down these enormous, old trees but we’ve planted others somewhere else. Equation solved.”

Problems only begun.

Here’s one problem I saw with my own two eyes: on that gray, drizzly Cinco de Mayo eve that I drove to the other side of Philly to witness the clearcutting for myself, to my surprise, I ended up feet away from a small group of four women, a group that included Maura McCarthy, head of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, a couple of her subordinates, and one other protestor. I’m not a contentious person (to a fault maybe), and so it would have been out of character for me to confront her as the sole other protestor present that rainy afternoon was bravely doing.

Instead, I politely introduced myself and asked Maura why she was doing what she was doing. We stood together and watched a chainsaw eat into a large linden, its wide-spreading canopy shivering with rainwater and potentially full of nests. Not that anyone checked first, but it’s a fair bet. They chopped down FDR Park during nesting season, after all. I stopped filming while we chatted, partially because I naively assumed something so magnificent would take hours to decimate. It took minutes to destroy what nature had taken decades to build.

A horrendous crack rent the air when the enormous tree toppled, and we all jumped. Since my back was turned, I missed the moment on video. Instead, I captured Maura’s expression with my own two eyes. I wouldn’t say tears came to her eyes as she watched her will be done, but she winced an awful lot and seemed on the verge of some real, deep emotion of some kind. I won’t speculate.

Regardless, her distress made no sense. She was in charge of this whole operation, after all.

That’s when I knew I needed to be involved with opposing whatever absolute chaos it was that I was witnessing. Incidentally, the second the court stay was lifted that Friday, May 3 and before an appeal could be processed in court that following Monday, May 6, Maura McCarthy snuck in with Seravalli Contractors to chop those old, heritage trees down as fast as they could manage to do it, which as I saw for myself was pretty damn fast.

That sneakiness is par for the course (pun intended, the Conservancy pulled the same move at Cobbs Creek, clearcutting a hundred acres before a plan could be finalized), But Maura was getting what she wanted. More dead trees. Again. So why was she visibly upset?  

“Of course, it’s very sad,” she told me, reminding me strongly of the walrus of Lewis Carroll fame, metaphorically dabbing her semi-streaming eyes with a pocket handkerchief while gobbling up the oysters who’d trusted him as our trees had been entrusted to her. “But it had to be done.”

“Why?” I asked her, puzzled by the combination of crocodile tears and sanctimony. Maura launched into a whole spiel about the necissity of mitigating flooding with the construction of new wetlands (without mentioning once that the wetlands only need to be mitigated because the Philadelphia International Airport is building an expansion for Amazon into its own nearby wetlands and by federal law must replace those wetlands with new ones).  She asked me not to record our conversation, so it’s hard for me to recall every detail, but I do remember she triumphantly name-dropped the Army Corps of Engineers as if their work on the project was an endorsement of the plan.

It’s not. I don’t recall her exact words as I said, but the Army Corps of Engineers issues permits for wetland mitigation. They don’t design or endorse these projects.

Finally, Maura said one thing I’ll never forget. After she finished explaining about the repeated flooding that would only worsen with climate change, noting it repeatedly as her justification for why they had to “shift the soil around”— she added a phrase so puzzling for a conservationist to utter that each syllable stuck with me, “It really doesn’t matter what goes on top.”

How can a conservationist speak so coldly of trees, I wondered?

“Then why does it have to be astroturf?” I asked instead.

I could see I’d stumped her with that simple question, which is when I knew it very much did matter what went on top and that the rest of her spiel had been just that. A spiel aka a long story or fast speech typically used as a means of persuasion. A sales pitch. Tara Rasheed, her senior director of capital projects, filled the silence with her card and an offer to set up a coffee between the two of us where I could ask Maura more questions.

Then Maura thanked me for helping her to feel better, which, for the third time in my short encounter with the head of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, managed to shock me with her disconnect between reality and emotion.

I was trying to understand why the city was clearcutting old trees, its own best defense against climate change, I was not trying to make Maura “feel better”, so let me set the record straight: Maura McCarthy’s actions are wrong and underhanded, and she should resign as head of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, not only for her sneaky actions that rainy Saturday but for her repeated record of clearcutting our city’s heritage trees despite the opposition of its people and for the profit of private organizations.

I know it can be too easy to call people you disagree with “fascists” or “Nazis”. There’s even a name for it: Godwin’s Law. Essentially, every online discussion if continued long enough will lead someone to comparing someone to Hitler.

I don’t want to go that far.

I do want to compare actions like Maura’s to Eichmann’s, though.

I don’t think Maura is evil. I do think her actions evoke Eichmann. They are Eichmannesque if you will.

Not unlike Eichmann, Maura seemed stunningly down-to-earth. She could have just as easily been a typical friendly, if uptight, librarian, or the manager of a Starbucks making sure the trash was taken out as much as a conservationist removing pesky trees that “had to go”. A normal bureaucrat “doing her job”, which is supposed to be “conservancy” but since conservancy in the official purview if you remember is really another word for 18th century German scientific forestry, her job is to treat the Earth like a Starbucks. It's a mechanistic worldview where the environment is just a thing to be measured and used like coffee spoons. Therefore, conservancy for someone like Maura, a professional bureaucrat, is translated into cutting down priceless, old trees, our children’s most valuable inheritance in a warming world, just because there’s a master plan that says she has to do it.

“It had to be done,” Maura said to me as we both stood there stunned after the enormous tree fell over.

Did it? Why? In other words, following bad orders and doing bad things “has to be done”. That’s why to me her muddled emotions evoked Eichmann. It’s Eichmannesque when people profess their love for the environment and then cut down heritage trees anyway. What I’m calling out is the disconnect, not the person. I am not a journalist, but there’s a story here, and I wish someone would investigate it before Maura McCarthy manages to pave over every inch of Philadelphia, because I don’t think she’s going to stop. If our own consciences don't stop us from doing what we know is wrong, then what will?

Consider Hannah Arendt. Just as I found Maura to be an ordinary, bland managerial type, irritated by customer [community] complaints, who could have as easily run a Starbucks as a conservancy, Arendt “found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case... Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’.”

I have no doubt if I’d had a conversation with Eichmann, he too would have left it cheered up. My husband calls me the Mayor of Nowhere (after a joke by John Mulaney). It’s my best and worst quality. As for Maura’s quality, her inability to reconcile her conscience with her actions, Arendt dubbed these characteristics ‘the banality of evil’: “Eichmann was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless.”

While I don’t want to throw around careless, broad terms like evil and Nazi, at the least we can agree it is shallow and clueless to rebrand the function of public parks in order to sell them off for private use and thereby evade sanctions in court. Killing a whole people is monstrous, obviously, but what about killing the environment that nourishes them? The climate that nurtures us all. Asthma rates are climbing in this city and are triple the national rate. My 8-year-old was recently diagnosed with asthma, and almost every family I know in Philly has one child with asthma. Trees can clean our air better than anything else, and yet we’re still chopping paradise down to put in more and more parking lots.

The world that will nurture our children and our children’s children is being decimated by people like Kathryn Ott Lovell (Philadelphia’s Parks and Rec Commissioner), Rep Kenyatta Johnson (the man behind the plan), the judges who wouldn’t even deign to hear this case, and Maura McCarthy, the head of Fairmount Park Conservancy.

So what else besides shallow, clueless, and maybe even evil (they said it, I didn’t) might future generations call Maura McCarthy’s muddled tears in that park once it’s a wasteland? Will they care about Maura McCarthy’s sadness any more than I did? What will they say about our own inaction?

The bureaucrats will only do what they think they can get away with doing, so when will we ourselves begin to dub ecocide a real crime?

If we’re not ready to call them evil, then why can’t muddled actions that harm the environment at least be deemed criminal? Why can’t these officials wait for the community to get on board with their designs? Who do our public lands belong to, after all? How more criminal could it have been than to craft the plan to decimate FDR Park in backroom deals? And while the community was ostensibly surveyed, not all the surveys were returned, and, according to Save the Meadows, the community’s survey answers were disregarded anyway. Their top choices for what a renovation could be were ignored in favor of creating nearly 30 acres of plastic practice fields—the least popular survey choice.

Theories differ as to why the city is building those fields there—maybe it’s because of the airport, maybe it’s FIFA, the World Cup is being held in Philadelphia in 2026 after all, maybe it’s to profit from teams traveling up and down the nearby I-95 corridor, so close by, now that the trees are down, the overpass can be seen and heard from the park— I’m not a journalist, and I don’t know how to investigate rumors, but the facts remain that those old heritage trees were far more precious than yet more athletic fields. Our city already has plenty of other, centrally located athletic fields, ones that could use some maintenance and offer more access to our city’s children. I know as a Philly soccer mom myself, I have no interest in driving through the hell that is the gridlock that surrounds 76 near FDR Park to take my child to soccer practice on cancerous turf. And for those children who can access the city’s subway, will they be able to afford the permits to play there? And don’t those children deserve non-toxic playing fields, too? And breathable air?

If bureaucrats keep following orders and not their consciences, and I saw Maura’s conscience on display, I saw real grief on her face when that beautiful old tree cracked in two, our Interstellar future will be assured. Future Philadelphians will broil on their perfectly green, perfectly plastic playing fields. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to leave it up to an Elon Musk or a Matthew McConaughey or a Maura McCarthy to save us with one of their marvelous technological tricks.

I want us to start saving ourselves. Most of all, I want us to stop cutting down our trees.

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Three hundred 40-year-old trees still remain in FDR Park. Go to Save the Meadows to learn how to get involved in the fight to stop the development at FDR Park and throughout Philadelphia. Wherever you are in the world, remember to act locally and think globally. Get involved with conservationists in your own area and check in on your own trees!