Anthropomorphizing Trees

In yet another sign of the decline of the West, a British "organic gardening guru" has decried the custom of Christmas trees saying that the practice is "torturing" the trees to death.

In his column in Amateur Gardening magazine Bob Flowerdew, 52, a regular panellist on Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, challenges the way that Britons take real trees into their homes and "slowly torture them to death".

He says buying an artificial tree - and saving a real tree from death over Christmas - is more environmentally friendly.

Christmas tree growers in Briton are rightly angered by this, pointing out that the growing of the tree is an environmental positive. When the trees are cut, fresh ones are planted. One can safely assume that considerably more pollution is emitted during the production of the artificial tree than during the growing of the live one. One can also point out that the artificial tree presumably uses plastic. Said material is derived, of course, from oil. So saying that use of a real tree is less environmentally friendly than use of an artificial tree is rather foolish. One suspects that Mr. Flowerdew is a bit misanthropic about this matter.

For an interesting discussion of misanthropic behavior and the anthropomorphizing tendencies of those people, see this month's Smithsonian. Paul Theroux is discussing it in relation to animals, but it holds true for trees as well.

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control. The classics of this type are single species obsessives, like Joy Adamson, the Born Free woman who raised Elsa the lioness and was celebrated in East Africa as a notorious scold; or Dian Fossey, the gorilla woman, who was a drinker and a recluse. "Grizzly man" Tim Treadwell was regarded, in some circles, as an authority on grizzlies, but Werner Herzog's documentary shows him to have been deeply disturbed, perhaps psychopathic and violent.