If a Tree Falls

Investigating a murder on an Indian reservation in the movie Thunderheart, local tribal police officer Walter Crow Horse (played by Graham Greene - the Canadian actor, not the British novelist)  gives FBI agent Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) some advice on how to look for clues.  "You gotta listen to the trees," he tells him.

I agree.  I think this Native American wisdom can tell us a lot of things about what's going on - especially with the weather.  This past Sunday, a very severe thunderstorm suddenly materialized in my town and knocked out the electricity on my street for two hours and change (if you were led to my July 7 post about Edward Snowden from Facebook and Twitter, and you noticed the three-hour gap between the time of the post and the time of the links, that was the reason; I'd published it just before the power went out), but it also sliced a huge limb from my neighbors' tree.  A few slivers of wood kept it connected to the tree, with a metal utility pole brace and an oak tree across the street holding it aloft.  It was taken down and cut up the next day, leaving a nasty gash in the tree it came from.

Although the tree itself remained standing, fallen trees and limbs in storms have become a regular occurrence in my neighborhood.  During a nor'easter in March 2010, an evergreen tree fell on my garage roof.  Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011 felled a huge tree along the street next to ours, taking down electrical wires; the October snowstorm that same year took out a limb that ended up on our street and brought electrical wires and an insulator cap down with it.  And Hurricane Sandy? The storm Chris Matthews was so glad we had toppled three trees almost simultaneously in the wooded lot behind our house and an evergreen next to someone's house a few doors up from us.

I've never seen so many trees go down within four years, and the violent nature of the storms that felled them only shows how serious climate change is. Storms are getting nastier and more ferocious.  The summertime thunderstorm that would have been welcomed for providing relief from the heat not too long ago has now become something to dread.  (Ask people in Ohio and Kentucky, who today just had storms with tropical storm-force gusts and several inches of rain knock out their power and flood their local highways, about that.)  Winter storms and tropical storms that can occur just before Halloween knock out electricity for days.  Nor'easters we could once endure with a nice cup of hot chocolate leave us shivering in the dark.  You can see it in the trees.  Storms in my part of New Jersey rarely toppled trees in my town before, but now they're getting felled on a regular basis just in my neighborhood alone!

The trees are talking.  They're offering last words, in fact.  When are people who could do something substantial about climate change going to listen?