As I have done many times in the past and will do many times again, I stand alone amongst the great trees of my home, Vancouver Island. My greatest companions and oldest friends, they rustle in the breeze to create an organic orchestra that performs for no audience. My heart aches as I close my eyes against the sting of tears – one sense turns off to illuminate the others. The smell of the cedar, the tickle of branches on my arms and birdsong in the distance. The goodbye is always bittersweet as I prepare to leave for a year abroad to enhance my studies. I am leaving the coastal Douglas Firs for another much larger island, with my ambitions to be an environmental lawyer like a blossom growing in my chest. My vision of this future is fragile but beautiful and with every night of hard studying and rewarding grades I am closer to one day protecting these trees from the evils of development.
Slowly, as if not to startle it, I approach an old Douglas Fir and place my palm on its rugged linear bark that traces lines up to the sky. To this tree, always a great listener, I whisper my thoughts, which swirl around my head like leaves picked up in a summer breeze. While travel is a gift and the best education, the privilege of leaving home comes at a high cost. The Co2 emission resulting from my flight from Canada to the UK comes to well over a tonne, while the tree I rest my hand against can absorb a mere 48kg in a year. Combine that with buses, trains, and cars and 8-10% of the world’s global warming-inducing emissions are coming from travel alone (World Travel and Tourism Council). The troubling state of our atmosphere, as described by the UN global goal 13, requires “the widest possible international cooperation aimed at accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.” It is this cooperation that I wish to one day facilitate from a legal standpoint, a huge undertaking but one that stems from the same roots that all of my choices grow from.
My daily habits will stick with me no matter where I go: low consumption and careful sourcing, deferring to walking or taking my trustworthy bicycle, and a million little things like limited clothes washing, packing food over purchasing packaged goods, sewing my own clothes and altering what I have, reusable containers and reusing food containers. My community will change, but conservation societies in my new home will help me ground and continue my environmental practices in a new landscape. The tempting but fallacious idea that one person’s choices make no difference is a mindset that is both infectious and harmful, and I will not be deterred from making every effort to make my year abroad as kind to the planet as I can. This is my promise to the trees as I make my goodbyes.
