In This Inferno, Trees Are Our Lifeline: How We Can’t Survive Without Them

The truth hits us hard, piercing through us, suffocating us. It’s a deeply personal assault, a barrage of sweat in our desperate search for breaths of air. The heatwave bitterly reminds us: we cannot survive without trees in the scorching furnaces our cities become. We cannot live without these green accomplices, without their welcoming shade, without their canopies that temper the heat and their protective aura.

As France swelters, woods, forests, and parks become our last sanctuaries. They are our natural air conditioners. They are what literally allow us to breathe and give us relief. Despite the myriad of misfortunes and injustices it brings, the heatwave at least merits recognition for this: it exposes our utter dependence, revealing our vulnerability which we feel in every pore.

It’s time to stop treating trees as replaceable urban furniture, as mere aesthetic decoration or unnecessary trinkets. The trees that unaware municipalities uproot and remove to make way for parking lots or more profitable real estate projects deserve our full respect and attention.

These are living beings that should be recognized for what they truly are: giants with tremendous powers, the fragile builders of our world’s habitability, the patient craftsmen of life on Earth who shelter our existences under their canopies.

Despite our technological gadgets, we find ourselves defenseless and powerless in the face of what is to come. We need to rely on other forces to face the future.

In his remarkable book, philosopher Emanuele Coccia describes leaves as “the origin of the world.” Yet, he laments, “we barely speak of them and their names escape us. Philosophy has always neglected them.”

Our friend Francis Hallé, who passed away earlier this year, also expressed regret in his book aimed at elected officials and administrators — written in 2011, it remains timely. “Trees deserve more than the poor esteem we hold them in,” he wrote. “They are alive, beautiful, useful, discreet, robust, silent, autonomous, comforting, easy to satisfy, and completely non-violent. I ask you: among you, the elected, who can claim the same?”

Trees are essential to us, especially today when one observes — as an arborist with a thermometer in hand — the temperature difference under a tree versus on the asphalt, or between a park and a tram line. The difference can sometimes exceed 30°C.

In her book Respire (2023), Marielle Macé refers to trees and forests as our “cosmic lungs.” Trees not only provide services, they fill more than just utilitarian roles, she says. They are an ancient power that oxygenates our atmosphere.

Indeed, who else is capable of turning solar energy into living matter? Who else can summon clouds, bring down the rain? Who rejuvenates the soil, purifies water? Who humidifies the air and lowers temperatures? Who filters pollutants?

Planting trees in cities must become a political necessity. Not merely a campaign slogan, not just an advertisement or another element of greenwashing. It is evident that the projects implemented today are grossly inadequate; they do not measure up to the gravity of the situation.

Half of the public space in Paris is still devoted to automobiles. We are suffocating from concrete and cars, from the dull gray of our metropolises and our glaring lack of greenery. Yet the sound of chainsaws continues to roar in cities. Every year, trees fall for new roads, shopping centers, parking spaces.

It is urgent to declare a moratorium on these tree-felling projects, which also slowly kill us. Paving over soils is no longer negotiable under this stifling heat. One can even dream of a joyous, overflowing crowd, armed with sledgehammers and picks, attacking the asphalt that imprisons us in our cities, to free the land and break the concrete. To grow rogue gardens and create cool islands everywhere. When will we see such festive and determined mobilizations, to take our destiny into our own hands and ally with the living?

In these challenging times, there’s something unsettling that confronts us. Like an awakening. A philosophical mantra. We realize that to live is essentially to live off the life of others: to live in and through the life that other beings have managed to construct or invent.

We need trees, and the heatwave, to borrow the words of comrade Baptiste Morizot, “returns us to our condition as living beings.” It aligns us with a common destiny with other living beings in our environment — without the need for theory. The heatwave is a “trans-species trauma,” he explains.

“This trauma moves across species barriers. We see a thirsty tree, a dried-up meadow, and we feel it in our flesh. In botany, we speak of water stress for plants, sharing a concept we believed was only animal, familiar from within our bodies, across very different forms of life. The plant drought stresses the entire environment up to us,” wrote the philosopher in a chapter of the book On ne dissout pas un soulèvement (2023).

Thus, in adversity, we are all connected, humans and plants alike. May the strength of this connection eventually build beautiful revolts against these heatwaves and their perpetrators, and may it also nourish our future care for other species, and for that magnificent otherness that is the tree community.

Gaspard d’Allens is the author of the book Des forêts en bataille (2024), which received the Lire pour Agir award.