Opinion: Wildfires destroyed the trees I planted 70 years ago, and with it, my hope for the future.

Editor’s note: Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American writer whose works include the play “Death and the Maiden” and the recently published novel “The Suicide Museum.” He is based in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is a distinguished professor emeritus at Duke University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinions on CNN.

santiago, chile
CNN
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How do we grieve the death of a single tree when the entire forest burns down? As fires rage in Australia in recent days, Colombia in recent weeks, and Texas after hitting California and Hawaii last year, vast tracts of forest are disappearing, made up of individual trees that will never rise again. How do we remember what is happening?

My own grief and things to remember are centered on Chile. So in recent weeks I have watched a raging conflagration burn through thousands of acres of my homeland, destroy countless buildings, kill more than 120 of my countrymen, and claim hundreds of lives. Even more missing.

The devastation I witnessed from my home in Santiago, about 100 miles away, had a special twist. Of the many trees that were reduced to ashes in this wildfire, I had a personal connection to one particular tree.

I planted it almost a quarter of a century ago when I was only 7 years old.

I was visiting Chile for two weeks on my way back to New York, where I had lived with my family since I was two years old. His father decided that I was old enough to perform the ritual that I had experienced with my own father. It’s time for me to plant a tree. Once I did that, he said, all I needed to do was write a book and have a son.

So he took me to the Viña del Mar Botanical Garden, Chile’s national botanical garden. A young woman caretaker led us to a spot where she was sure the tree could grow and gave us a small shovel and some seeds. I covered it with dirt and said goodbye as if it were an old friend, promising to come back and see how much it had grown.

Although I never revisited the place (the crude map I had drawn at the hotel was quickly lost), I returned to Chile when I was 12 and made it my home. I eventually became a citizen, got married, published my first book, and yes, became the father of a son. Even though I didn’t keep my promise to the tree, it still haunted me as the years passed.

And it became even more important when I went into exile after President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup in 1973. The mythical tree became a means of breaking the distance imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I often think of the tree that I planted as a young man rising out of the Chilean soil, spreading its branches as it welcomes birds and beetles, celebrating the greenery of the botanical garden, beckoning me from afar, and whispering: I was comforting myself. My past was waiting for me – that not all was lost and uprooted in the catastrophe of a coup. It was a promise that looked like it would come true when, after a long struggle, democracy was restored to the land that had watched the tree grow in 1990.

In recent years, I’ve written a novel in which humanity appears to be committing mass suicide due to human-induced climate change, and the tree has come to represent hope. As wildfires continue to wreak havoc on the planet, I hope that my special trees have resisted the ravages of time and the depredations of polluters, towered over waste and erosion, and that others around the world I imagined them working with trees to provide shade and color as a symbol of perseverance and continuity. .

Perhaps that tree I planted as a child has now burned down. The 990-acre botanical garden (home to 1,300 species, some endangered) was almost completely destroyed, and there were other casualties. There were 30 dogs in the kennel, countless small animals and birds, and sadly four humans. Existence.

Among them was Patricia Araya, who has worked as a horticulturist preparing new seeds for germination for the past 30 years. Patricia’s 92-year-old mother, who was a greenhouse caretaker when she was young, and her two young grandchildren also died. And I have been thinking with horror that this elderly woman might not have been the very adolescent who gave the seeds and shovel to her eager seven-year-old boy at the time. I fear that she was my tree’s guardian and godmother who passed away.

All that remains of the tree is the story of its beginning and end. Of course, there are countless other anonymous trees with no stories like this that have been destroyed by wildfires in Chile and around the world. And like the lifeless trees of Viña del Mar, each man, woman, and child who died in that fire had a story of their own that I don’t know how to tell. did. And beyond the Chilean tragedy, other tragedies loom, and as the atmosphere becomes increasingly heated and we sleepwalk toward the apocalypse, there are untold consequences for the entire planet at risk. An upheaval of scale is looming.

Last month it was Chile, today it was Texas, and who knows where else it will be in the near future. This is a reminder to honor and express gratitude for each and every tree that has lost its life to the effects of this climate change.

Therefore, this tree that I planted so long ago will perhaps serve a final service and awaken our humanity even a little to what we are doing to the earth and to ourselves. may be helpful. This leaves us with the following questions: Without lying, how can we give hope to today’s little boys and girls who may plant seeds in the ground, say goodbye to trees, and promise to come back to play? How do we ensure that our trees and our children grow without fear of the fire that befalls us all?