Ahou Naderpour Ardestani (11) | STAFF REPORTER
There was a time when trees would grow one of two ways. Some were planted by humans and grew under strong, kind hands, giving them water when there was no rain and getting them all kinds of nutritious soils and fertilizers. Their days were filled with chirping chickens, chatty sheep, and farmers’ songs, and that’s how they learned to talk. Others were born in the wild, breathed in that forest morning on their first day, then had critters dangling from their branches and bugs and larvae crawling up and into them soon as they were thick as a wrist. They were home to the birds, bugs, and beasts and learned their language.
In either case, the trees learned to speak the language of the creatures around them, and they could talk with them. Humans, for some reason, could never hear the trees’ voices, but some of them talked to the trees anyway, even though they could never hear the reply.
It’s all different now. I’ve been around for a long time. Back in the older days, people knew pollution, global warming, and trees dying were all problems. Tried to fix it too, but didn’t really succeed. They kept telling themselves they were changing, trying hard to save mother Earth. As the saying goes, when you tell a lie enough times, you start believing it. All their recycling and “eco-friendly” junk and nonsense advertisements failed to grasp the damage they were doing every day. They just kept telling themselves things were improving. Until finally the consequences started making it impossible to think anything was getting better. Some surveys were done and it was discovered that despite all their efforts, tree and plankton populations had decreased drastically since the last survey. People were shocked, even though deep down part of them knew things weren’t going too well. Then, while this problem was being tackled, some other scientists were working on a brand new pesticide. They were modifying some germ to act as a pesticide and infect and kill all the crops’ enemies like weeds and bugs while being harmless to people. Humans always like to mess with natural things, make ‘em different, change ‘em. They like to think they’re improving’ ‘em. Anyway, some insect or other caught the germ in the lab and took it outside. The germ was designed to target both insects and weeds, but what scientists didn’t know was that it could transmit to other plants too. Maybe this insect went to some forest and carried the germ with it, because soon it started spreading from tree to tree, destroying forest life. It is known as the jungle eater.
All the while the carbon and toxins in the air were building up, with so many trees dying. The plankton suffering from the acidic oceans were already nearly gone too. People needed a solution fast. They made these giant air filters in some parts of the world. The best of these filters were maybe a tenth as efficient as trees, but far more expensive. Endless hours of study went into creating monstrous machines that could barely do what trees had been doing for ages. Humans are smart though, after about a decade of horrible air conditions, trying to save what was left of Earth’s natural photosynthesizers and living off of filters, they created a system. A robotic tree farm. Basically, it was an outdoor lab for growing masses of trees as fast and efficiently as possible. The soil was scarce, so the farms used formulas of minerals and other nutrients instead that had exactly everything each tree needed to a T. LED plant lights was installed because apparently sunlight isn’t always good enough, at least that’s what the humans think. But the real highlight of the deal was the seeds. As always, humans fiddled with nature. They synthesized tree seeds that grew three times as fast as regular trees. Their roots were thick but very short to take up less space.
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According to their lightwaves and nourishment, those trees are in as good a shape as a plant can possibly be, and yet they aren’t alive.
So many birds fly to me from near and far, dozens of squirrels stash their nuts all around me and beez always buzzing by. They all tell me when they’re with me it feels like they’re home.
I am, after all, one of the last of my kind who can talk.
