Brecht

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

Brecht wrote that in 1939, while Nazis were burning books and more. Finland was fighting the Winter War with Stalin's Soviet Union and Europe was at war again.
Wars in the twenty-first century are physically removed from Europe, but still often of our making or connivance.
But to speak of trees is not to ignore injustice, and Brecht has that qualifying "almost".
Finland's forested terrain also helped in keeping Finland from Soviet subjugation.

It becomes a necessity to speak of trees more and more as injustices increase. War, even when dressed up in polluting 'ideology' as with the Nazis, is about resources, including land. We are fighting in the middle east for the control of oil and increasingly, of water. That trees and plants, past and present have a role in this is obvious: no laying down in the Carboniferous era of plants, no oil. Without the current stabilising effect of trees, no topsoil, no water retention. When lemon groves and olive orchards are cut down as an act of military aggression in Palestine, it does more than ruin the farmers - it leads to eventual desertification.

To be silent about injustice is not an option. But to speak of trees is not to be silent. It is not only a tacit oppositional stance to that of warmongers, but is also an engagement with some of the underlying causes of war.

Poor people do not own resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world's resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources.

It's also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens (though we should now find a new word to replace sapiens). The most fleeting look at ecology reveals that we depend on other species more than they on us. Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism - say mistletoe in an oak - is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both.

Brecht was right, we have a duty to act in the prevention of daily - and often terrible - human injustice (there is no other kind). No-one discusses trees to prevent a firing squad or a suicide bomber. But to speak of trees and importantly for trees becomes an imperative as well. It's to ask questions; the who, the why.

If a primarily aesthetic (or proper economic) appreciation of trees, of woodlands, leads to an understanding of the political aspects of land ownership and its control and misappropriation; so much the better.

To wander in the woods - where we're not needed - is to realise this. It's also to realise that we're often not wanted by a landowner.
Brecht also wrote: You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.