Where?

Now what? Luttez contre l’effet de serre, créez des forêts. The electric sign is giving me orders. What am I supposed to do? The first part is conceivable. I can fight against the greenhouse effect by turning off the lights, reducing my personal methane output, and eating raw food. But how do I create some forests? The last time an out-of the-blue—or maybe out-of-left-field—statement like this stopped me in my tracks, I had gotten on an elevator in Washington and saw a sign reading, “Be good to your heart. Consider taking the stairs.” Stopped, as I was, in my tracks, I had nothing better to do than consider taking the stairs, which I did at some length while the elevator went up nine floors. At the end of my consideration, I had a nice low resting pulse, revealing how much my heart appreciated how good I had been to it. But considering is not the same as creating. The city of Paris has raised the stakes considerably.   This is not as it should be or maybe not as I think it should be. The electric sign I am reading—one of those with little day-glow disks on a black background—is really trying to be helpful, offering contacts for daycare, emergency services of all kinds, upcoming public (and free) amusements, and generally giving the citizens of Paris one heads-up after another about the length, depth, and breadth of the welfare state. Message after message and nothing but good. The sign belongs to the city and is broadcasting help and advice from the philanthropes in the Mayor’s office. All to the good until the imperative appears, telling me to go out and create some forests. Here? Right on this grand boulevard? Everything that is not paved already has a tree on it. I don’t have a shovel or, come to think of it, a seedling in my pocket, nor do I have any hope of finding one of either. I could stop a passerby or two, asking, Pardon, monsieur, savez-vous où je peux acheter un arbre? I have asked my share of lunatic questions over the years in Paris, but standing here on a commercial street where the Sixth and Fourteenth Arrondissements are stitched together with invisible thread and asking people where I can buy a tree is just asking for more trouble than I am in the mood for today—or will be for the rest of my life. And anyway, they’d tell me, if they decided I was safe to talk to, to go over to the Île de la Cité where there’s been a tree market since they built Notre-Dame just across the way. By the time I got there, they’d probably be sold out to Parisians showing their solidarity with City Hall by buying trees. And if there were some left? Swell: buy a tree twice my size and take it on the Métro and plant it… where? Paris is very persnickety about where and how its greenery is placed, nothing aléatoire about it, no rolling of the dice when it comes to sticking trees and plants in the ground. Even if I could figure out where to get a few trees large enough to survive on their own outside a nursery but small enough for me to carry, I wouldn’t know where to plant them—and the sign’s day-glow dots aren’t telling either. And even if I did know where—and I don’t and won’t—and even if I had the cash and the muscle to buy trees by the yard and carry them off, I would still have no idea how many trees make a forest. We live in a world that loves to quantify everything: how many drinks constitute a binge (five in two hours, but subject to debate), poverty (to two decimal places), the odds of graduating from a college in five years (fifty-six percent). But where is the quantifying definition of the number of trees in a forest? References tell me helpful things like this: “A forest is a dense collection of trees covering a relatively large area. Larger than woods.” Swell again, but whatever large is relative to (a ping pong table? the dark side of the moon?), it still is going to be more than I can handle. I’m lost and head for home feeling I have failed. Of course there was the Website flashing dottily on the electric sign and, once I have recovered from my feelings of inadequacy as an urban forester, I take a look. There it is at www.1parisien1arbre.com, and everything is clear. Paris does not need to be reforested, not at all, silly me: I do not have to plant a whole forest by myself or even a single tree. But if two million Parisians came together in a sense of solidarity, they could plant two million trees—aha, now the “1Parisian1tree” name for the Website makes sense. The trees would be planted in French-speaking developing nations, specifically, Madagascar, Cameroon, and Haiti. And no shovel, no seedlings, no sweat will be involved. Just five euros—more if you would like, handled on a secure, encrypted payment service—and the International Association of French-speaking Mayors, which will not charge anything for administrative costs, will take it from there. I’m off the hook. It feels good. It’s a relief to know that I do not have to create a forest all on my own, but only contribute to the creation of a charity, and a bureaucracy to run it, at a small expense of cash and none at all of sweat. I try not to care that the gift is not tax deductible and not to worry that my secure transaction online will be handled by Société Générale, the big bank that nearly went under just a few months ago and is still looking a bit peaked. But something is bothering me. I imagine the citizens of Madagascar, Cameroon, and Haiti would be delighted to see forests growing, but what about…