There has been some talk in recent days of ecological conservation, as if the outdoors were something small and easily misplaced that might wink away of we take our eyes off of it. Trees are lauded like derby-winning horses and coddled like precocious children, as if a tree has ever done any favors for any one of us. Has a tree ever—even one instance would be sufficient—has any single one ever said your hair looked nice when in fact it was rather hastily done-up, or driven your pregnant wife or husband to the veterinarian’s when your car was in the shop having its tonsils reshingled, or loaned you its new snow shovel in the heart of icy July, even when it knew you were a serial borrower and unlikely to return it quite as promptly as it wished?

I didn’t think so. And yet still we continue to laud them like derby-winning children and coddle them like precocious horses, and paint a slanderous picture in the public mind of that cultural hero of our nation, the proud lumberjack. Lumberjacks have committed none of the anti-anti-establishment atrocities that cemented the beat cop in the common view as a dirty pig, and yet they have garnered much the same perception from the modern hippie crowd. Simply for murdering thousand-year-old redwoods for individually-packaged toothpicks, suddenly this proud national figure is somehow in the wrong.

Trees take our hard-earned tax money and give nothing back to society, yet they are protected as if they have done anything at all to merit our concern, when, in fact, trees do far more harm than help. It is a scientifically-accepted fact that one single tree unapologetically unleashes into the unsuspecting atmosphere three hundred thousand cubic liters of oxygen per day, and nearly three billion per week: Oxygen that raises the inflammability of our atmosphere by a full 2%, causing rampant widespread forest fires, woefully increasing the effects of second-hand smoke inhalation, and immorally encouraging unrepentant arsonists.

Meanwhile, the wood from that same one tree could easily be put to such society-bettering use as the construction of a better mousetrap, combustion engine, microprocessor, or style of interpretive dance. It could end up in a chainsaw or be burnt in a wood stove for clean, smoke-free energy, or even become the next President of the United States. Anything could happen. But, while it stands there in the forest, silently mocking us, it is nothing but a reckless hazard, endangering lives by threatening to at any moment unpredictably topple itself onto the innocent heads of our wives and children and coffee percolators, harboring known offenders such as termites, alligators, and smallpox in its aggressively outstretched boughs.

People of the city, where you need not worry about the constant danger faced by those who are forced by reasons of money or preference to live in proximity to trees, I call on you now to step up and tear the scales from your eyes and butchers’ counters, to see through the lies of the Green Agenda and take action, action to halt the spread of this environmentalist extremism and to end the menace of trees once and for all! Thank you.

Author bio:

Daniel Galef was born in a log cabin he built himself in Tehawxey, Mississippi, where he spent his formative years as a subbookkeeper, tracking down and assassinating patrons with overdue loans. In the mid-nineteenth century, he located the Fountain of Youth and made his second million bottling and carbonating the water. Immediately before the Crash, he retired to a humble life selling bags of peanuts on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He died in 1892 in a tragic crossword accident and has written only two books since, preferring to spend his time holding his breath for charity and autographing baseballs as Napoleon III.