6 minutes reading time
I was maybe ten when my grandpa cut one big tree on his land. Not some sacred ancient thing, just a big tree he'd decided had lived long enough. He sold the wood and had a carpenter make something like a table or a bench, I don't remember which. And I, fresh from whatever environmental science bullshit they were teaching me in middle school that year, lost my shit at him completely. They in school had introduced something called EVS that year. So at home, actually my grandpa's home , I threw a tantrum. I probably cried. I am almost certain I cried, actually.
He looked at me and said, more or less: relax, more trees will grow. That's the whole point of trees, they keep growing. Metal doesn't grow back. And then he just went back to whatever he was doing.
I didn't accept that. I decided he was wrong and I was right and that belief — wood furniture bad, cutting trees bad, all of it — stayed with me for years. Not just a few years. Like, embarrassingly many years. I went through school with it. I went through the entirety of a tier-3 engineering college with it. It never even occurred to me to think about it again.
When my parents bought plastic chairs (actually not because of me, but that's all we could afford as plastic was economical compared to wooden furniture), I felt fine about that. When I walked past some rich person's house with wooden dining furniture I had this little internal reaction, this quiet judgment. What the fuck, cutting trees for a chair. Meanwhile I'm being virtuous with my sixty-rupee white plastic chair that will never biodegrade. I was so fucking dumb for a thing I'd never actually examined.
The realisation didn't come in one moment. It just surfaced at some point — wood grows back. Obviously it grows back. You cut a tree, you plant another, the wood from the first one sits in furniture for forty or fifty years storing the carbon it pulled from the air while it was alive, and the new tree starts pulling more. Plastic is fossil fuel that won't rot for hundreds of years. The plastic chair I felt good about is categorically worse.
My grandpa's table was the more sensible environmental choice. The thing I was mocking was actually fine.
I'd held the wrong belief for over a decade because a teacher gave me a slogan — cutting trees is bad — and I took it at face value and never interrogated it once. No context, no: bad compared to what, at what scale, under what conditions. Just: bad. So I stored it as a fact and walked around with it.
They're still doing this to kids, by the way. The same slogan, same zero nuance. Some kid right now is feeling morally superior about a plastic water bottle. (but I hope not. They probably are saying with zero nuance that plastic bottle is bad, or maybe like recycling is the only solution, which is also bullshit. I dont know why recycling is still a thing gets so much attention than reducing or even reusing)
There's this other thing I keep coming back to, which is something a physics teacher told me — not my higher secondary physics teacher, different one. That guy, the higher secondary one, was an absolute bastard. I genuinely cannot think about him without something happening to my blood pressure. The worst part is he's probably still teaching, which means there are probably students in his class right now whose lives he's in the process of making worse, and I'm not doing anything about it, I've never done anything about it, and that's a specific kind of guilt I sit with and then immediately push away because I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm not going to get into it. Anyway — the other teacher, earlier, different person, only moderately terrible. He said something once about how asteroid belts contain absurd amounts of gold and platinum and iron. The universe makes metals constantly. Supernovae, neutron star collisions, stellar nucleosynthesis or whatever, I'm simplifying. The point is metals are just physics. The universe produces them as a byproduct of existing.
But wood needs something completely different.
It needs billions of years of evolution starting from single-cell organisms. It needs liquid water, which requires a planet at a specific distance from a star of a specific type, which is already a massive coincidence. It needs photosynthesis, which needed to be invented by biology after enormous amounts of time. It needs an atmosphere with the right mix of gases. It needs soil that itself took millions of years of decomposition to form. You can probably find asteroids out there with more gold in them than all the banks on earth combined. You will not find a forest. You will not find cellulose or a leaf or a bird or a fungal network under the soil.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about some of the specifics here, I'm not a biologist. But the basic idea seems right. Wood is not just "a material." It's organised biological structure that required most of the planet's history to exist. Diamond is just carbon under pressure. Wood is carbon that went through four billion years of life to get there.
And I spent my childhood worrying about my grandpa's table.
The practical bit: obviously I'm not saying go chop everything down. Scale matters, replacement rate matters, my grandpa cutting one tree on his farm is nothing like a logging company stripping a hillside. My grandma's family prayed to some of the old trees, wouldn't touch them. They'd trim a branch here and there — I don't know if that's even okay, I'm not going to pretend I've thought it all through — but the point is they understood it as a system. Harvest some, preserve some, let it regrow. That's just how agriculture works. Trees are slower crops.
School never taught it that way. It taught it as a binary.
What I keep getting stuck on is how many other binaries I'm still carrying around unexamined. This wooden furniture thing sat in my head for over a decade and it was just wrong, backwards, and I had no idea. I wasn't even close to questioning it. If something this basic was just sitting there undetected, I genuinely have no way of knowing what else is.
I can't make a list. There's no audit.
I just hope I keep running into things that crack them open. That I stay alive long enough and pay enough attention that I keep getting corrected, by reality or by people who actually know things, until I die with somewhat fewer dumb beliefs than I was born into. That's not an inspiring thought. It's just the only honest version of progress I've been able to come up with.