I was reading the newspaper over the weekend and was particularly intrigued by three stories: the near-collapse of Bear-Stears investment bank , the total collapse of a construction crane in downtown Manhattan , and a serious fire which brought down another building in Washington, DC .  As I read, I was struck with a cereping sense of familiarity, as if I had seen this sad pattern before.  In order to make sense of it, however, I'm first going to have to talk about my parents' house and how a forest dies.

The area my parents live in is what's left of rural Northern Virginia.  The terrain around their neighborhood consists of gentle hills that consist of fields and pasture land broken up by large stands of forests.  The climate keeps the land there relatively lush and green, and there are numerous places where the two-lane roads duck under the eaves of the small forests.  When I first came there I had the quaint notion that I could easily imagine the land as it might have looked to the early European settlers, and I had visions of an unending expanse of trees stretching into the distance.  Yet, even though there is an impressive amount of woodland compared to where I had previously been living in southern California, I eventually recognized that whatever forest remained was largely cosmetic, and that those trees are the merest memory of a once-great woods.  Still, I considered that what remained, having survived the march of time and civilization so long, might last for quite a while longer.  That was, however, before my parents began to talk about the problems with their trees.

My parents' particular neighborhood was carved out of the forest with some care paid toward preserving the trees, albeit more for reasons of ambiance than as a result of any environmental concern.  Most of the houses in that development sit on two or more acres of woodland.  There are numerous squirrels and birds.  Deer sometimes happen by, and an errant young bear even appeared once.  When you're there, you do get some sense of living in a bit of preserved wilderness.  I would often wonder why other neighborhoods built in the area had not followed the same plan, for in the midst of the housing boom I saw several parcels of land denuded of trees to make way for homes.  However, that might have only amounted to delaying the inevitable.

In their first four years on the property, my parents had four trees die on them.  This was a natural thing, for these were old trees and fell victim to rot or draught or lightning.  Removing them was a practical necessity, for fear that strong winds might blow them down onto the house.  Other trees had fallen to the wind in the area when they grew old and weak.  Their neighbors had has similar problems.  I didn't think much of this at first - there were still plenty of trees around.  As I walked around their land, though, I came to observe that although old trees were coming down, almost no new ones were going up.  This was not a true wilderness, after all.  Old trees normally fall and create clearings, and then new trees come up in those clearings, but in a developed area the clearings are turned into farmlands, or parks, or yards.  As long as people keep living and building in the area the trees will keep falling and, despite even the good intentions of neighborhoods like the one my parents live in, enough trees will fall that even the semblance of a forest will be lost, and all that will be left is a rustic garden with a few small stands here and there. 

We notice when large swatches of woodland disappear quickly - whether it's a huge forest fire in Oregon or California or clear cutting in the Amazon.  These are dramatic events that demand attention.  However even in a place like my parents' neighborhood, long since developed and cultivated, where one might think any questions of conservation are already settled for good or ill, what little is left is still disappearing.  Unless someone does something, the last remains of those woods will perish forever without any help needed from an axe or chainsaw.  We won't notice, however, because all we'll see is the unfortunate falling of a tree here, a tree there.

Now we return to the recent bad news.  It struck me that these artifacts of civilization - A building, a crane, a bank - are rather like the trees falling.  One hopes that the civilization which produced them is more akin to the still vital forest, and that something newer and stronger will grow up in the place of what has fallen before.  Perhaps it's the gloomy economic prospects that the nation (and indeed a good portion of the world) is facing which causes me to think pessimistically about these omens.  A recent article over at Slate proposes that American business is in trouble on a very basic level.   Like the trees, perhaps there is some kind of rot setting in, ready to cause a collapse when the next strong wind blows?  If we don't pay close attention to these failures - a bank here, a building there - what greater long-term calamity do we risk?