back and local ski-area o;cials had been
photographed on a little patch of snow, looking like penguins on a too-small iceberg.
Back in the museum, there was a comfortable bench in front of an exhibit
called When It Changed. Joel Sternfeld’s
contribution was a simple series of
>fteen candid portraits of participants at
the 2005 United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change in
Montreal. The subjects were from every
corner of the planet. Their expressions
weren’t dramatic, but they did not look
happy. The faces on the wall registered
the early dawning of realization and deep
dismay, like they were in the midst of
hearing—really hearing—news so bad you
couldn’t look away, so bad you wouldn’t
wish it on your worst enemy.
Life Meets Death
by elizabeth redden
Hundreds of years of human history
haunt Arlington National Cemetery. Atop
the hill, alongside a mansion with
panoramic views of the national capital
below, are the graves of Union dead deliberately dug around what had been General
Robert E. Lee’s home. Downhill, in Section
60, where soldiers of the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars come to be buried, a
wide muddy trench pierced by car tracks
is evidence enough of all the transit. Part-
way in between burns John F. Kennedy’s
“eternal ?ame,” while a famous post oak—
named the Arlington oak—hangs overhead.
Like the Arlington oak, many of the
cemetery’s eight thousand trees, dotting
652 acres, stand inseparable from those
buried beneath. The giant urban oaks, the
oldest the three-hundred-year-old white
“Taft oak” by the former president’s grave;
the cedar of Lebanon honoring the victims of the bombing of the Marine Corps
barracks in Beirut in 1983; and the conspicuous ?owering dogwoods, the memorial
tree most often requested by families, all
serve as dynamic headstones for the dead.
Here, human history entangles with the
roots of trees.
“We probably have the >nest collection
of old trees that you’ll >nd in any urban
area, certainly the mid-Atlantic,” says Erik
Dihle, division chief for grounds, burial
operations, and ceremonial support at
Arlington National Cemetery. A horticulturist by trade, he estimates the cemetery
boasts about six hundred trees over age
one hundred, with a sizeable number over
two hundred, too.
The age of the trees is all the more
remarkable, Dihle says, given the constant
digging at the cemetery and the corresponding risk of damage to tree roots.
Arlington is home to twenty-eight to thirty
funerals each day.
At Arlington, sta= block o= locations
speci>cally for trees between and among
the hundreds of thousands of headstones.
But sometimes tree roots outgrow their
allocated spaces—a particularly acute
problem when it comes to burying the
next of kin in sites that have long been
undisturbed. Dihle has seen dramatic
cases, like that of the widow of a World
War II soldier who died >fty years after
her husband. In the intervening period, a
lovely black cherry tree had grown up and
out near the gravesite, the roots spreading
laterally underground. “Well, what do we
do? We don’t bat an eye. We dig that grave
so she can join her husband,” says Dihle.
But, he adds, “We’re going to do the
least damage we can to that cherry tree.”
Stephen Van Hoven, the cemetery’s
urban forester, describes the desperate
measures unleashed in those rare cases
where roots infringe upon space needed for
a gravesite: how landscapers prune the
sprawling roots with a circular blade they
pierce through the soil, blindly dragging
it along the tree’s extremities, cutting
the roots cleanly so they can regenerate.
He tells how landscapers take an extra step
with the most vulnerable of trees—angling
an “air spade” and blasting soil away
supersonically—then making selective, precise root cuts before the gravedigger starts
digging. As long as it’s a clean slice, the tree
stands a chance. But when a backhoe snags
and yanks at the roots, leaving them ragged,
