What is “Elm City”?
We’re woodworkers. Wood comes from trees. We call ourselves “Elm City Wares” because our city, New Haven - really kind of a micro-city, a micro-urban town - has an old nickname: Elm City. Like hundreds of towns and cities, it has a central avenue called Elm Street, which decades ago used to be lined with Elm Trees. Except there aren’t many original Elm trees in New Haven anymore, which is also true of all the other towns and cities with streets called Elm Street. Where’d they go? As a wise illustrated character once asked, “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE TREES?”
Elm trees went the way of the Chestnut tree. As one woodworking YouTuber recently pointed out (shout-out to you, Lincoln Street Woodworking guy), Chestnut is now an extremely rare wood. You can’t get it from Chestnut trees anymore, only from old barns and the like that were made from Chestnut a long time ago, full of nail holes and such. Early Americans of the European variety went gaga for Chestnut because of its strength, hardness, straight grain, and resilience to water and pests. But then, in the early 1900s, Chestnut blight happened, a super-harmful fungus that all but made the Chestnut extinct.
That’s what happened to Elm trees in the mid-20th century, and here’s where the story becomes interesting from the standpoint of anyone interested and sensitive to environmental concerns. Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the modern environmental movement, published Silent Spring in 1962, a classic of the genre. She was a scientist, a biologist, who researched the holistic effects of the pesticide DDT, which cities and towns were blasting on their precious Elm Trees to kill the beetles that were killing off the trees, and which the emerging agribusiness industry was carpet-bombing on crops everywhere to kill off pests. What she argued, to be really brief about it, was that our love affair with DDT was self-detrimental, and that we needed a more sensible approach, one that I find interesting in all kinds of intellectual ways (oh by the way I’m a philosophy professor in my normal everyday life, so if you like these posts, know that there will be occasional flourishes like this one).
DDT killed the beetles on Elm trees and the pests on farmland. Job done. Then, the dead, toxified beetles and pests fell to the ground and mixed into the decaying slurry of fallen autumn leaves, like some contaminated compost additive, which birds, as they do, ate and were similarly poisoned and died. When the following spring rolled around, there was no birdsong, a Silent Spring.
The moral of the story is deliciously complicated. Part one of the story is just to know that you can’t affect one thing in nature without affecting a whole bunch of other stuff in a spinoff way. Birds turn out to be pretty crucial to tree proliferation because they eat seeds and poop them out into these perfect little tree incubator blobs. The Circle of Life isn’t just about clickbaity Nature Channel predation. It’s also about basic stuff, like pooping. Part two of the story is that maybe we shouldn’t pull out all the stops to protect one precious tree. How ’bout some tree diversity? What might we call that - hmmm … biodiversity?
We hope your sense of “your people” is full of diversity AND biodiversity, because that’s what we mean by “your people.” At Elm City Wares, we know that Elm City has learned that the hard way.
