Wood Lust

Photo: Anurup Kanti Das

We know they like tax-free SUVs. We know they like whizzing by the main streets with twenty vehicles in tow as their entourage. We know they don't mind seeing us, poor, hapless civilians waiting in choking gridlocks in the scorching sun when the roads are cleared for their highnesses' smooth travelling. But who would have thought that Members of Parliament, many of them ministers or deputy ministers, had a thing for wood especially the Shegun variety?
A Bangla daily, has reported that between 2009 and  2014 about 15 MPs, some of them Ministers, have been buying huge quantities of wood at nominal prices under a curious policy that provides allocation of wood from illegally felled trees seized by the authorities or wood from trees uprooted during storms, for the purpose of building homes. Why they need so much wood to build houses with, when they already live in palatial concrete buildings may never be known. Thankfully our present Environment and Forests Minister, perhaps irritated by the childish greed of grownups, has suspended this policy. But before such good sense prevailed, these MPs have paid a fraction of the cost of such wood that has been valued at over two crore taka. It is baffling why all this wood, if indeed from trees seized from tree thieves or discarded by vicious storms, could not have been sold off at market rates and the proceeds used for say, repairing schools destroyed by storms or fixing the potholed roads. But then these are the kind of questions that are seldom answered.
Tree cutting, however, is a bizarre obsession, in our country. We are not talking about just illegal logging in our beautiful forests by thugs and criminals and a few government officials gone astray. Trees are cut at the drop of a hat.
In February this year, the cabinet approved the felling of 500 gorgeous Sal trees that line the Dhaka-Mymensingh road to make way for four lanes. Several hundred more may also face an untimely death for this project.
In the same month over 200 roadside trees were illegally cut down in Awaliapur union by leaders of Awliapur Federation, an organization registered with the Social Welfare Department – a department, ironically trusted with the responsibility to look after the trees. The trees, which were planted by a local NGO as part of a tree planting project, were sold off to local traders.
Then you have the practice of 'eco-vandalism' by political 'activists' who think they are at liberty to cut down trees for road blockades or to finance their activities. Last year, according to the country's Chief Conservator of Forests, 70,000 trees have faced the axe for this purpose. Initially introduced by members of the Hefajat e Islam, soon this strategy of killing trees was adopted by members of the Jamaat. Thus along with humans, the trees have become casualties of our politics.  
It is almost like we are at war with greenery. Every now and then trees are officially marked off as ready for the guillotine to build staff quarters, to 'clean up' the place or make way for rows of disheveled shops. Krishnachura, Jaam, Neem, Tetul, Sheuly – all the trees that provide nothing but beauty, shelter and food – are targeted for felling. The same is true for all our forests and parks where land grabbers in collusion with unscrupulous officials take part in this ugly denuding – to build concrete money-making structures.
Human chains, loud protestations from eminent luminaries, environmental laws, international disapproval, nothing has been able to curb this greed for wood and more wood.
Then your neighbour, who doesn't have a stalk of greenery in her building, puts the final nail in the coffin. She will demand that you cut that tree in your house because it is blocking the sunlight or because its leaves fall on her driveway, totally unmoved by the beauty of nature that could be a redeeming feature in her concrete monstrosity.
Without these trees we are losing our strength –to fight the lashings of punishing storms and floods or the suffocating heat and fumes of our cities. We can no longer claim to be one of the greenest countries in the world. We can only admit we are tree killers who have no qualms about cutting a massive banyan tree, hundreds of years old. We just have a thing for wood.