Across the world, and throughout history indigenous peoples have identified sacred trees, hills, mountains and waterways. Across the world and throughout history white supremacy has felled them, carved their images into them, dammed and polluted them. The monstrosity at Tunkasila Sakpe Paha is metaphor made flesh, the white rulers saying, these are not your grandfathers, instead we will carve ourselves into the heart of your sacred place. This is not just relegated to the pages of the history books – trees are still cut down because their value is one which white supremacy does not calculate to be worthy.

A part of neuronormativity, which is an expression of patriarchal white supremacy, is the enforcement of a hierarchy within which an attachment to non-human objects is pathologized as wrong. I recognise that here I might be drawing close to the arguments of Singer, and I don’t mean speciesism, which is an argument from moral philosophy, which has never really addressed its own whiteness. Instead I am talking about love, and those things it is determined acceptable to love. Most of you have probably seen a “freak” of the week newspaper article about someone who married a tree, a figure of mockery and questionable mental health. This is part of how the norms, all the norms, of white supremacy, are enforced. The autistic child must be conditioned to be OK without their comfort object, the first peoples must accept roads matter more than trees, value can only be this – measured, counted, fixed and not applied to those things which do not support the existing power structures.

A tree stood for 300 years, and it’s felling is an act of patriarchal violence. It is the same violence which raises a knife or a fist, it is the same violence which also enacts on the perpetrators, keeping them tools of those above them whose position they uphold and protect, even as they are themselves harmed.

Instead of, “it is only a tree” or “what about X or Y?” perhaps we should ask ourselves, how are these acts of violence the same, and what structures of power enabled both to occur?